Mbeki has now been propelled into well-deserved obscurity, but there is clearly a more general problem. The ANC and communist ideologues who control South Africa still think in terms of US imperialism being the principal opponent of any third world liberation movement. Republicans may be viewed as worse than Democrats, but anyone who represents the US government and is, indeed, its commander-in-chief, is by definition an enemy. Zuma has just been in the US trying to ingratiate himself with Rice and Bush but feelings have hardly been helped by the blanket White House refusal to allow any of their number to be photographed with him on account of his sleazy reputation. It is difficult to believe that things will be different with Obama.

As the news came in of the Obama victory, South African radio chat shows were full of questions like "But will he forget his roots? Will he take a correct stand on class issues? Will he support socialist countries like Cuba?" You got the strong feeling that many of those phoning in would have felt a lot more comfortable, on a know-your-enemy basis, with a US president who was a conservative white male.

But this leaves out of account Obama's undeniable impact at the grass roots. The fact that he, a poor boy born to an African immigrant father, could rise in a single generation to become president dramatises America's promise of openness and opportunity as nothing else could. This almost magical achievement will alone guarantee Obama huge crowds anywhere in Africa and will without doubt spur many more Africans to seek a future in America. The real questions Obama poses for Africa are how, if African political leadership is so bad, Africa has been able to export a young man able to lead America - and why is there no one of his calibre at the helm of any African state? Potentially, Obama has far more subversive messages, that race need not be determinant, that - as Asians already know - there is nothing specifically "white" about manic hard work and the Protestant ethic and that the whole victim and thus entitlement culture is something you have to get over. Not many of Africa's elites are willing to listen to that but at grass roots it may be different.

President-elect Obama has often been compared to JFK - who, it should be remembered, nearly lost the Presidency in 1960 in a heavily Democratic year because the issue of his Catholicism cost him around 3 per cent of the vote. Yet Kennedy made the breakthrough. By 1968, when Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy ran for Democratic nominee, nobody even asked if they were Catholics. If Obama could achieve the same with race, his contribution in policy terms might be as slight as JFK's and it would hardly matter, for a giant step towards post-racial normality would have been taken. Nothing could help Africa more.