The U.S. president paid tribute to the former South African president and called him his 'personal hero' amid speculation that he may pay a visit to the Pretoria hospital where Mandela, also known as Madiba, is clinging to life.
Obama is in the middle of a three-country tour of Africa that the White House hopes will compensate for what some view as years of neglect by the administration of America's first black president.
Yesterday Obama toured Goree Island, a former Senegalese shipping port and stood its the 'Door of No Return', where Africans were forced onto ships to be sold into North American slavery.
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama boarded Air Force One earlier to fly to South Africa from Senegal's capital Dakar
People protesting against Obama's visit to South Africa carried placards in Pretoria today
Demonstrators burned an American flag while
protesting against the offical visit of Barack Obama in front of the
U.S. Embassy in Pretoria
About 800 people marched through Pretoria to
voice their opposition to Obama and U.S. policy in South Africa and
around the world, while some demonstrators burned an American flag
Obama has only visited the continent once during his term of office, to make a short visit to Ghana at the beginning of his first term where he said: 'I have the blood of Africa within me.'
'I've had the privilege of meeting Madiba and speaking to him. And he's a personal hero, but I don't think I'm unique in that regard,' Obama told reporters in Senegal yesterday.
'If and when he passes from this place, one thing I think we'll all know is that his legacy is one that will linger on throughout the ages.'
The White House said it was up to the family to decide if Obama could visit the ailing former president in hospital.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air
Force One during his flight to Johannesburg, Obama said, 'We'll see what
the situation is when we land.
'I don't need a photo op and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned with Nelson Mandela's condition.
'I think the main message we'll want to deliver, if not directly to him, but to his family, is simply profound gratitude for his leadership.'
Mandela, 94, is fighting a lung infection that has left him in a critical condition and in hospital for nearly three weeks.
His fourth hospitalisation in six months
has focused attention in South Africa and globally on the faltering
health of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is admired as a symbol of
resistance against injustice and of racial reconciliation.
President Jacob Zuma has said Mandela's condition improved over Wednesday night but he remained critical.
The president has no public engagements planned for this evening when he arrives and it is thought he could make a trip to the hospital then.
Obama's three-day trip includes a visit to Cape Town's Robben Island, where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years imprisoned by the previous white racist South African government.
'We are going to completely defer to the wishes of the Mandela family and work with the South African government as relates to our visit,' deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Senegal.
'Whatever the Mandela family deems appropriate, that's what we're focused on doing in terms of our interaction with them.'
Today South Africans protesting Obama's visit to their country rallied a few blocks from well-wishers at the hospital in Pretoria where Mandela is critically ill.
About 200 trade unionists, student activists and South African Communist Party members gathered in the capital Pretoria to protest Obama's visit this weekend, calling his foreign policy 'arrogant, selfish and oppressive'.
'We had expectations of America's first black president,' said Khomotso Makola, a 19-year-old law student.
'Knowing Africa's history, we expected more.
'He has come as a disappointment, I think Mandela too would be disappointed and feel let down.'
South African critics of Obama have focused in particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to deliver on a pledge to close the U.S. military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects.
Hundreds of protesters marched to the U.S. embassy in a peaceful protest against Obama's impending visit.
The demonstrators opposed U.S. policy on Cuba, the war in Afghanistan, global warming and other issues.
The rally in Pretoria was organized by trade unionists and members of the South African Communist Party.
The protesters want to raise public awareness and warn U.S. citizens about human rights violations committed by the Obama administration, which includes the non-closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison holding terrorism suspects, said campaign coordinator Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.
'Their administration's government is not welcome, and is being received with antagonism,' Ndlozi said.
'Therefore they'll have to rethink the standards by which they hold their government.'
Protesters carried signs that read: 'No, You Can't Obama,' a message inspired by the 'Yes We Can' campaign slogan adopted by the president during his first run for election.
Demonstrators staged a similar
protest outside the Parliament building in Cape Town where Obama's
record on human rights and trade relations in Africa were questioned.
'He's coming here to plunder Africa and South Africa,' protester Abdurahman Khan said.
'He's coming for the wealth and resources, for the gold and the diamond mines, while the majority of Africans and South Africans are suffering.'
Protesters also plan to rally Saturday at the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus, where Obama will address students and receive an honorary law degree, and on Sunday at the University of Cape Town.
While acknowledging that Obama has not spent as much time in Africa as people hoped, the administration is eager to highlight what it has done, in part to end unflattering comparisons to accomplishments of predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Food security and public aid are two of the issues the Obama team believes are success stories.
