Africans watching Obama's moment with pride and amazement

JOHANNESBURG - Josephine Seleka knows the date, the local time, and channel where it will be aired, and more than a week in advance arranged for her family and friends to gather around her television together.

Like millions of others throughout Africa, she spent the last year watching in disbelief as Barack Obama kept winning primary elections and then persuaded a majority of Americans to elect him the nation's first black president.

On a recent afternoon, as the 45-year-old tour guide dined at a café outside South Africa's museum documenting the racist apartheid system, Seleka said she wouldn't miss today's inauguration for the world.

She could not recall such a meaningful moment in history since the election of Nelson Mandela 15 years ago as the first black president of South Africa, which ensured the end of the official segregation policy that successive minority white governments used to oppress South Africa's black majority.

"Now, America will become a true rainbow nation, just like ours," Seleka said. "We're very excited to witness this history."

On a tour of southern Africa this month, from the rocky mountains of Cape Town to a bridge connecting Zimbabwe and Zambia, signs of Obama seemed to be everywhere. His wide grin appeared on nearly as many T-shirts and bumper stickers as old icons such as the bearded Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

And nearly everyone wanted to talk about the president-elect.

On a bus in Windhoek, Namibia, one man couldn't contain his enthusiasm and held up a newspaper with headlines about Obama. A taxi driver near Victoria Falls in Zambia introduced himself as Obama, and said he was proud to share the name.

In Johannesburg, Whitney Gabriel, 18, a university student, said Obama's election made her think that she could truly do anything she wanted. "It shows that you can really work your way up, that change can really happen," she said.

Not everyone was as enthusiastic about the inauguration.

Helen Bleazard, who spent 29 years here before leaving the country with thousands of other white South Africans, said she had no interest in watching Obama take the oath of office. Bleazard, 46, who now lives in Ecuador and was back to visit her daughter, said she was disappointed by the changes in her country, and that Americans might feel let down as well.

But other white South Africans said they were eager to witness such a momentous transfer of power in the United States.

Ryan Wasmuth, 22, said he plans to leave his job as a customs agent early to watch the inauguration. "I think it's fantastic," he said. "It says a lot about Americans - that they did this without the pressure that was required here."

In Soweto, an overcrowded black township several miles to the southwest of Johannesburg, Wellington Mashexa sat on a wall beside a memorial to Hector Pieterson, a 13-year-old boy whose fatal shooting by white police officers in 1976 sparked an uprising that made the area the heart of resistance to apartheid.

As he overlooked the spare memorial, Mashexa, 20, who is among the legions of unemployed young black men here, said he thought what had happened in faraway America could have an impact on him.

"The history here is linked in a lot of ways to the civil rights movement in the United States," he said. "What is happening with Obama is inspiring for everyone I know. It means a lot. He now represents blacks everywhere."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.