BARACK OBAMA HUSSAIN EULOGIZED NELSON MANDELA ON MANDELA DAY

This Mandela Day, I’m reflecting on the trip I made to Johannesburg in 2018 to celebrate the remarkable life and legacy of Nelson Mandela. On that trip, I also had a chance to meet and work with the next generation of Obama Foundation leaders in Africa.

Madiba devoted his life to the long walk towards freedom, justice, and equal opportunity. At the outset, his struggle was particular to South Africa, to his homeland – a fight to end apartheid, a fight to ensure lasting political and social and economic equality for its disenfranchised non-white citizens.

But through his sacrifice and unwavering leadership and, perhaps most of all, through his moral example, Madiba and the movement he led would come to signify something larger. He came to embody the universal aspirations of dispossessed people all around the world, their hopes for a better life, the possibility of a moral transformation in the conduct of human affairs.

Madiba's light shone so brightly, even from that narrow Robben Island cell, that in the late '70s he inspired a young college student on the other side of the world to reexamine his own priorities. Madiba made me consider the small role I might play in bending the arc of the world towards justice. And later, as a law student, I witnessed Madiba emerge from prison – just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall – I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.

Through his actions and his words, Madiba reminded us that, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart."

Let's keep this as our North Star, so that future generations might look back and see that we upheld Madiba’s remarkable legacy and carried forward a new banner of freedom.