Africa mourns Jesse Jackson, a global change agent

From the Great Blue Skies where he now resides, Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson would urge a troubled world — fractured by racism, poverty and political turmoil — to “continue the work, continue the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and continue mobilising for change, change, change for human rights and social justice”. Africa has lost a beloved friend.

South Africa has lost a son of its struggle. The world has lost one of the last towering giants of the civil rights movement. Reverend Jackson, 84, passed away at his Chicago home on Tuesday morning after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Surrounded by his close-knit family, he slipped gently from this world — a global statesman whose life was defined by courage, compassion and an unshakeable belief in the human spirit. Jackson’s death is now a national statistic, one of the 40 131 Americans who died with Parkinson’s disease in recent years. His son was at his side when he died peacefully, saying they shared him with the world’s extended family.

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His impact was felt worldwide. Durban-born Karlen Padayachee, now a US citizen and corporate lawyer in Minneapolis, was among the first to break the news of the death of the gifted orator to South Africans in the early hours of Tuesday morning, hours after Jackson slipped away at 12.45am. On Friday, 5 December 2013, as South Africans slept, he broke the news that Nelson Mandela died.

The “Honourable” Jesse Jackson, as described by his grieving family, was, in truth, a movement unto himself, he was an era. As glowing tributes flooded global communication spaces, Chicago police cordoned off the Rainbow PUSH Coalition tower block, while hundreds of supporters and admirers arrived with floral offerings and handwritten homages. The world’s media—dozens of TV networks—went into overdrive as presenters and commentators retraced a life’s journey that championed our own freedom, spotlighted the plight of Palestinians in the conflict-scarred Middle East and helped free terrified hostages, earning him a presidential award from the White House.

A gregarious man with a mission, a complex personality, hard-nosed politician, he strode from the pulpits of politics to the precipice of the Oval Office, paving the way along Pennsylvania Avenue for Barack Obama. Yet he was never fully credited for the electoral breakthrough that delivered America’s first Black president, even though cameras captured him weeping openly on the night the Democratic Party’s historic victory was announced.

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