In his oration at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on Tuesday, Barack Obama asked himself “how well have I applied his lessons in my own life?”, and invited all of us to ask the same question of ourselves.
In his own case, President Obama offered no answer. But it was the fairly clear implication of his words that he didn’t think he was shaping up too badly. Madiba, he said, had been “the last great liberator of the 20th century”. Guess who looks like being the first great liberator of the 21st.
Today’s leaders needed to be filled, he went on, with the spirit of Ubuntu – a Nguni Bantu word meaning “the oneness of humanity” (Cameroon translation: “We’re all in this together”). They needed to stand up for justice and peace. His performance reminded me slightly of Tom Lehrer’s Folk Song Army: “We all hate poverty, war and injustice – unlike the rest of you squares.”
Such rhetoric is consistent with the tone that Mr Obama has used from the beginning of his presidency, notably when he reached out to Islam in his speech in Cairo in June 2009. It is by now not too early – in some respects, it may even be too late – to ask whether Mr Obama’s foreign policy has yet produced any great outbreak of global Ubuntu.
There is no doubt that billions of people – including your hard-bitten columnist – wanted to hear some such hopeful message when Mr Obama first came to global prominence in 2008. Even today, it is not only Left-wing Danish prime ministers and Mr Cameron who want to share a selfie with him: a large portion of humanity feels the same. The BBC News website still leads off each day with an elderly picture of Obama and Bill Clinton arm in arm. But what, in five years or so, has actually happened? Read on and comment » | Charles Moore | Friday, December 13, 2013
