Barack and I both knew that the months of campaigning ahead would involve extra travel, extra strategizing, and extra worry. It was impossible not to worry about reelection. The cost was huge. （Barack and Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who would eventually become the Republican nominee, would each raise over a billion dollars in the end to keep their campaigns competitive.） And the responsibility was also huge. The election would determine everything from the fate of the new health-care law to whether America would be part of the global effort to combat climate change. Everyone working in the White House lived in the limbo of not knowing whether we’d get a second term. I tried not to even consider the possibility that Barack might lose the election, but it was there—a kernel of fear he and I carried privately, neither of us daring to give it voice.
The summer of 2011 turned out to be especially bruising for Barack. A group of obstinate congressional Republicans refused to authorize the issuing of new government bonds—a relatively routine process known as raising the debt ceiling—unless he made a series of painful cuts to government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which he opposed because they would hurt the people who were struggling the most. Meanwhile, the monthly jobs reports published by the Labor Department were showing consistent but sluggish growth, suggesting that when it came to recovering from the 2008 crisis, the nation still wasn’t where it needed to be. Many people blamed Barack. In the relief following the death of Osama bin Laden, his approval ratings had spiked, hitting a two-year high, but then, just a few months later, following the debt-ceiling brawl and worries about a new recession, they’d plunged to the lowest they’d been.
As this tumult was beginning, I flew to South Africa for a goodwill visit that had been planned months in advance. Sasha and Malia’s school year had just ended, so they were able to join me, along with my mother and Craig’s kids Leslie and Avery, who were now teenagers. I was headed there to give a keynote address at a U.S.-sponsored forum for young African women leaders from around the continent, but we’d also filled my schedule with community events connected to wellness and education, as well as visits with local leaders and U.S. consulate workers. We’d finish with a short visit to Botswana, meeting with its president and stopping at a community HIV clinic, and then enjoy a quick safari before heading home.
It had taken no time at all for us to get swept up in South Africa’s energy. In Johannesburg, we toured the Apartheid Museum and danced and read books with young children at a community center in one of the black townships north of the city. At a soccer stadium in Cape Town, we met community organizers and health workers who were using youth sports programs to help educate children about HIV/AIDS, and were introduced to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the legendary theologian and activist who’d helped dismantle apartheid in South Africa. Tutu was seventy-nine years old, a barrel-chested man with bright eyes and an irrepressible laugh. Hearing that I was at the stadium to promote fitness, he insisted on doing push-ups with me in front of a cheering pack of kids.
Over the course of those few days in South Africa, I felt myself floating. This visit was a long way from my first trip to Kenya in 1991, when I’d ridden around with Barack in matatus and pushed Auma’s broken-down VW along the side of a dusty road. What I felt was one part jet lag, maybe, but two parts something more profound and elating. It was as if we’d stepped into the larger crosscurrents of culture and history, reminded suddenly of our relative smallness in the wider arc of time. Seeing the faces of the seventy-six young women who’d been chosen to attend the leadership forum because they were doing meaningful work in their communities, I fought back tears. They gave me hope. They made me feel old in the best possible way. A full 60 percent of Africa’s population at the time was under the age of twenty-five. Here were women, all of them under thirty and some as young as sixteen, who were building nonprofits, training other women to be entrepreneurs, and risking imprisonment to report on government corruption. And now they were being connected, trained, and encouraged. I hoped this would only amplify their might.
The most surreal moment of all, though, had come early, on just the second day of our trip. My family and I had been at the Nelson Mandela Foundation headquarters in Johannesburg, visiting with Gra?a Machel, a well-known humanitarian and Mandela’s wife, when we received word that Mandela himself would be happy to greet us at his home nearby.
We went immediately, of course. Nelson Mandela was ninety-two at the time. He’d been hospitalized with lung issues earlier in the year. I was told he seldom received guests. Barack had met him six years earlier, as a senator, when Mandela had visited Washington. He’d kept a framed photo of their meeting on the wall of his office ever since. Even my kids—Sasha, ten, and Malia, about to turn thirteen—understood what a big deal this was. Even my eternally unfazed mother looked a little stunned.
There was no one alive who’d had a more meaningful impact on the world than Nelson Mandela had, at least by my measure. He’d been a young man in the 1940s when he first joined the African National Congress and began boldly challenging the all-white South African government and its entrenched racist policies. He’d been forty-four years old when he was put in shackles and sent to prison for his activism, and seventy-one when he was finally released in 1990. Surviving twenty-seven years of deprivation and isolation as a prisoner, having had many of his friends tortured and killed under the apartheid regime, Mandela managed to negotiate—rather than fight—with government leaders, brokering a miraculously peaceful transition to a true democracy in South Africa and ultimately becoming its first president.
Mandela lived on a leafy suburban street in a Mediterranean-style home set behind butter-colored concrete walls. Gra?a Machel ushered us through a courtyard shaded by trees and into the house, where in a wide, sunlit room her husband sat in an armchair. He had sparse, snowy hair and wore a brown batik shirt. Someone had laid a white blanket across his lap. He was surrounded by several generations of relatives, all of whom welcomed us enthusiastically. Something in the brightness of the room, the volubility of the family, and the squinty smile of the patriarch reminded me of going to my grandfather Southside’s house when I was a kid. I’d been nervous to come, but now I relaxed.
The truth is I’m not sure that the patriarch himself completely grasped who we were or why we’d stopped in. He was an old man at this point, his attention seeming to drift, his hearing a little weak. “This is Michelle Obama!” Gra?a Machel said, leaning close to his ear. “The wife of the U.S. president!”
“Oh, lovely,” murmured Nelson Mandela. “Lovely.”
He looked at me with genuine interest, though in truth I could have been anyone. It seemed clear that he bestowed this same degree of warmth upon every person who crossed his path. My interaction with Mandela was both quiet and profound—maybe more profound, even, for its quietness. His life’s words had mostly been spoken now, his speeches and letters, his books and protest chants, already etched not just into his story but into humanity’s as a whole. I could feel all of it in the brief moment I had with him—the dignity and spirit that had coaxed equality from a place where none had existed.