Zoom in, and the scene is like so many others: An American family on vacation, touring a historical site abroad. The father is in khakis and a navy windbreaker, the mother in a sweater and sensible pumps, and their two school-age daughters in casual wear and sneakers, arms crossed and looking slightly bored as an elderly tour guide explains the global significance of a pile of limestone rocks.

Pan back now from the tight frame to the rim of the rock quarry that encircles them, the television news cameras perched above, a convoy of black security vehicles, the Secret Service snipers in combat gear and rifles hidden in the brush, a U.S. Marine helicopter bearing the presidential seal. An even wider frame reveals a view of all of Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, a beautiful but barren speck on the globe, once so loaded with political urgency and, now, nearly three decades later, at the center of attention again.



President Obama peers out of former South African president Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

President Obama and his family have arrived, in the summer of 2013, to tour the place where one of Obama’s personal and political heroes, Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid revolutionary and former president of South Africa, spent nearly two decades behind bars and was forced to perform hard labor in this very limestone quarry.

From the archives Mandela’s cause shaped Obama’s political awakening Entering his sophomore year at Occidental College, Barack Obama sought a political movement to match his personal awakening. He found Nelson Mandela.

It is a visit that so many have waited so long for, the first black leader of the world’s most powerful nation paying homage to a global icon of black struggle. Together the two men and their presidencies seemed to represent the triumph of two great liberation movements: the American struggle for civil rights and the international fight against South African apartheid.



The note that Obama and the first lady signed in a guest book at Robben Island in June 2013. (Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

It was Mandela’s struggle and writings that had persuaded a young Obama to take his first steps into political activism during his years at Occidental College and at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s.

In his 1995 book, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote that Mandela, from afar, was one of his male role models in the absence of his own father. Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Obama had visited Robben Island once before, in 2006 as a U.S. senator from Illinois, but not as president and not with his family.

And yet for Obama, the return is bittersweet.

A day earlier, 900 miles away in Johannesburg, the president’s motorcade had pulled up to the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory, where Obama met privately with Mandela’s daughters Makaziwe Mandela and Zindzi Mandela Hlongwane, as well as a number of his grandchildren. Mandela, 94, was in the hospital, severely ill, and Obama had chosen not to visit the ailing icon out of respect for his health concerns.

Obama, then 51, instead spoke by telephone with Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, who was at her husband’s side in the hospital.

“I don’t need a photo-op, and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive,” Obama had told reporters on Air Force One during a flight from Senegal to South Africa on a six-day trip to three African nations, his first extended visit to the continent while in office. His final stop would be Tanzania.



Obama looks out from the Door of No Return at the House of Slaves, a memorial to the Atlantic slave trade on Senagal’s Goree Island, in June 2013. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)


“The main message we’ll want to deliver, if not directly to him but to his family, is simply our profound gratitude for his leadership all these years,” said the president, who had met Mandela just once, in 2005, when Mandela already had become frail.

A single photo exists of their brief, unscheduled meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, a snapshot taken by an Obama aide. The senator is cast in silhouette by the window, standing and shaking hands with the seated Mandela, who is more clearly lit, a walking cane within the older man’s reach.

If that private meeting was not yet a symbolic passing of the torch — Mandela only vaguely knew who he was meeting — Obama’s visits to Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2013 are viewed as one.

Obama and Mandela are “bound by history as the first black presidents of their respective countries,” South African President Jacob Zuma said after a meeting with Obama. “Both carry the dreams of millions of people of Africa and the diaspora who were previously oppressed.”

Mandela would die six months later.

Throughout his tour, Obama is feted as a native son, even though he has elected not to visit Kenya, his father’s homeland. There is a palpable sense that he remains a symbol of hope, despite the fact that Obama’s Africa policy on trade, development and health care had been criticized for not being as robust as those of his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Jojo Bruce-Quansah, former editor of the Ghana Palaver newspaper, explains how Ghanaians felt about President Obama when he visited their country in 2009 and why he “didn’t see President Obama as a black president.” (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

“Welcome home, Mr. President,” posters in Senegal read. In South Africa, children wore clothing with his likeness. And in Tanzania, the government renamed the boulevard outside the presidential palace “Barack Obama Drive.”

In Cape Town, during a discussion on AIDS policy, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the U.S. president: “When you became the first black incumbent of the White House, you don’t know what you did for our psyches. My wife sat in front of the TV with tears running down her face as she watched the celebration with you in Chicago. You won. And we won.”

Onlookers chuckled, but the older man, sitting next to Obama at a long, thin table, leaned in closer. “Your success is our success. Your failure, whether you like it or not, is our failure,” he said slowly. “And so we want to assure you that we pray for you to be a great success.”

Obama looked uncertain while Tutu talked — here was a man who, like Mandela, had fought apartheid and inspired a younger Obama. Now, Tutu was handing him their mantle.

From the archives Eulogizing Mandela, Obama celebrates and scolds President Obama remembered a personal hero — a man whose example “woke me up to my responsibilities” — before an adoring stadium audience on the outskirts of Johannesburg.

And yet, the American leader had another goal for his Africa trip than simply basking in the glory of his own reflection: inspiring the next generation of political leaders.

During a town-hall-style discussion with 650 students at the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus, and with thousands more watching across the continent on a live broadcast, Obama spoke optimistically of young Africans whose politics and activism would help overcome the historical residue of apartheid and slavery, and the corruption in many modern-day African nations.


The president quoted from Robert Kennedy’s address in Cape Town in 1966, saying the challenges of our world demand “the qualities of youth; not a time in life, but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.”

So zoom in again on the Obamas in the limestone quarry, where the air is still, the sun is bright and they are listening to Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada, then 83, who spent 18 years here as a political prisoner.

The president, wearing sunglasses, turns toward Malia, then 15, and Sasha, then 12. A television boom microphone captures his words.

“One thing you guys might not be aware of is that the idea of political nonviolence first took root here in South Africa because Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer here in South Africa. Here is where he did his first political activism. When he went back to India, the principles ultimately led to Indian independence, and what Gandhi did inspired Martin Luther King.”

Mandela, Gandhi, King. The names of men who changed the world ring out in the stillness of the barren island where Obama has come to pay his respects.