Africans Await Obama Inauguration with Mixed Expectations

People around the world are looking forward to the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20 as president of the United States. Many hope he will bring change to a world they believe is in crisis. For others, Mr. Obama's ancestral roots in Africa mean even more. Millions of members of the African diaspora stayed up all night, like many people in America, to cheer when Barack Obama was declared the next president of the United States.A professor at Johannesburg's Witwatersrand University, Veronique Tadjo, says for people with African ancestry it was an emotional as well as historic moment."Obama has brought a big hope and has changed a lot of things for a lot of people in terms of how they view themselves. A black man becoming the most powerful man on the planet is something that is very important," she said.But an African-American researcher who has lived on the continent for 13 years, Francis Kornegay of Johannesburg's Institute for Policy Studies, says African commentators are warning against expecting too much from the Obama presidency. MORE..http://voanews.com/english/2009-01-08-voa19.cfm