'Africa has seen a steady and
consistent increase in our overall resource investment each year that
we've been in office,' said Raj Shah, head of USAID.
'And sustaining that in this political climate has required real trade-offs to be made in other areas, but we've done that.'
Today, Obama took part in a Feed the Future event on food security, his key Africa policy so far, before leaving Dakar.
He toured displays in small thatched booths at his hotel grounds on a bluff overlooking the ocean, meeting with farmers and entrepreneurs who are using new methods and technologies to advance the cause of food security.
Obama met the head of the Senegalese
Federation of Corn Producers, Nimna Diayte, second right, during a food
security event today before setting off for South Africa
In
brief remarks later, he drew attention to Feed the Future, a public
private partnership initiated by his administration that he said has
helped seven million small farmers in developing nations, including
7,000 in Senegal.
'This is a moral imperative,' he said. 'I believe that Africa is rising and it wants to partner with us not to be dependent but to be self-sufficient.'
'Far too many Africans endure the daily injustice of poverty and chronic hunger.
'When people ask what's happening to their taxpayer dollars in foreign aid, I want people to know this money's not being wasted. It's helping feed families.'
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush passed innovative Africa initiatives while in the White House and have continued their development work in the region since leaving the Oval Office.
Obama's efforts here have not been so ambitious, despite his personal ties to the continent.
Clinton first drew extensive attention to
Africa in 1998 when he made the longest trip ever by a U.S. president,
with stops in six countries that had never before been visited by any
occupant of the Oval Office.
He is scheduled to come back this summer for what has become an annual visit, with his Clinton Foundation investing in myriad wide-ranging projects in Africa on health, agriculture and climate change.
Bush will be in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania next week at the same time as Obama, although they have no plans to meet.
Instead, Michelle Obama and former First Lady Laura Bush plan to appear together at a summit on empowering African women organised by the George W. Bush Institute, with the former president in attendance.
Bush's trip this week is his third in 19 months to promote his Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon partnership to combat breast and cervical cancer in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
On this visit, he and Mrs Bush plan to help renovate a cervical cancer screening and treatment
clinic in Zambia before heading to Tanzania for the summit.
Witney Schneidman, former deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said Obama's efforts are not like George W Bush's AIDS initiative 'where you put people on a medicine to save their lives - very, extremely important.
'This is more of a structural change, and I think that's going to take time.'
Schneidman said that the birther movement in the U.S, which questioned where the president was born, was a 'real constraint on dealing with Africa'.
Obama's initiatives for Africa were not attention-grabbing on the continent or back home, said Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mwangi Kimenyi of the Brookings Insitutions' Africa Growth Initiative said: 'Africans still consider Clinton their president.
'If you go to Africa and
mention Clinton - I mean, he is a hero, even today. I don't think
President Obama is going to approach the level of President Clinton at
all, in terms of respect, in terms of what they feel, and it's partly
because, as one whose family is from Africa, the expectations were
rather high.
'I mean, they expected him to do more, to do more visits, to actually relate better with Africans, to understand the continent better.
'There is not that feeling that, you know, we have our son there. There's probably more reference of a prodigal son than a, you know, son.'
Obama foreign policy adviser
Ben Rhodes said the president is signaling increased engagement with the
current trip and hopes it will prove to be a 'pivotal moment' of
Africa's growth taking off.
'Frankly, Africa is a place that we had not yet been able to devote significant presidential time and attention to,' he said.
'And there's nothing that can make an impact more in terms of our foreign policy and our economic and security interests than the president of the United States coming and demonstrating the importance of our commitment to this region.'
dailymail.co.uk
'I don't need a photo op and the last thing I want to do is to be in any way obtrusive at a time when the family is concerned with Nelson Mandela's condition.
'I think the main message we'll want to deliver, if not directly to him, but to his family, is simply profound gratitude for his leadership.'
Mandela, 94, is fighting a lung infection that has left him in a critical condition and in hospital for nearly three weeks.
The White House said it was up to the family of
Nelson Mandela to decide if Obama could pay a visit to the ailing former
president in hospital
In Cape Town tributes to the ailing former president were painted on stones
The stones left in Cape Town were painted with 'Madiba', Nelson Mandela's tribe name
Mandela is being treated at the Mediclinic Heart
Hospital in Pretoria, where wellwishers have been leaving tributes
since his admission for a recurring lung infection
'DOOR OF NO RETURN': OBAMA PAYS EMOTIONAL VISIT TO FORMER SLAVERY PORT
President
Obama spent yesterday afternoon touring a Senegalese island where
Africans were shipped across the Atlantic into slavery.
