Stephen Cook: Oh, how I love the pure energy of love and light in that beautifully eloquent phrase:”bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice”.
By Stephen Collinson, AFP – December 6, 2013 | Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.
America’s first black president, Barack Obama, says Nelson Mandela was a ‘profoundly good’ man who ‘took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice’.
Obama – who met the former South African president briefly only once in 2005, but was inspired to enter politics by the anti-apartheid hero’s example – has paid a sombre heartfelt tribute within 45 minutes of Mandela’s death being announced.
‘We will not likely see the likes of Nelson Mandela again,’ Obama said in a televised statement, hailing his political hero for his ‘fierce dignity and unbending will to sacrifice his own freedom for the freedom of others’.
Obama said Mandela, in his journey from a ‘prisoner to a president’, transformed South Africa and ‘moved all of us. ‘He achieved more than could be expected of any man.’
‘Today he’s gone home and we’ve lost one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will share time with on this Earth.
‘He no longer belongs to us; he belongs to the ages.’ Obama recalled how his passion for change was stirred by taking part in an anti-apartheid rally – his first ever political act.
‘The day that he was released from prison gave me a sense of what human beings can do when they’re guided by their hopes and not by their fears,’ Obama said.
The president ordered that flags on US government buildings, ships at sea and installations be lowered to half mast through to sunset on Monday, in a rare honour for a foreign leader.
He also called South African President Jacob Zuma to offer his condolences and said that South Africa would continue to draw strength from Mandela’s legacy as the hero who defeated the racist apartheid system.
First Lady Michelle Obama, who met the former president in South Africa in 2011, took to Twitter to praise Mandela’s ‘extraordinary example of moral courage, kindness, and humility’.
Mandela’s fragile health overshadowed President Obama’s trip to South Africa in June, and there had been fears that the former South African leader would pass away while Obama was in the country.
The president decided against visiting Mandela in the hospital, reasoning he would be a distraction, and met with members of his family instead.
But his entire trip became a prolonged tribute to Obama, and the president took his wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha to Robben Island, where Mandela was held in spartan conditions by the racist apartheid regime.
In one wrenching shot taken by his official photographer, Obama was pictured in the tiny cell where Mandela once lived, with his emotional daughter in his arms.
He also walked with his family around the bleak limestone quarry on the island – off the coast of Cape Town – where Mandela endured years of backbreaking and futile work under the eyes of white South African guards. Obama is expected to travel to memorial ceremonies for Mandela in South Africa once they are scheduled.
His Cause Shaped Obama’s Awakening
By Scott Wilson,WashPO – December 6, 2013
Entering his sophomore year at Occidental College, Barack Obama sought a political movement to match his personal awakening, which he signaled to friends and family at the time by reclaiming his African first name.
Barry became Barack that year. He had read Du Bois, Fanon, Malcolm X — an array of authors writing about the black struggle for liberation in his country and in others shaking off the legacy of colonial rule around the world.
That is where he looked for — and found — a figure and a cause to channel his rising political enthusiasm: Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on a lonely island off Cape Town, and his outlawed African National Congress.
Obama would help lead the student push for the Southern California college to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
“As the months passed I found myself drawn into a larger role — contacting representatives of the African National Congress to speak on campus, drafting letters to the faculty, printing up flyers, arguing strategy — I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions,” Obama wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”
“It was a discovery that made me hungry for words.” Thirty-three years later, Barack Obama, elected twice to his nation’s highest office, memorialized Mandela from behind a podium far from those heady student-led strategy sessions at Occidental.
In a statement he delivered Thursday evening with halting emotion in the White House Briefing Room, Obama called his participation in the divestment movement “my very first political action, the very first thing I ever did that involved an issue or a policy or politics.”
And he located the very start of his long walk to the Oval Office — through Columbia University and Harvard Law, through Chicago’s South Side and Springfield — in the inspiration set by Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president of a nation ruled for generations by a white minority.
“I cannot fully imagine my own life without the example that Nelson Mandela set,” Obama said. “And so long as I live I will do what I can to learn from him.”
The two men were born half a world and four decades apart. Obama’s birth came a year before the start of Mandela’s nearly 30-year imprisonment. And their achievements are far different in scale, even if the outlines of their lives trace similar lines. Mandela became one of his country’s first black lawyers, while Obama, decades later, became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
After negotiating the end of apartheid, Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. Obama became the first black president of his country a century and a half after the end of slavery.
Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for helping ensure a democratic transition through a plea for racial forgiveness. Obama was awarded the same prize 16 years later, acknowledging in his Nobel Lecture that “compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight.”
Openhearted Rebellion 