ABSTRACT
On the occasion of the centenary celebration commemorating South African President Nelson Mandela’s birth, US President Barack Obama spoke in July of 2018 in Johannesburg, highlighting the impact of the example of the South African leader on the young American:
Madiba’s light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late ’70s he could inspire a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities, could make me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. 1
Taking account of the transnational flow from South Africa to the USA, Obama observes that together with Mandela’s release from prison and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama then a political science student at Columbia University saw himself shaped by a “wave of hope”—a universal wave of hope—that had a global impact. Figured as what became a lesson in democracy, Mandela’s “democratic vision” was clearly an inspiration for the future American president. Looking toward South Africa for lessons in leadership, civic responsibility, and for a democratic vision may not have been the direction many traditionalists might have imagined possible for an American president, yet Obama testifies to this transnational trajectory, one that decenters the US as the origin story of the long walk towards democracy and freedom. One hundred years after the birth of Nelson Mandela, “it’s time” Obama suggests, “for us to stop paying all of our attention to the world’s capitals and centers of power….” We couldn’t agree more (see Morgan in this volume).