He called the visit a 'very powerful moment.'
Obama says visiting Goree Island with his family helped them fully appreciate the magnitude of the slave trade.
They toured the museum at the Maison des Esclaves where slaves were gathered before going through the 'Door of No Return' and being forced onto ships bound for North America.
The Maison des Esclaves was built between 1780 and 1784 but now it is used as a tourist destination and a museum the tells the horrors that the African slaves faced.
It is believed that a few hundred slaves were shipped through the port on an annual basis until the late 1780s.
Obama also said that, as an African American and an African-American president, the trip gave him even greater motivation to stand up for human rights around the world.
He said the island is a reminder of what happens when civil rights are not protected.
Obama peered out at the crashing waves through the door, at first by himself and later joined by his wife, Michelle, and two daughters.
Emerging minutes later, Obama said the site painted a powerful picture of the magnitude of the slave trade as he reflected on the ties many in the U.S. share with the continent.
Obama's focus in Senegal was on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence.
He called the visit a 'very powerful moment.'
Obama says visiting Goree Island with his family helped them fully appreciate the magnitude of the slave trade.
They toured the museum at the Maison des Esclaves where slaves were gathered before going through the 'Door of No Return' and being forced onto ships bound for North America.
The Maison des Esclaves was built between 1780 and 1784 but now it is used as a tourist destination and a museum the tells the horrors that the African slaves faced.
It is believed that a few hundred slaves were shipped through the port on an annual basis until the late 1780s.
Obama also said that, as an African American and an African-American president, the trip gave him even greater motivation to stand up for human rights around the world.
He said the island is a reminder of what happens when civil rights are not protected.
Obama peered out at the crashing waves through the door, at first by himself and later joined by his wife, Michelle, and two daughters.
Emerging minutes later, Obama said the site painted a powerful picture of the magnitude of the slave trade as he reflected on the ties many in the U.S. share with the continent.
Obama's focus in Senegal was on the modern-day achievements of the former French colony after half a century of independence.
President Jacob Zuma has said Mandela's condition improved over Wednesday night but he remained critical.
The president has no public engagements planned for this evening when he arrives and it is thought he could make a trip to the hospital then.
Obama's three-day trip includes a visit to Cape Town's Robben Island, where Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years imprisoned by the previous white racist South African government.
'We are going to completely defer to the wishes of the Mandela family and work with the South African government as relates to our visit,' deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Senegal.
'Whatever the Mandela family deems appropriate, that's what we're focused on doing in terms of our interaction with them.'
Today South Africans protesting Obama's visit to their country rallied a few blocks from well-wishers at the hospital in Pretoria where Mandela is critically ill.
About 200 trade unionists, student activists and South African Communist Party members gathered in the capital Pretoria to protest Obama's visit this weekend, calling his foreign policy 'arrogant, selfish and oppressive'.
'We had expectations of America's first black president,' said Khomotso Makola, a 19-year-old law student.
'Knowing Africa's history, we expected more.
'He has come as a disappointment, I think Mandela too would be disappointed and feel let down.'
South African critics of Obama have focused in particular on his support for U.S. drone strikes overseas, which they say have killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and his failure to deliver on a pledge to close the U.S. military detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba housing terrorism suspects.
Hundreds of protesters marched to the U.S. embassy in a peaceful protest against Obama's impending visit.
The demonstrators opposed U.S. policy on Cuba, the war in Afghanistan, global warming and other issues.
Some protesters dressed as a Guantanamo detainees to join the 800-strong march against Obama's visit in Pretoria
One placard accused Obama of being a 'Zionist
Uncle Tom'. The 'Uncle Tom' refers to the title character faithful slave
in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and used to
insult a black person perceived as too keen on winning the approval of
white people
Outside the Parliament building in Cape Town a young girl held up a placard reading: 'Stop plunder of Africa'
The Pretoria protest was by organised by trade unionists and members of the South African Communist Party
The protesters want to raise public awareness and warn U.S. citizens about human rights violations committed by the Obama administration, which includes the non-closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison holding terrorism suspects, said campaign coordinator Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.
'Their administration's government is not welcome, and is being received with antagonism,' Ndlozi said.
'Therefore they'll have to rethink the standards by which they hold their government.'
