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, which he signaled to friends and family at the time by reclaiming his African first name.
Barry became Barack that year. He had read Du Bois, Fanon, Malcolm X — an array of authors writing about the black struggle for liberation in his country and in others shaking off the legacy of colonial rule around the world.
That is where he looked for — and found — a figure and a cause to channel his rising political enthusiasm: Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on a lonely island off Cape Town, and his outlawed African National Congress. Obama would help lead the student push for the Southern California college to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
“As the months passed I found myself drawn into a larger role — contacting representatives of the African National Congress to speak on campus, drafting letters to the faculty, printing up flyers, arguing strategy — I noticed that people had begun to listen to my opinions,” Obama wrote in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” “It was a discovery that made me hungry for words.”
Thirty-three years later, Barack Obama, elected twice to his nation's highest office, memorialized Mandela from behind a podium far from those heady student-led strategy sessions at Occidental.
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