AllAfrica.com, Washington

Africa: Mandela, Obama and The Post-Racial Age

The Monitor (Kampala)
18 October 2008

Posted to the web 18 October 2008

Prof. Ali A. Mazrui

Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama are potential icons of a post-racial
age which is unfolding before our eyes. Mandela has become the most
respected Black man by all races in world history.

Obama stands a chance of becoming the most trusted Black man in US
history. No African-American has ever come so close to winning the US
presidency. But no African-American could have approached so close to
winning the US presidency without an unprecedented level of trust from
a sizable part of the white electorate.

A major cause of the Mandela-Obama respective successes lies in their
embodying a short memory of racial hatred, and their impressive
readiness to forgive historical adversaries. They have both
illustrated a remarkable capacity to transcend historical racial
divides.

Cultures differ in hate retention. Some nurse their grievances for
generations. Others are intensely hostile in the midst of a conflict,
but as soon thereafter, they display a readiness to forgive, even if
not always to forget. The Armenians, Irish and Jews fall in this
category.

Armenians were butchered in large numbers by the Ottoman Turks in
1915`1916. This story of the Armenian martyrdom of World War I has
been transmitted with passion from generation to generation.

Armenians are still demanding justice from Turkey nearly a hundred
years after the massacres. Similarly, the Irish have long memories of
grievance. Clashes occur in Northern Ireland virtually every year
concerning marches that commemorate `Orange Conflicts’ in the
seventeenth century. Jews also have strong collective memories of the
Holocaust and other outbursts of European anti-Semitism.

Mandela came from a culture illustrative of Africa’s short memory of
hate. That culture is far from being pacifist. Wars and inter-ethnic
conflicts have been part of Africa’s experience before European
colonization and decades after independence.

What is different about African cultures is relatively low level of
hate retention. Obama’s tolerance may be due to personal
multi-culturalism. He had a white American mother, a Black Kenyan
father, and an Indonesian step-father.

His cultural ancestry includes Luo culture, Islam and Black American
Christianity. Mandela’s life passed through stages. His early days as
a nationalist were characterized by a belief in non-violent
resistance. In a sense, he carried the torch of South Africa’s Albert
Luthuli and Mahatma Gandhi. Sharpeville was a major blow to his belief
in passive resistance.

By the time that Mandela was having afternoon tea with the unrepentant
widow of the founder of apartheid, Hendrick Verwoerd, he had tough
acts to follow in African magnanimity. There were precedents of
forgiveness that he followed and improved upon.

Post-colonial Africa had produced other instances of short memory of
hate. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, once condemned by a British colonialist
as a `leader of darkness and death’ was unjustly imprisoned in a
remote part of the country.

When he finally emerged from prison on the eve of independence, he
proclaimed `suffering without bitterness.’ He proceeded to transform
Kenya into a staunchly pro-Western country.

In November 1965, colonial Southern Rhodesia’s Ian Smith launched his
Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, unleashing a
bitter Zimbabwe civil war. Yet, he lived to sit in a parliament of
Black-ruled Zimbabwe and was not subjected to postwar vendetta. Again,
Africa’s short memory of hate at work. In the late 1960s, Nigeria
waged a highly publicized civil war that cost nearly a million
lives. The Federal side won that war but was uniquely magnanimous
towards the defeated Biafrans. Yet, another manifestation of Africa’s
short memory of hatred.

For his part, when Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990,
this most illustrious of all Africa’s liberation fighters embarked on
a mission of healing and forgiving. This former hero of mobilization
leadership became a paragon of the reconciliation style of
leadership. He became the greatest of all African examples of
prolonged reconciliation, an exemplar of African short memory of hate.

Obama illustrated his post-racial tolerance by denouncing his
firebrand pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and leaving his own radicalized
church. Obama is more of an ideological liberal than a moral
Gandhian. Indeed, Obama is less of a Gandhian than Martin Luther King,
Jr. was. But in their different ways, Mandela, Obama and King have all
been part of the search for a post-racial age.

The writer is a professor of political science and African studies at
State University New York.