I didn't have to be in the room or even in the country -- which I am not right now -- to have anticipated the rousing reception for Michelle Obama when she visited with young women and girls in South Africa's black township of Soweto. Reading the White House pool reports, as even most reporters who are there must do, reminds me that I have been there, done that. While I don't have anything like the stature of America's first lady, I am up close and personal with the profile of the kind of woman those young girls and women in Soweto listen to with intense interest and appreciation.  

What I learned from visiting townships like Soweto or other locations where Mrs. Obama and her daughters danced with the young women as they sang, "We Are Marching in the Light of God," is that being from a mostly poor, impoverished place, where generations of black people have known nothing but oppression and denial, has not in any way diminished their humanity or their capacity to dream, though it may have stood in the way of realizing those dreams.  

When I have gone to places where Mrs. Obama has visited, I have shared, as Michelle Obama did this week, the triumph of my generation in the U.S. over similar kinds of adversity, brought on by white lawmakers and their brutal  enforcers, who did everything in their power to diminish us and to turn our dreams into nightmares.  

When I shared our stories of triumph over a racist system in this country, and compared it to their own, especially the role young women like themselves played in that triumph, they smiled broadly and applauded enthusiastically as they did for Michelle Obama. The fact that apartheid had been defeated didn't immediately mean that there was the wherewithal to achieve their dreams, but I could see for myself that it opened the door to dreaming as never before. 

And I was encouraged that they were living in the realm in which my own mother lived as she encouraged me to dream impossible dreams, knowing that dreams propel ambition. Michelle Obama, too, recalled the struggles of young people in the U.S. and in South Africa. Many, if not most, of them were "born frees" -- those born after the South African anti-apartheid struggle was won in 1994 -- or who, as Nelson Mandela's wife, Graça Machel, said, were toddlers at the time -- and their memories are fading, if not nonexistent.