‘Obama brings out the African in him’

Midway through a three-country trip to Africa and shortly after an emotional tour of his hero Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison cell, Barack Obama was greeted by another revered African leader, Desmond Tutu, with the words: ‘Welcome home.’ 

America’s first black president - ‘the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas’, as Obama describes himself - had returned to Africa for his first extended trip as the world’s most powerful leader.  Despite disappointment that it took him so long, the continent, for the most part, welcomed him and claimed him as its own. People lined the streets in Dar es Salaam as Obama began and ended his visit toTanzania, and young audiences in South Africa sprang to their feet to applaud his words. ‘Your success is our success. Your failure, whether you like it or not, is our failure,’ Tutu said.