Obama-Man

[Kire]

Obama-Man
Dispatch November 12, 2008
Is the new American president Africa’s long-awaited superhero?
by Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne


On the evening of the election, as I was watching the returns come in at an Obama election party, I met a man who was more informed about the election than anyone I'd met in the past twenty-one long months. CNN blared over the bar's loudspeaker. Images of Obama in various thoughtful poses decorated the walls and the chests of more than half the crowd. The partygoers had come to drink, whether in celebration or commiseration—consequences for work the next day be damned. Moving toward the back of the bar, I shared a counter with a short black man dressed in a white button-down shirt and dress pants, wearing rimmed glasses that gave his round face an intellectual air. "Do you think Obama's going to take Virginia?" he asked. We spoke for a minute about the possibility. "I'll be honest with you,” he said, “when I look at the polls there, I start to think it might actually be possible—it looks good, but you never know."

It was the kind of hopeful but guarded statement heard across America on Tuesday night, but this time, the speaker was a Soweto-born South African man who has never been to the United States. We were speaking at 3 in the morning in a bar in Johannesburg, South Africa, where an equal mix of Americans and South Africans had turned out to see—they hoped—the first black man elected president of the United States.

Not surprisingly, South Africa’s apartheid past ripples through black South Africans’ reactions to Obama. The prospect of America electing a black president felt impossible. “With us and how we relate to white people here in South Africa, many people tried to project that onto the States,” said Shoni Tshisikuk, my acquaintance from the election night party, when I spoke with him again two days later. “They said, “Wait a minute, we know white people in this country. We don’t think that given a chance they’d ever elect a black person. So we don’t think that white people in the U.S. would ever be willing to put a black person into power, into the ultimate office.”

So what does it mean to black South Africans that America did just that? “For us, it feels like maybe this could be ushering in a new world, where people will pause and wait and listen to what you have to say before they pass judgment,” Tshisikuk said. “To some degree it has made it possible for people to believe. It creates that sense of possibility.”

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811u/obama-south-africa