Reflections on The Obama Inauguration, Africa and Transitions

I've seen and experienced many things in my life, some good, some evil -- many of them recorded here from my time in Africa. And as I watched Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, I had to think about some of those times.

Like the time, in my final year in Kenya, when a man showed up at my office in Nairobi from Uganda. He told me he had come by my office in the press center to announce he was going to take up the armed struggle against President Yoweri Museveni.

I asked him why and he explained he had been in the opposition in Uganda but he and his supporters were fed up and wanted to overthrow the government. I asked him if he had ever considered running for office and fighting for peaceful change of power.

He looked at me as if I had come from another planet and simply dismissed the question. "There is no point in that," he said.

And he went on quickly to reveal his group intended to stage a strike soon against government forces -- in western Uganda, as I recall. Did I want to report on their plans and interview him about it?

I told him I had no patience anymore for his kind of violence, for his view of government transition.

And I asked him to leave.

He was dumbfounded. But I felt somehow a better person for what I had said and done.

And that brings me back to today, Inauguration Day in the United States.

It can be done peacefully and cordially and with grace, even by those who have suffered the indignities and abuses of society.

Yes we can.