In the end, the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the US's 44th president did not so much signal the advent of a postracial America as - it is to be hoped - the start of a postsimplistic politics. These are essentially the words of commentator Stanley Crouch, though they appear in slightly truncated form here. His words will resonate for a long time to come.
The simple truth is that the half-black, half-white Obama did not so much transcend his chosen racial identity, his blackness, when he won the presidential election, as he did an outdated ideology that says you are either black or white - never both - and that politics is either Right or Left - never grey.
The genius and, dare we say it, courage of Obama was to see early on that an election campaign premised on experience would not succeed when the personal experience of the average American with politics was one of disillusion and disappointment. Obama understood that what Americans needed was change. They needed change in the way they pursued their politics and change in the tone of that pursuit.
That is something that his main Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, the failed Republican candidate for president, never entirely understood.
The courage of Obama stemmed from his belief that a message of change would trump the one of experience that his rivals chose to run on. What's more, he stuck with that message. He knew that nothing embodied his message of change better than his biography and his race. No president before him had looked like him. There had been Republican and Democratic contenders who did, such as Alan Keyes and Jesse Jackson. But he was the first black presidential candidate with a realistic shot at the White House to mount a bid.
He did this in two ways. First, he used his biography to show that his was the story of almost every American - that is, a story of migration and mixing. Second, he offered himself as the embodiment of a chance for the US to confront its racial demons. But he did not end there, and that, again, was his genius and the failure of Clinton, and of McCain after her.
Obama premised his campaign on the building of coalitions that transcended class, race, region and faiths. The failure to do the same accounted for Clinton's and McCain's scalps. They assumed that Americans - what Clinton called during her primary fight with Obama "hardworking Americans, white Americans" and what McCain, for his part, called "real Americans" - were too racist, too steeped in their past to vote for a black man.
Clinton was the one to use that assumption first, and you could say she had no way of knowing beforehand that it would not work.
What excuse did McCain have? He had seen Clinton use the assumption and still come short. The answer, of course, is that McCain could not decide what he was: was he the president that Americans had been waiting for, as one of his campaign jingles put it? Was he the maverick who had bucked his party on so many occasions before? Was he the experienced hand who had served his country for more than half a century? Was he the patriot who would put country first?
Obama had the McCain people so ding-donged they did not know how to counter the Obama phenomenon.
Obama knew it would be simplistic to premise a campaign on the baser instincts of Americans. He knew it would be futile to think that appealing to the worst in people would work when what Americans needed was change.
Americans are not stupid, after all. They had lived through eight years of Republican ineptitude and the callous indifference of George W Bush.
However, it is not only the Republicans who must come to terms with Obama's ushering in of a new and postsimplistic politics. The whole world must now relate to the world brought about by Obama.
Gone will be the "you're either with us or against us" mentality displayed by Bush. Gone, too, will be the bullying that has characterised American foreign policy of late.
Expect Obama to rebuild genuine alliances around the world. There isn't a single state anywhere that thinks the barbarism of the Taliban and the rank intolerance of Al-Qaeda are good ideas. This salient fact was ignored and undermined by Bush's cowboy-style, anti-alliance politics.
Expect Obama to introduce a style of foreign affairs that moves from the realisation that the world does not care for terrorism, and not from a foreign policy that is founded on the alienating small- mindedness of Bush.
It must be hoped that in the world ushered in by Obama there will be a re orientation of America's foreign aid policy, which is obsessed at the moment with condoms and abortion - two things that are, in the greater scheme of things, something of a distraction.
Expect Obama to push for greater democratic consolidation in Africa. Expect him to push for trade agreements that have built-in safeguards for the environment and labour protection for workers. The world is in peril and China and India cannot continue along their current growth paths without the rest of the world paying a steep price for it. Obama is likely to remind these two countries of that.
As for the world's oil producers, they are likely to be bothered, even if slightly for now, by Obama's determination to push for America's energy independence.
For all their moral and political failings, A NC president Jacob Zuma and his allies here at home are fairly pragmatic. This is potentially a good thing for US-SA relations under Obama and President Kgalema Motlanthe. SA may not vote with the US all the time at the UN but then again the opportunities to differ are likely to be diminished by the advent of a more conciliatory, friendly and consensus-seeking American politics.
In any event, Obama's election marks the end of a politics of simplicity and the start of a politics of complexity - a politics so complex that everyone, black and white, will be forced to abandon long-held shibboleths about race and the ways of the world. We are in a new world now: a world of realism.
- Dlamini is a columnist and a doctoral student at Yale University
