LONDON — Through tears and whoops of joy, in celebrations that spilled onto streets on distant continents, people around the globe called Barack Obama’s election a victory for the world and a renewal of America’s ability to inspire.
By electing a youthful African-American, the United States has chosen a man whose face seems familiar and comforting in most of the world.
In Paris, New Delhi and the beaches of Brazil, revelers said Obama’s election made them feel more connected to America, and that America, after years of strained relations, seemed suddenly more connected to the world.
“As a black British woman, I can’t believe that America has voted in a black president,” said Jackie Humphries, 49, a librarian who partied with 1,500 people at the U.S. Embassy in London on Tuesday night.
“It makes me feel like there is a future that includes all of us,” she said, wrapping her arm around a life-size cardboard likeness of the new U.S. president-elect.
“Americans overcame the racial divide and elected Obama because they wanted the real thing: a candidate who spoke from the bottom of his heart,” said Terumi Hino, a photographer and painter in Tokyo. “I think this means the United States can go back to being admired as the country of dreams.”
Kenya, where Obama’s father was raised as a goat-herder, declared today a national holiday, and people danced in the streets wrapped in the American flag in Obama’s ancestral village of Kogelo.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela, the civil rights icon who helped bring down his country’s apartheid regime, released a letter to Obama that said, “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.”
Desmond Tutu, another iconic anti-apartheid leader and the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, said Obama’s victory tells “people of color that for them, the sky is the limit.”
“We have a new spring in our walk and our shoulders are straighter,” Tutu said, echoing a commonly held sentiment across the continent.
The world sees Obama as more than a racial standard-bearer, of course, and many praised Obama for his policies on everything from Iraq to health care, which are known to the world in remarkable detail.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
