Latest update June 4th, 2026 12:03 AM
Barack Obama: The moment, the magic, the future
There are only two times in my life that I have seen a beautifully philosophical occasion that made me feel that life, in essence, will continue to justify our existence in this world and that truths will never be stifled by evil and that human beings will continue to create a life worth living.
The first is when Nelson Mandela became the President of South Africa. The average person, unconcerned with politics, will never be able to understand how someone who believes in political struggle felt deep inside their soul when Mandela triumphed. There and then, you knew life was not a flower fated to die with the passing of the seasons.
The second time was when the PNC lost the general election in October 1992. For me, it was my personal liberation. I had suffered psychic damage under the PNC. I was expelled from UG, almost lost my life twice, and my mother died without seeing me find employment in my own country.
Though President Hoyte was far removed from what Burnham stood for, we had enough of rigged elections and authoritarian rule. For people like me who couldn’t believe Guyana would have changed, it was a moment of inexplicable joy. October 1992 has faded from my mind. It has turned out to be one of life’s largest disappointments for me.
Only the memory of Mandela remained until Wednesday, November 5 in the early hours of the morning when I saw the reincarnation of Nelson Mandela in the form of Barack Obama. However much we love Mandela, the intellectual side to us must not yield to emotional submission.
The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American President will carry more historical weight than the deification of the great South African hero. It is truly difficult to find a semantic form in which to describe what the world has just seen with the election of Obama.
In my article on Tuesday, I referred to him as a phenomenon that does not come often in life. The same can be said of Mandela.
The difference with Mandela and Obama lies in the meaning of the United States to the world. South Africa, important as it is to the future of the African continent, and to a lesser extent the world, did not have that global reach to change mankind in ways we all longed for when Mandela became a messianic inspiration. The story is fundamentally different with Obama.
I don’t believe we will ever see another Mandela in hundreds of years to come. I may be wrong because life does have its optimistic surprises that smother earth’s inhabitants but Mandela is a human being way beyond the blood of ordinary mortals.
With Barack Obama, we on Planet Earth may be on the threshold of something incredibly scintillating – the liberation of the world. The U.S. exerts enormous influence and direction on every civilised country in the global community. The United States may not have the power to change every territory it would like to but U.S. habits, both negative and positive, inevitably permeate the globe and find an effect on the world, however hard that is to accept and understand.
Since the 20th century began, the U.S. has enjoyed a love/hate relation with the world. Victorious after World War Two because of its priceless help in defeating fascism worldwide, the U.S. became an empire. Its war machine, its culture, its wealth dominated the world. There were moments when it was the globe’s good guy, then equally, it did wrong things that made the world see it as the bad guy.
The U.S. underwent a dramatic moral decline as the 21st century began. Its internal leadership lacked a humanitarian passion and its response to 9/11 saw the diminution of its enduring democracy. In fact, this writer believes that Mr. Al Gore was cheated out of the 2000 presidential elections. This is how far the moral weakening of the U.S. had gone.
With Barack Obama, there will be a twin achievement. His life story will motivate us, human beings, to believe in the oneness of the human race and we may see phenomenal, extraordinary, incredible, apocalyptic changes all over the world. There can be no mistake about it; Barack Obama is fantastically charismatic and inspires those who listen and like him.
The twin side of this fantasy will be what he will do for the world using the international reach of the U.S. He will no doubt start with his own country. He promised his people to tame the abusive side of American power. He promised his people that the U.S. sun is so large that those that have been excluded will no longer be left out. Then, no doubt, he will turn his eyes on the liberation of mankind.
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