Nelson
Mandela (Madiba), one of the great democratic leaders in the world had said
many things about his stay in Ethiopia. His started the appreciation with the
black Ethiopian pilot:
“We put down briefly in Khartoum, where we
changed to an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. Here I experienced a rather
strange sensation. As I was boarding the plane, I saw
that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the
instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly an airplane?
But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set,
thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat
back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts. Once we were in the air,
I lost my nervousness and studied the geography of Ethiopia, thinking how
guerrilla forces hid in these very forests to fight the Italian imperialists.”
