It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
—ROBERT F. KENNEDY, “DAY OF AFFIRMATION“SPEECH, CAPE TOWN, JUNE 1966
I realize that I offer these words of hope at a time when hope seems to have gone from many parts of the world. As we speak, there is slaughter in Darfur. There is war in Iraq. . . . And I have to admit, it makes me wonder sometimes whether men are in fact capable of learning from history, whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward course, or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace, ascent and decline. . . . And then I thought that if a black man of African descent would return to his ancestors’ homeland as a United States Senator, and would speak to a crowd of black and white South Africans who shared the same freedoms and the same rights . . . then I thought: things do change, and history does move forward.
—BARACK OBAMA, “A COMMON HUMANITY THROUGH COMMON SECURITY” SPEECH, CAPE TOWN, AUGUST 2006
Barack Obama’s journey to Africa had been planned since early 2005, shortly after he took the oath of office for the U.S. Senate. Scheduled for August 2006, it was one of the final pieces of The Plan, the two-year outline to keep Obama’s star rising and his political power at its highest ebb. As with The Plan, the trip was devised by his top political minds—Chief of Staff Pete Rouse, media consultant David Axelrod, Communications Director Robert Gibbs and Obama himself. The “congressional delegation” trip, or CODEL in the official parlance of Washington, was designed to be various things: a fact-finding mission for the new senator, a family visit to his paternal relatives in rural Kenya and, perhaps most important, a public relations splash. The hope among Obama’s team: to raise the senator’s profile nationally and internationally; to solidify his support among a key constituency, African Americans; and to bulk up his foreign policy credentials.
Obama’s trip, in many ways, would echo the excursions of two other iconic Democrats, both of whom took high-profile trips to Africa and reaped political benefits in the African-American community back home. President Bill Clinton, still beloved among blacks in the United States, was greeted deliriously over his twelve-day trip to Africa in 1998. And, in particular, Senator Robert Kennedy’s 1966 journey to South Africa, where he forcefully denounced apartheid, sent a clear message to blacks in the United States. Kennedy’s trip is the venture that Obama’s most resembled—two young, charismatic, idealistic senators with presidential aspirations reaching out to desperately poor blacks on the globe’s most often ignored continent. Images of Kennedy being mobbed by African blacks were beamed back to America through newspaper and television. “I believe there will be progress,” Kennedy told residents of Soweto. “Hate and bigotry will end in South Africa one day. I believe your children will have a better opportunity than you did.” And Kennedy’s “ripple of hope” speech (actually titled “Day of Affirmation”) is considered by some RFK biographers to be his best.
Because of the trappings that accompanied Obama’s incredible star power, the African enterprise was much more successful as a major media hit than as a mission to imbue a first-term senator with greater knowledge about Africa. The trip took on a special fascination among the press because of the astounding market success of Dreams from My Father, of which a large portion was devoted to Obama traveling to Kenya in his early thirties to study his paternal African heritage and connect with his Kenyan relatives. In August 2006, the national media and various segments of the American public were enthralled with Obama’s life story, and this was another way for them to explore his history and, consequently, another way for Obama and his aides to advance the rapidly growing legend around that unique ancestry. Thus, the trip became the focus of enormous media attention. Needless to say, with a swarm of Kenyan, American and international reporters documenting his every public move, it proved difficult for Obama to have anything close to a “normal” CODEL.
This is not to say that Obama’s goal in traveling to Africa was not rooted in a certain idealism. Even before he was elected, he had visions of visiting that continent as a senator. In addition, conversations I had with Obama along the 2004 campaign trail made it abundantly clear that the atrocities of Darfur’s civil war were a deep source of concern for him. In those conversations, Obama was hesitant to prescribe a specific solution for the civil war, but he believed that the African conflict deserved greater attention in U.S. foreign policy. As such, he also told a roundtable of journalists at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 that the two places he would most certainly visit after his election were the Middle East and Africa. Also, as a senator, Obama was successful in passing an amendment to a 2006 Iraqi spending bill that increased aid to the Republic of Congo, one of his few legislative accomplishments as a new member of the minority party.
