The Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund for Journalists

Never in my life time have I seen so many people collectively shed tears, not because they are sad but because they are happy. 

And never in my life time have I seen a lot of people feel happy to have been proved wrong.

They predicted time was not ripe for a black American to be President of the USA. They were wrong and too happy they were proved wrong!

The Obama moment! Someone described it as the equivalent of the Mandela moment!

Tuesday night 4^thNovember, Hundreds of people filled Times Square to celebrate the historic election of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States of America.

They danced, they chanted, they screamed, they… and they cried .. it was so touching, yes history had been made and I was proud to be there.

But why did they cry? It was not only Americans that shed tears , foreigners too did. Why?  ‘ am proud of these Americans’one of them told me. Who cant be?

I asked a few elderly people why they cried or felt like crying . Atleast three of them told me they new one day an African American would be President. But not in their life time! They were just too happy that they had lived long enough to see it happen. 

They could have beenother reasons too why people were too happy.

President of Hague Appeal for Peace Cora Weiss told me and my colleague from Tanzania Eric Kabendera in an interview.

‘We couldn’t wait another minute, Bush has been the most destructive President in our history and the least popular, and the image of America in the world was at its lowest possible point ..and that’s a dangerous position to be in , and things have just turned around so quickly…. we have a new image, we have a popular President… 

Cora is one of the people that helped mobilise support to train Africans that came to America in readiness for independence in their countries.

Her Organisation also helped Obama senior with some grants during his stay at Hawaii university. Not that they brought him to the states.

Cora has done many other noble things I will not attempt to lay out in this blog because I will run out of space.

Yesterday I listened to McCain preach about America- one of those campaign messages at one of his campaign meetings before the ‘Obama tsunami’ swept him away.

I missed some of the first words but heard the last ones.

‘…We are Americans,we never run away from history, we make history!’  And the crowd cheered on.

I couldn’t help think how appropriate those words are for an Obama victory! I don’t think he meant Obama when he said them because he was still in the race then.

Wouldn’t it have been so appropriate for Dr Martin Luther King Jr to be here to witness the Obama victory?

I did not cry on Tuesday night leading into Wednesday morning.. but I felt like it on Saturday afternoon as  I watched a documentary on CNN about Dr King and head these words spoken the day before he was assassinated,

...And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.’

I watched him shed tears. Did he know he was going to die? He alone can answer that question and unfortunately he is not around.

The best out of this global best moment is to turn the Obama Presidency into a success.

Or else history will be very harsh on the people of colour or the blacks or the bye racial as others would want to describe them.

It all remains to beseen.