Obama's victory marks end of racism: S.African Nobel laureate

Kolkata, Nov.11 (ANI):South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer has hailed US President-elect Barack Obama's victory as an end of racism.

Gordimer, 84, is in India to deliver the second Nobel laureate lecture, an initiative of the Ministry of External Affairs to provide an opportunity for Indian academics and opinion makers to interact with Nobel laureates and also enable the Nobel laureates to be exposed to the emergence of a new India.

"He's celebrated now as a black man, signifying, that...at least in a very powerful country like America, the domination over rest of us has been overcome. But it's not pointed out that indeed, he is half white and half black. To me, that symbolically represents a kind of advance in recognizing the human tribe as one. In other words, it's bringing together in his own DNA, his blood, what we all wish to see, the end of racism," Gordimer said, while delivering the lecture here on Monday.

Expressing disappointment over globalisation, Gordimer said, it is nothing but a series of pacts which does little to bridge the gap between the rich and poor.

"The concept of globalisation, as we see it now, seems to be hardly more than a series of trade pacts. It certainly doesn't comes to the heart of the problem of the huge gap everywhere in the world, certainly in your country and in mine between the rich and the poor," she said.

Gordimer, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1991, has been quite vocal in her criticism of globalisation. According to her it is nothing but a means by the big nations to further trade with other countries and is a pursuit of materialism.

Most of her literary works deal with psychological and moral tensions of her divided country.

She was the founder member of Congress of South African Writers and was an active participant in anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. (ANI)