So in charting Obama’s first two years in office, Obama and his advisers carved the Africa trip in stone. The idea, Gibbs told me in March 2005, just a few months into Obama’s term, was to send the senator into the 2007–2008 national election cycle with his public image as strong as “humanly possible.” Gibbs was not specific about whether that meant readying Obama for a presidential run or as a viable vice-presidential selection for whomever the 2008 Democratic Party nominee turned out to be. Gibbs was not specific because, in early 2005, Obama’s long-term political fortunes as a senator remained a mystery, and at that point it would have been viewed as arrogant to have 2008 presidential aspirations, even if that was the case for Obama, Gibbs or other advisers. Furthermore, if a presidential run was the ultimate hope, there was no way to gauge if Obama’s celebrity would remain strong enough to make a 2008 bid for the White House politically viable. But his advisers certainly were charting a bold course to strengthen and expand Obama’s national reputation quickly, and those larger career decisions would come as events unfolded, all dependent on the execution and outcome of The Plan.
“Kenya will just be crazy—the media, the people, everything will be insane,” Gibbs told me over a breakfast plate of eggs Benedict in a Chicago restaurant back in March 2005, a year and a half before the trip. As usual, his instinct was dead on the mark. The fifteen-day trip was organized to include visits to five countries, but the bulk of the journey was to be spent in South Africa and then Kenya. After Kenya, Obama had planned brief visits to the Congo, Djibouti and the Darfur region of Sudan, site of the bloody conflict that was killing thousands of Sudanese a month and displacing millions more. But Kenya, the homeland of his father, was the physical and emotional centerpiece of the CODEL. Since Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate, Kenyans had adopted him as one of their own, and his rapid ascent to political power in the United States had made him a living folk hero in the East African nation, especially among his father’s native tribe, the Luo. A beer named for Obama had gone on the Kenyan market after his 2004 convention speech (Senator beer); a school in rural Kenya was named in his honor; and a play based on his Dreams memoir had been staged earlier in 2006 at the Kenyan National Theater. Thus, Obama’s brain trust expected large, enthusiastic crowds once he reached Kenya. And they were not to be disappointed.
On my way to Africa, I encountered Obama in a bookstore in the Amsterdam airport on the layover between my flight from Chicago, his from Washington and our connecting flight to South Africa. He wore his typical uniform designed for anonymity—a light charcoal gray synthetic jacket and a Chicago White Sox baseball cap fixed low over his eyes. We exchanged greetings and I did not try to engage him in a long conversation, realizing that we would be seeing each other every day for the next two weeks. Instead, I went into my campaign posture of giving him space, largely because of what I had seen awaiting him at the gate for the plane: nearly a dozen journalists, a handful of them toting video equipment. The media insanity was about to ensue. For the next couple of weeks, it would seem, Obama’s every utterance and mannerism would be captured on video or audio.
OBAMA’S AFRICAN ADVENTURE BEGAN IN CAPE TOWN, THE PICTURESQUE city at the far southern tip of the continent. His first morning opened rather inauspiciously. At our hotel, the Table Bay—a modern, upscale facility that anchored a sprawling mall complex on the Cape Town harbor—an embassy official greeted him by asking if he had ventured out the night before with some of the media and other members of his CODEL. “I can’t hang with these guys in their twenties and thirties,” a tired-looking and raspy-voiced Obama answered somewhat tersely. By then, Obama had completed his second book, The Audacity of Hope. But a year filled with late nights of writing, a day job as a senator and weekend duties as a husband and father had taken its toll on him physically. Now, after another night in a faraway hotel at the end of a seemingly endless plane ride (actually, it was twenty-two hours), Obama tried to suppress his routine morning grumpiness. In any case, Obama no longer drank and was never one to grab a beer in the hotel lobby while on the road. At the end of the day, he would disappear into his hotel room and watch ESPN or touch up his speech for the next day or, more likely, both.
That morning, the reporters and videographers in the entourage got their first taste of the lack of organization behind the media end of the trip. The American-based reporting gaggle was already about a dozen deep, including several magazine writers, two documentary film crews and newspaper reporters from the Tribune and Sun-Times in Chicago and the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis. Yet despite all these inquiring minds, there was no physically produced schedule for the day’s events. A couple of reporters openly groused about this state of affairs, and it was obvious that Gibbs had no clear idea how to control or appease all of us. He explained the night before that Obama had been permitted by Senate ethics officials to bring along only two Senate staff members on the CODEL—himself and Mark Lippert, Obama’s foreign policy adviser. The lack of advance planning would soon wear on all involved, including Gibbs. But this was another example of Obama’s lack of real power in Washington. Democrats were in the minority, and he had no leverage to convince the Republican administration that his trip was different from that of the rest and that he would need additional staffing, particularly to handle the media. Axelrod suggested that he hire a professional public relations firm from campaign funds to help organize the trip. “But the lawyers wouldn’t let us do it,” complained Axelrod, who was not on the trip. The result was that Gibbs told the reporting entourage in scattershot fashion what would be happening next.
