Seeing ourselves through another’s inspiring eyes

OUR future looks so bleak that South Africans are united in their collective gloom. So you can imagine how thrilled I felt when I met an amazing visitor to our shores who held another view of us.

Retired US Ambassador Mosina Jordan is an elegant and dynamic woman whose presence graciously changes the aura of a room. She reaches out to people with ease and makes them the centre of the conversation. Her radiant youth belies her age and it is difficult to believe that she is the mother-in-law of the US Consul General Sherry Zalika Sykes and the mother of her husband, Michael Jordan.

“Despite your tragic history of apartheid and most recently, your post-apartheid travails, South Africa is not a country that can easily be ignored. The natural beauty of your flora and fauna, your warm sunny weather and your rich cultural heritage of diverse communities, have not gone unnoticed. You have people power,” she says as she lists the many great South African writers, artists and political leaders. At the top, of course, is Nelson Mandela.

“South Africans are vibrant people. I simply love Durban,” she raves. “The landscape is a tapestry of rolling lush green hills. I love the beaded artistry in magical colours and the rich Zulu culture. But most of all you are a very warm, friendly and, engaging people whose hospitality is unmatched.”

As an African American, Ambassador Jordan finds a kinship with all things African. She advises us that Africa cannot ignore the fact that it is a part of this world view and its citizens have a role on this planet.

Jordan is a writer of children’s books, in which as a cancer survivor in the latter part of her life, she developed an interest. When I met her at a few parties at the US consulate, I was fascinated by this powerful, unassuming woman who in her youth was involved in the civil rights movement, supporting the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first African American labour union. As she shared her life story, I made comparisons with our lives here under apartheid.

When black women were struggling to make inroads into mainstream careers in South Africa, Jordan started her foreign service career in 1982 as director of the office of Equal Opportunity Programs and rose to deputy mission director and assistant deputy administrator for Latin America.

As director for Regional Development in Bridgetown, Barbados, she directed a $24 million development programme to promote economic diversification, free trade, and legal reform for seven Caribbean island nations. In 1995 she was appointed ambassador to the Central African Republic (CAR).

“My mission,” she says, “was not an easy one as I was tasked to promote economic development, democracy, and human rights in a nation under decades of dictatorships”. It became dangerous when the CAR army soldiers staged a mutiny in the capital, Bangui, over unpaid wages followed by a series of attempted coups lasting a year.

Jordan responded by evacuating all Americans and establishing an embassy in exile in neighbouring Cameroon.

After her term as ambassador ended, Jordan returned to the US and was appointed USAid mission director to Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean. For five years, she worked on socio-economic development in Jamaica, Barbados, and Guyana.

She has travelled through our townships reading and donating her books to the community, and to libraries and schools. Our challenge in South Africa is to keep our international links alive as we had done in the past when apartheid closed all doors to us. Now more than ever we need this lifeline to inspire us out of our gloom.

She must have read my thoughts. “If there is any place in the world that I’d love to settle in, it would be Durban,” she says.