Manto tshabalala msimang biography of barack obama
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Today is World AIDS Day. I know, big yawn. Another day devoted to another horrific pandemic and then after feeling terrible -- or not -- we'll all forget about it. But here in South Africa, where I have been traveling the past two days with a group of American and South African bloggers, World AIDS Day resonates particularly hard.
South Africa has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world. Now, the reasons for this travesty are many. Poverty. Lack of education. Cultural stigmas around talking frankly about sex. Macho attitudes toward women. But the main culprit is a single man: former president Thabo Mbeki.
For years Mbkei scoffed at the notion that HIV causes AIDS, refusing to provide anti-AIDS drugs to South Africans. According to a recent Harvard Study, we now know those treatments would have saved 330,000 South African lives. That's not including the 35,000 babies who needlessly contracted the virus from their mothers.
Mbeki's health minister, if you can imagine it,
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It is not too early to pronounce Barack Obama a political phenomenon unlike any previously seen on the American scene. He proved that last week in Kenya, where he was received in a manner more befitting a messiah than a junior senator bearing nothing more than opinions and good cheer. Obama began his two-week African odyssey in South Africa and ended it in Chad, but Kenya (the only country in which his wife and two young daughters accompanied him) was at its literal and emotional center. For it was in Kenya (in a village called Kogelo, Alego, in a district called Siaya), where paternal roots run unbreakably deep, that his father was born. The Luo tribesmen there claim Obama as one of their own; and as his motorcade passed through Kisumu en rutt to his ancestral by, thousands lined the path.
They wore Obama T shirts and Obama caps, and waved Obama flags. Many climbed trees to catch a glimpse. Others sang songs in his honor. "He's our brother. He's our son," said one man in the
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A case of democracy and aid or diplomacy and trade
BARACK Obama's first political speech was about South Africa. And he didn't say a word. Having joined an anti-apartheid students' group at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1980, Obama had the idea of stepping up to address students, only to have someone immediately yank him from the podium - symbolising the voicelessness of black South Africans.
But Obama was so taken with his first experience of the spotlight that he physically resisted the guy doing the yanking. He later recalled: "I really wanted to stay up there, to hear my voice bouncing off the crowd and returning back to me in applause."
Biographer David Mendell suggested this was literally the moment that turned Obama into a politician, and his career has retained a tenuous but consistent link to Africa ever since.
Two and a half years ago, he visited five African countries, including his father's birth country of Kenya and a low-key trip to South Afric