The first event that day was the most significant: a cruise to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison. This would be a day of symbolism—a black American politician visiting the solemn site where Mandela was incarcerated for leading, and ultimately winning, the fight against an unjust, virulently racist society in South Africa. If Obama were lucky, this story line would play across the globe on major networks and in major journalistic publications. And to this point in his Senate career, Obama had not been short on luck.
As the ferry pushed off from the Cape Town harbor, Obama settled into a seat next to his guide for the day, Ahmed Kathrada, an apartheid-era African National Congress leader who was jailed for eighteen years on Robben Island, much of that time alongside his friend Mandela. Kathrada’s current appearance belied his youth as a rebel. He was slight of stature, bespectacled and wore white Nike running shoes and a maroon fleece jacket, which gave him the look of an innocuous tourist rather than a retired antiapartheid activist. As the low morning sunshine illuminated Kathrada and Obama in a yellowish glow, still photographers snapped pictures and documentary film crews scurried about. Furry boom microphones hovered overhead as Kathrada provided Obama with a historical overview of the prison site. Obama initially shot a wary glance at the big microphones but soon went about his business as just another celebrity tourist to the island, a place that had been visited by such luminaries as Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. Over the course of the day, Kathrada would tell Obama that guards kept the roughly fifteen hundred prisoners in nearly complete societal isolation, refusing, for example, to tell them that Americans had landed on the moon. They were permitted only to send out one five-hundred-word letter every six months. Obama also learned that a caste system based on the shade of one’s skin had been in place in the prison. Lighter-skinned prisoners of Asian heritage like Kathrada, who were called “Asiatics,” were treated slightly better than darker-skinned African blacks.
Once the boat docked, Obama and Kathrada led the march of media and other interested parties up to the uninhabited prison about fifty yards away. The spotlessly clean facility was constructed of gray stone, quarried on the island by the former prisoners, and had been slightly renovated into a museumlike showpiece. The two men stepped down the narrow hallways and quickly reached Mandela’s cramped prison cell. Photographers and reporters pushed together outside the door to document the moment inside, hoping to hear anything that Obama might utter and grab a clear photo of him inside the cell. Just then, Pete Souza, the veteran Chicago Tribune photographer, with a keen eye for the dramatic, scrambled away from the pack and into the prison yard, where he hopped up on a gray wooden bench just outside the small, barred window to Mandela’s cell. Souza later explained that he had remembered a famous photo of Clinton visiting the cell that had been shot from that external vantage point, and he sensed that the same image of Obama would be perfect. Several others followed Souza’s lead and ran after him in hot pursuit. A photographer inside the cell mentioned the Clinton shot to Obama, prompting the senator to respond with “Oh, really?” Talking with Kathrada, Obama had already taken clear notice of the history behind him—and now he suddenly took notice of the historic media opportunity before him. With Souza outside shooting through the window, Obama straightened his shoulders, pushed his jaw forward and squinted his eyes into a serious gaze. Souza’s photo in the Tribune the next day, which ran across the globe on wire services, offered a pensive-looking Obama peering out the window from behind the steel bars. Several other photographers filed a similar captivating image. Though there were several more hours of public appearances, with that serious pose, Obama’s work for this day had been done.
His second day in Cape Town again revealed his deft political touch, although it was more cerebral and less theatrical in nature. He visited a community health center that mostly treated AIDS patients, consulted with an outspoken AIDS activist and shared a private moment with a beloved global figure, Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu.
In 2006, South Africa was suffering through one of the most severe AIDS epidemics in the world, with one in five people in the nation—nearly five million—infected with the virus, according to the United Nations. South Africa’s leaders had come under heavy criticism for promoting its spread through unsound public statements that flew in the face of scientific evidence. A former South Africa vice president, for example, had recently conceded that he had unprotected sex with a woman suffering from AIDS. And not only that, the politician claimed that a shower afterward would reduce his risk of infection.
The health center was located in Khayelitsha, a poor township amid miles and miles of tin-roofed shantytown shacks in stark contrast with the modernity of Cape Town. Outside the clinic, Obama was pressed by reporters to speak about South Africa’s AIDS crisis and what should be done to quell it. Obama had been seeking a meeting with the country’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who was one of the politicians who seemed least concerned about the deadly impact of AIDS on his constituents. Mbeki had publicly questioned whether the HIV infection led to AIDS, a scientific fact known the world over. Here, Obama was caught in something of a dilemma. How broadly should he criticize the current government and risk scuttling his potential meeting with Mbeki?
