Bound Together in Invisible Ways: Eulogising a Giant of History

Abstract

This article examines Barack Obama's eulogy on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's memorial on 10 December, 2013. Using a critical discourse analysis framework, the article demonstrates that Obama's eulogy is an act of memorialising Mandela that captures the life story of this statesman and also generates conversations about identity, participation and agency in both local and the global spaces. The eulogy privileges three qualities: making emotional connections with the audience through the use of adjectives, enhancing the ethos of Mandela by strengthening the pathos of the occasion and finally, interpolating Obama's own identity-formation by calling for action that perpetuates Mandela's magnanimous contributions. Although the word Ubuntu is only used twice in the eulogy, this article contends that it is this experience of being bound together in ways invisible to the eye that Obama focuses upon in order to make connections between apartheid and Jim Crow, the South African nationalist struggle and the Black American civil rights movement. In 1 945 words, Obama captures the complex selves of Mandela as politician, prisoner, husband, father, divorcee and sage statesman.