Barack Obama quotes Mandela in most-liked tweet ever: The story behind the South African leader's words

Two Nobel Prize-winning icons of black history, Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, combined in spirit to create the most-liked tweet in history, after an ugly display of white nationalism in Charlottesville reached a tragic denouement on Saturday.

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite," the former US President wrote in three separate tweets.

The first of these has received over four million likes, a record that looks increasingly unassailable with each passing hour.

"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..." pic.twitter.com/InZ58zkoAm- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 13, 2017

But 32-year-old Heather Heyer was not one of the millions who found balm in the lines above, taken from the late Nelson Mandela's autobiography, The Long Walk To Freedom.

For it was she who died when an alleged Nazi sympathiser used a car to mow down opponents of an impending white nationalist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday.

Video of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4- Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017

(Video: Twitter/Brennan Gilmore)

The gathering, called Unite The Right, was set to oppose the planned removal of the statue of an American historical figure: Robert F Lee.

Lee was the leader of an army that defended the notion of white supremacy, and a slave-owner himself.

Small wonder, then, that Barack Obama borrowed the prose of that indefatigable South African anti-apartheid crusader, to make the point that prejudice grows only if you feed it.

The lines are among the very last of Nelson Mandela's book. They're part of a stirring literary coda in which he recalls - with manifest emotion - the day on which he was sworn in as South Africa's first black president. His elevation to the highest office in his land came after a period of incarceration that lasted 27 years.

All those years failed to sap his conviction in the goodness innate in mankind, the core message of the lines Obama tweeted. He speaks of taking comfort in the rare, ephemeral "glimmer of humanity" in his captors, during his darkest moments.

"Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished," Mandela writes, just a line later.

If not the flame of inviolate goodness, it was the categorical repudiation of neo-Nazism and white supremacism that many Americans hoped their President, Donald Trump, would personify in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy.

But Trump's remarks, which have been both inconsistent and ambivalent, have drawn bipartisan criticism. His most recent position amounts to equivocation that splits the blame between the extreme left and right.

In adopting such a stance, the The Washington Post said Wednesday in an editorial, Trump has "all but declared" to the world's racists that "he has their backs."

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