Obama chose to come out swinging. He charged that the government was in “denial” about the crisis, and he advocated a “sense of urgency and an almost clinical truth-telling” about the spread of the disease. “It’s not an issue of Western science versus African science,” he said. “It’s just science, and it’s not right.” He then dropped that day’s major headline: He would take an AIDS test when he reached Kenya in hopes of erasing the stigma behind the disease among Africans. AIDS is spread primarily by heterosexual sex in Africa, yet most Africans choose to die rather than be tested. With these controversial proclamations, it now looked unlikely that Obama would meet with Mbeki to lobby him to address the AIDS crisis. Yet however ephemeral his statements were that morning, Obama gave voice to a crisis that was killing hundreds of South Africans per day. Few world leaders had spoken out so vigorously on the handling of the crisis by the South African government. “It sends this message of political leadership, of being prepared to be open about HIV,” said Zackie Achmat, one of South Africa’s most notable AIDS activists. “We wish more politicians were that honest.”
The afternoon meeting with Desmond Tutu was a low-key affair. It was held in Tutu’s office inside a rather prosaic stretch of two-story, yellow-brick commercial buildings that looked as if they would fit comfortably into a nondescript office park in suburban middle America. Tutu wore a gray cardigan sweater and gray pants. In a brief appearance before reporters, he lavished praise on his celebrity visitor. He told Obama, “You’re going to be a very credible presidential candidate.” To this, Obama replied with his “Aw, shucks” demeanor, although he didn’t seem at all rattled by such a prominent figure envisioning great things for him. Tutu joked, “I hope that I would be equally nice to a young white senator.” After a chuckle from Obama, Tutu added: “But I am glad you are black.”
Back in Cape Town that evening, Obama delivered a fairly non-controversial forty-three-minute address before an attentive audience culled by a progressive think tank. Gibbs handed reporters a copy of the speech, but as he often did, Obama deviated from the prepared remarks almost immediately. “Well, he stayed with it through the first ten words,” Gibbs said to me with a roll of his eyes.
In this speech, titled “A Common Humanity through Common Security,” Obama stressed his familiar theme of an interconnected humanity. But here in South Africa, the common bond was not just among good-hearted Americans but among well-meaning people stretching across borders and across continents. He cited Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s influence on the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, and how that movement, in turn, spurred activism back in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He said modern threats such as AIDS, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and environmental degradation should bind people together across the globe, not divide them. He offered few specifics as to how that should occur, but asserted that there should be an “overarching strategy” to coordinate cooperation among nations, with the United States playing a leading role. He called on America and South Africa to partner to help weaker nations “build a vibrant civil society.” His penultimate moment came when he observed that his very presence in Africa provided living proof that humanity was moving forward. He closed with that favorite quote from Reverend King about the arc of the moral universe slowly bending toward justice.
Obama was still fatigued, and consequently he walked fairly dryly and slowly through the well-written text. A magazine writer asked me later if I had ever seen Obama look this tired, and thinking back to that commencement address when he was so sleep-deprived that his knee buckled onstage, as well as other such occasions, I replied that I had. But as is often the case, his energy level spiked when he finished with the prepared speech and took audience questions. At the conclusion, audience members, many of whom had never heard of Obama, showered him with hearty applause. Several attendees whom I interviewed said they were in full agreement with his hopeful message, but one noted that it fell well within a conventional political framework. “It was very interesting and he is very level-headed. I certainly think he is a very good ambassador, a very able politician,” said David Wheeler, a retired university instructor. “He put across the position of the United States as being beneficial to the rest of the world.” It was also worth noting that Obama’s underlying message was that a black politician from the United States who had African roots might just be beneficial to the rest of the world as well.
BY THE THIRD DAY, FATIGUE WAS SETTLING OVER THE MEDIA ENTOURAGE, and frayed nerves were evident from even the most patient individuals in the group. Immediately following Obama’s speech the night before, we had left Cape Town and driven a couple of hours to Pretoria. The next morning, after a short night’s rest, reporters gathered in the Pretoria hotel lobby and readied themselves to be hauled off to that day’s events, which at this point were unknown to them. This fact had already irritated several reporters, who had wanted to know how to prepare for the day. As the media grumbled, an embassy official appeared. He informed us that Obama had no public events scheduled for that day. This did not shock me or anger me, since Gibbs had told me before we departed that there would be “down days.” But it did come without fair warning. The news particularly unsettled several newspaper reporters, whose editors most likely were expecting a story to be filed every day. What were they to file today?
