As this tumult was beginning, I flew to South Africa for a goodwill visit that
had been planned months in advance. Sasha and Malia’s school year had just
ended, so they were able to join me, along with my mother and Craig’s kids
Leslie and Avery, who were now teenagers. I was headed there to give a keynote
address at a U.S.-sponsored forum for young African women leaders from around
the continent, but we’d also filled my schedule with community events
connected to wellness and education, as well as visits with local leaders and U.S.
consulate workers. We’d finish with a short visit to Botswana, meeting with its
president and stopping at a community HIV clinic, and then enjoy a quick safari
before heading home.
It had taken no time at all for us to get swept up in South Africa’s energy. In
Johannesburg, we toured the Apartheid Museum and danced and read books with
young children at a community center in one of the black townships north of the
city. At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and
health workers who were using youth sports programs to help educate children
about HIV/AIDS, and were introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the
legendary theologian and activist who’d helped dismantle apartheid in South
Africa. Tutu was seventy-nine years old, a barrel-chested man with bright eyes
and an irrepressible laugh. Hearing that I was at the stadium to promote fitness,
he insisted on doing push-ups with me in front of a cheering pack of kids.
Over the course of those few days in South Africa, I felt myself floating.
This visit was a long way from my first trip to Kenya in 1991, when I’d ridden
around with Barack in matatus and pushed Auma’s broken-down VW along the
side of a dusty road. What I felt was one part jet lag, maybe, but two parts
something more profound and elating. It was as if we’d stepped into the larger
crosscurrents of culture and history, reminded suddenly of our relative smallness
in the wider arc of time. Seeing the faces of the seventy-six young women who’d
been chosen to attend the leadership forum because they were doing meaningful
work in their communities, I fought back tears. They gave me hope. They made
me feel old in the best possible way. A full 60 percent of Africa’s population at
the time was under the age of twenty-five. Here were women, all of them under
thirty and some as young as sixteen, who were building nonprofits, training other
women to be entrepreneurs, and risking imprisonment to report on government
corruption. And now they were being connected, trained, and encouraged. I
hoped this would only amplify their might.
The most surreal moment of all, though, had come early, on just the second
day of our trip. My family and I had been at the Nelson Mandela Foundation