Michelle, gettin' dirty in a good cause

Celia Dugger has an article in The New York Times about Michelle Obama in South Africa:

Graça Machel, the wife of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, took the pulpit of the Regina Mundi church in Soweto, South Africa to introduce Michelle Obama, the wife of America’s first black president. “We welcome you as a daughter of African heritage, and we can call you the queen of our world,” said Ms. Machel, an advocate for women and children, noting that Regina Mundi means Queen of the World in Latin.
The prickly ambivalence that South Africans often show toward the United States, which is often perceived here as an overbearing superpower, seems to have been suspended for Mrs. Obama. South Africans have embraced her with stirring emotion since she arrived, and she has been hugging them back, one by one, stop after stop.
Both the choreography of her appearances, and the nationally broadcast speech she gave here, have evoked the commonalities between the freedom struggles of black people in South Africa and the United States, an approach that has resonated with South Africans.
At the Regina Mundi church, which was both a sanctuary and an organizing hub for those fighting apartheid, much like black churches in the United States during the civil rights movement, Mrs. Obama told the story of young people in both countries “who marched until their feet were raw, who endured beatings and bullets and decades behind bars, who risked and sacrificed everything they had for the freedom they deserved. It is because of them,” she said, “that I stand here before you as first lady of the United States of America.”
Donald Gips, the American ambassador, who has cultivated friendships with a wide range of South Africans, said he believed that Mrs. Obama’s visit would contribute to a further warming of relations between the United States and Africa’s leading democracy. “When I talk to people in government, business and civil society, there’s an incredible love for President Obama and the first lady,” he said. “This trip has solidified that.”
The distrust between South Africa and the United States dates to the Cold War, when the African National Congress, South Africa’s liberation movement, found refuge and support in the Soviet Union while President Ronald Reagan condemned “the Soviet armed guerrillas of the African National Congress,” who, he said, “have embarked upon new acts of terrorism.”
But, even after the end of apartheid, there were years of tension over South Africa’s approach to AIDS under former President Thabo Mbeki, who resisted the widespread distribution of life-saving drugs and questioned HIV as the cause of the disease. American administrations were also critical of what they saw as Mr. Mbeki’s coddling of Robert Mugabe, the autocrat in neighboring Zimbabwe.
But South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma, has changed the country’s direction on AIDS, pressing a major expansion of treatment for those with the disease. He is also taking a tougher line with Mr. Mugabe, 87, pushing for the strengthening of institutions that would make fair elections possible. Having the first African-American couple in the White House has not hurt relations between South Africa and the United States, either.
On her visit, Mrs. Obama has paid tribute in word and deed to South Africa’s most heroic vision of itself, as the country that made a peaceful transition from white minority rule to black majority rule seventeen years ago.
Mr. Gips and his wife, Elizabeth, hosted a hundred guests— “the crème de la crème of South Africa,” as one guest described them— to meet Mrs. Obama at the ambassador’s residence in Pretoria. Mrs. Obama spoke to each guest individually, those present said. Several guests said they were touched that Mrs. Obama quoted Albertina Sisulu, a beloved mother of the anti-apartheid movement who died this month at age 92. And they chuckled when she told them her husband was “pouty” that he had been unable to come to South Africa with her.
“People are fascinated by the fact that we have a black woman first lady,” said Jay Naidoo, a cabinet member in Mr. Mandela’s first government who became a businessman and is now a philanthropist. “There’s a fascination that a black couple is in the White House. It’s unbelievable.”
Later, Mrs. Obama visited the apartheid museum and the Nelson Mandela Foundation, where Ms. Machel showed Mrs. Obama, her daughters, Malia and Sasha, and her mother, Marian Robinson, Mr. Mandela’s letters and memorabilia.
Just afterward, Mr. Mandela, 92 and in frail health, granted Mrs. Obama and her children a rare audience. Sello Hatang, a spokesman for the Mandela Foundation, described the visit as a courtesy call that included an exchange of pleasantries. Most of the major papers featured front page photos of a smiling Mrs. Obama, chic in a red J. Crew suit and bare legs, leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with a smiling Mr. Mandela. “He looked strong, he looked good, he looked happy,” she told reporters who have traveled with her from the United States.
In her speech at the Regina Mundi church, Mrs. Obama called on Africa’s youth to take on contemporary injustices that “are no less glaring” than the ills of the past: hunger, disease, and domestic violence. And she celebrated young women who have sacrificed for what they believed: Robyn Kriel, a Zimbabwean journalist who has been beaten and harassed for writing about corruption and human rights abuses there; and Grace Nanyonga, a Ugandan orphan who started cooking fish and selling them at age thirteen to support her six siblings. “Hey Grace,” Mrs. Obama called out. “You go, girl!”

Rico says that 'crème de la crème' better describes the old regime; they'll have to come up with a new phrase for the darker leadership now...