Patience with Gibbs and the lack of advance work was now extremely thin. It did not go unnoticed that he did not deliver this unwelcome news himself, but sent an embassy official to face the media. “He’s a total obfuscator,” a documentary filmmaker said of Gibbs. (One documentary film crew had been hired by Axelrod. The second was on contract with Hollywood actor Edward Norton’s production company.) Not only had precise scheduling been absent, but there had been virtually no access to Obama in private moments. Unstaged moments often make the most tantalizing scenes of a documentary. But as I had learned two years before in the Senate campaign, Obama intensely guards his personal time, what precious little of it there is. And in his weary state, he certainly would not agree to cameras invading his hotel room or his traveling vehicle. Nor would he countenance a writer sitting next to him and gauging his private moods. My long-standing relationship with Obama perhaps gave me the best opportunity for direct access to the senator, but ever since Gibbs appeared on the scene in the general election campaign and began his long, tightly controlled reign over media relations, I had learned to live with greatly restricted access compared with the early Senate campaign days. And by now, I had also reconciled myself to the fact that no amount of pushing Gibbs would change this reality. Indeed, even the documentary crew most sympathetic to Obama—the group hired by his own media consultant to produce flattering footage that would be used as campaign material—was irritated about the lack of private access to the senator.
Fortunately for the newspaper reporters, the day soon provided some real news—none of it good for Obama. He learned that, indeed, President Mbeki would not meet with him. The official reason: an Iranian delegation was in Johannesburg for a summit to discuss their country’s decision to move forward with a uranium enrichment program. “It would look inappropriate if the president were to meet with Obama with the Iranians here,” an official with the U.S. Embassy said. Obama later speculated that his harsh words about the government on the AIDS crisis did not help his cause. The second bit of bad news was that Obama was forced to cancel his visit to the Congo because of violence surrounding a presidential runoff election. These events occurring in tandem emphasized that, despite the media glorification of this trip, Obama had no actual power to affect global policy. Indeed, even if he were a senator idolized by America’s progressives and canonized in the media, he really was not a major player on the world stage. At least not yet.
To satiate the unfed American reporters, who hadn’t seen the senator all day, Gibbs made Obama available for a news conference in our Pretoria hotel in the early evening. Obama arrived in black suit jacket and white shirt, but quickly noticed that the assembled reporters were dressed down. We had been tourists most of the day, after all. To fit in with the reporters, Obama slipped off his suit coat and dropped into a soft chair in his stock white dress shirt. He slowly rolled up his sleeves to look even more casual. And for the first time on the trip, he looked fresh and physically rejuvenated. He certainly had gotten some badly needed rest that day, as well as a badly desired visit to the gym. I learned later that he had worked out and followed it with a long nap, two things that Gibbs most likely did not want reported back in the American newspapers. One could envision that headline: “Obama Lands in Pretoria, Takes Nap, Hits Gym.”
Obama was his typically collected and well-spoken self during the news conference. Nevertheless, he tightened considerably when questioned by the two reporters who had covered him most aggressively back in Washington—Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times and Jeff Zeleny, then of the Tribune. Since arriving on the continent, these two fiercely competitive journalists had been in a fitful contest to send home the most scintillating tidbits about Obama’s adventure, and both had been working and cajoling Gibbs mercilessly. Sweet was constantly in his face, while Zeleny plied him with drinks at the bar late into the evening. Sweet was pulling multimedia duty and was a perpetual ball of chaos. She not only filed daily stories but authored a blog for the Sun-Times website and sent back both video and still photography. Not being trained in television media, she produced video dispatches that had the feel of narrated vacation footage. Moreover, her constant battles with the wobbly tripod that held her video camera provided amusement to all around. The thirtyish Zeleny penned daily stories and, along with Souza, compiled several handsome audio-video packages for the Tribune website. Sweet, a veteran Washington reporter whose demanding manner could border on abrasive, had long tested the nerves of Obama. He had once hung up on her in a phone interview. And Zeleny, in addition to pushing Gibbs for information, was not shy about stepping up to Obama whenever a pertinent question struck him. The often imperious senator seemed to maintain a level of respect for Zeleny’s professional dedication, but at the same time it was apparent that he preferred to own his personal space at all times, and Zeleny did not mind invading it. For all of this tension, Obama’s Africa visit received mostly positive and nearly play-by-play coverage on the websites of both newspapers, leading his critics to charge in web postings, quite incorrectly, that Zeleny and Sweet were, in fact, media toadies for the senator.
