” In his memoir, Long Walk To Freedom , Nelson Mandela recounts an incident that occurred early in the anti-apartheid movement on one of his trips to garner support from other African leaders. The incident caused him to experience what he called “a strange sensation” as he was boarding an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. He noted that the pilot was black, and because he had never seen a black pilot before, in the instant he saw this pilot, he writes that he had to suppress the panic that arose within him. “How could a black man fly an airplane?” he asked himself.
But a moment later he had caught himself and recounted: “I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat and chided myself for such thoughts.” Once they were in the air, he lost all of his nervousness and began to study the geography of Ethiopia.”