SA, Obama mark Mandela’s centennial
SOUTH Africans along with former US President Barack Obama were marking the centennial of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela’s birth yesterday with acts of charity in a country still struggling with deep economic inequality 24 years after the end of white minority rule.
Obama met with young leaders from around Africa to mark the anniversary, a day after he delivered a spirited speech in Johannesburg about Mandela’s legacy of tolerance and criticized US President Donald Trump and his policies without mentioning him by name. An enthusiastic crowd of 14,000 gave Obama a standing ovation for his address, the highest-profile one since he left office.
“Most people think of Mandela as an older man with hair like mine,” the 56-year-old, grayhaired Obama said to laughter from his audience yesterday. But he added that people forget that Mandela “started as a very young man, at your age, trying to liberate this country.”
Speaking to participants in his Leaders Africa program, 200 young people from 44 African countries, he urged them to pursue change at home and emphasized the impact they can have as the continent’s population is the fastest growing in the world. “How big are your ambitions?” he asked.
Obama also spoke out against the corruption and conflict that slow down change, mentioning as one example the current deadly tensions in Cameroon, which faces an Anglophone separatist movement and the threat from Boko Haram extremists based in neighboring Nigeria.
“Find a way where you’re not selling your soul,” Obama said, encouraging them to engage in political work and community involvement, especially women.
South Africans and others around the world marked Mandela’s birthday with clinic openings, blanket handouts and other charitable acts. In Cape Town, numbers were painted on homes in one of the sprawling slums to help health workers locate people living with HIV and tuberculosis.
After 27 years in prison in South Africa, Mandela was released in 1990 and became the country’s first black president four years later. He died in 2013 at the age of 95.