In the press briefing, Obama told reporters that he had been careful not to criticize the United States too harshly while he traveled abroad, but said he could feel in South Africa “some negative impressions outside our borders that we’re going to have to deal with.” He said America’s decision to invade Iraq was responsible for that. “I think the perception is that not only did we act unilaterally, but that we have essentially determined that our interests and concerns and viewpoints are the only ones that are relevant,” he said. “You hear a lot of discussion that the United States dictates its foreign policy as opposed to cooperating with other nations. So I think there is a lot of work that we’re going to have to do in the coming years to recover the levels of legitimacy that I think we had.” He also addressed questions about how he felt bringing a media circus with him to visit his Kenyan relatives. He had last visited Kenya fourteen years before while researching his Dreams memoir, and he had come alone. He was far from alone now. “I’m going there as a United States Senator, but this gives me an opportunity to reconnect and find out what’s going on and find out what folks need,” he said, sidestepping the question. “My anticipation is that I will be able to help in the future in terms of projects and ideas that they want to pursue. But no matter what happens, there is always going to be some level of discomfort just because there is this huge gulf between life in the United States and life in Kenya.” Obama also said that he worried that his visit would be “hijacked” for political gain by some Kenyan politicians, particularly the Luo tribe, to which his father belonged. This, as it would turn out, was a legitimate fear.
Day Four in Africa jumped headfirst into activity. We drove to Soweto, a Johannesburg suburb that gained international attention in June 1976 with the Soweto Uprising, mass riots spurred by the white government’s decision to force black students to be educated in the Afrikaans language rather than in English. Soweto is now a middle-class suburb of blacks that houses a museum dedicated to the uprising and its most famous victim, Hector Pieterson, a thirteen-year-old killed when police opened fire on protesting students. With Hector’s sister Antoinette as his guide, Obama toured the Pieterson museum, which is largely ignored by the locals but draws a good number of tourists. A few American tourists who patronized the museum recognized Obama, shook his hand and asked for autographs. The museum workers, meanwhile, asked reporters who he was.
With media crews buzzing around them, Antoinette solemnly walked Obama along the museum’s exhibits. They gazed at photographs of Mandela and other images from the antiapartheid movement. When they reached the most dramatic moment of the tour, Obama knew exactly what to do. The two stopped in front of a wall-sized print of the iconic photo of the lifeless body of Antoinette’s younger brother as he was carried from the protest scene in the arms of another young man. The riveting image, taken by a news photographer, was publicized around the world and helped to galvanize the international community against apartheid. Though the focus of the photo is on the limp dead teen, the viewer’s eyes also wander to seventeen-year-old Antoinette running alongside the young man holding her dead brother. Her mouth is agape and her right hand is raised helplessly into the air. In a “feel-your-pain” moment reminiscent of Bill Clinton, Obama slid his long slender arm across Antoinette’s shoulders and pulled her against his thin torso. She reached around his waist and pulled him tighter. The two lingered in front of the huge photo as flashbulbs feverishly flickered behind them. “That was the shot there, man,” the Tribune’s Souza observed. “Just a great shot, and Obama knew it.”
Outside, through a light rain, Obama offered a short speech as he stood with Antoinette before a memorial to her slain brother. Obama often pays tribute to the leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States by saying that their efforts paved the way for his success. Here in Johannesburg, he did much the same, noting that his first political activism came in college when he protested apartheid and advocated divestment of American funds from South Africa. “If it wasn’t for some of the activities here I might not have been involved in politics,” he said.
The next quick stop was a museum in Soweto dedicated to Rosa Parks, the black seamstress who helped launch the civil rights movement in the United States by refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Obama glad-handed the curious onlookers throughout the museum, which truly resembled a small library, and then ran across something that prefaced events to come later in the trip—a framed black-and-white photograph of Robert F. Kennedy during his seminal trip to South Africa in June 1966. Kennedy, standing atop the roof of a car amid a sea of black South Africans, was leaning forward and extending a hand to the enthused crowd. In the coming days, there would be scenes similar to this one for Obama—only they would play out in his homeland of Kenya. Here in South Africa, he was barely recognized. Seeing the photograph, Obama could not help himself. He glanced down at the image and a half smile grew from a corner of his mouth. “You know,” he said to a person in the entourage, “my desk in the Senate is the same desk that Robert Kennedy had.” Whether Obama had meant to draw a parallel or not, the image was drawn.