Earlier today, President Obama delivered a fitting speech at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in Soweto, South Africa. Obama drew on the activist’s struggle against apartheid and his fight for social justice, saying that Mandela’s work made his own political career as America’s first black president possible.
“With honesty, we must ask: How well have I applied his lessons in my own life?” the POTUS asked the crowd gathered in Mandela’s memory. “It’s a question I ask myself, as a man and as a President.
“We know that, like South Africa, the United States had to overcome centuries of racial subjugation,” he continued. “As was true here, it took the sacrifice of countless people to see the dawn of a new day. Michelle and I are beneficiaries of that struggle. But in America, and in South Africa, and in countries all around the globe, we cannot allow our progress to cloud the fact that our work is not yet done.”
The memorial ceremony was held at First National Bank Stadium in Soweto, a township of Johannesburg and the former hub of the anti-apartheid movement. The rain-soaked event drew a star-studded crowd including former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter, former President Bush and his wife Laura, Bono, Naomi Campbell, Charlize Theron, and former South African president Frederik Willem De Klerk, who freed Mandela from prison, among others.