Protesters carried signs that read: 'No, You Can't Obama,' a message inspired by the 'Yes We Can' campaign slogan adopted by the president during his first run for election.
Outside Cape Town's parliament building demonstrators protested against America's support of Israel
'He's coming here to plunder Africa and South Africa,' protester Abdurahman Khan said.
'He's coming for the wealth and resources, for the gold and the diamond mines, while the majority of Africans and South Africans are suffering.'
Protesters also plan to rally Saturday at the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus, where Obama will address students and receive an honorary law degree, and on Sunday at the University of Cape Town.
While acknowledging that Obama has not spent as much time in Africa as people hoped, the administration is eager to highlight what it has done, in part to end unflattering comparisons to accomplishments of predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Food security and public aid are two of the issues the Obama team believes are success stories.
Mr and Mrs Obama looked through the 'Door of No
Return' while touring the House of Slaves at Goree Island off the coast
of Dakar yesterday
Facing history: President Obama took a tour of
Goree Island outside of Dakar, Senegal where slaves used to be depart on
boats bound for America in the late 18th century
Touring: President Obama was accompanied to
Goree Island by his wife Michelle, their eldest daughter Malia,
Michelle's mother Marian Robinson and their niece Leslie
'And sustaining that in this political climate has required real trade-offs to be made in other areas, but we've done that.'
Today, Obama took part in a Feed the Future event on food security, his key Africa policy so far, before leaving Dakar.
He toured displays in small thatched booths at his hotel grounds on a bluff overlooking the ocean, meeting with farmers and entrepreneurs who are using new methods and technologies to advance the cause of food security.
Meaningful: Though the Maison des Esclaves has
become a popular tourist destination, it was one of the more minor slave
shipping ports in Senegal
Obama arrived at the airport with Senegalese president Macky Sall for his flight to South Africa today
Obama met the head of the Senegalese
Federation of Corn Producers, Nimna Diayte, second right, during a food
security event today before setting off for South Africa'This is a moral imperative,' he said. 'I believe that Africa is rising and it wants to partner with us not to be dependent but to be self-sufficient.'
'Far too many Africans endure the daily injustice of poverty and chronic hunger.
'When people ask what's happening to their taxpayer dollars in foreign aid, I want people to know this money's not being wasted. It's helping feed families.'
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush passed innovative Africa initiatives while in the White House and have continued their development work in the region since leaving the Oval Office.
Obama's efforts here have not been so ambitious, despite his personal ties to the continent.
Obama met Senegalese farmers and entrepreneurs who are using new methods and technologies to advance the cause of food security
Obama pointed to a rice crop before it is processed during a food security exposition in Dakar today
He is scheduled to come back this summer for what has become an annual visit, with his Clinton Foundation investing in myriad wide-ranging projects in Africa on health, agriculture and climate change.
Bush will be in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania next week at the same time as Obama, although they have no plans to meet.
Instead, Michelle Obama and former First Lady Laura Bush plan to appear together at a summit on empowering African women organised by the George W. Bush Institute, with the former president in attendance.
Bush's trip this week is his third in 19 months to promote his Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon partnership to combat breast and cervical cancer in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
The U.S. president met a rice farmer and other entrepreneurs during the event in Dakar
Witney Schneidman, former deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said Obama's efforts are not like George W Bush's AIDS initiative 'where you put people on a medicine to save their lives - very, extremely important.
'This is more of a structural change, and I think that's going to take time.'
Schneidman said that the birther movement in the U.S, which questioned where the president was born, was a 'real constraint on dealing with Africa'.
Obama's initiatives for Africa were not attention-grabbing on the continent or back home, said Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mwangi Kimenyi of the Brookings Insitutions' Africa Growth Initiative said: 'Africans still consider Clinton their president.
Obama is on a three-country tour of Africa, seen
at Goree Island near Dakar, Senegal, yesterday where African slaves in
past centuries were shipped west
'I mean, they expected him to do more, to do more visits, to actually relate better with Africans, to understand the continent better.
'There is not that feeling that, you know, we have our son there. There's probably more reference of a prodigal son than a, you know, son.'
U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about the
condition of Nelson Mandela in Dakar last night ahead of his visit to
South Africa today
'Frankly, Africa is a place that we had not yet been able to devote significant presidential time and attention to,' he said.
'And there's nothing that can make an impact more in terms of our foreign policy and our economic and security interests than the president of the United States coming and demonstrating the importance of our commitment to this region.'
dailymail.co.uk
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