First Lady Has Visit With Tutu Homeless Women Present Clinton With Cast-Iron Pot

Hillary Rodham Clinton toured a dusty, windblown piece of land here Wednesday where homeless women have been building their own low-cost houses between the railroad tracks and a stretch of industrial development.

Many of the women at the Victoria Mxenge housing project, named for the civil rights lawyer slain in 1985, had never heard of Hillary Clinton, and the leader of the group had to look at her notes to get the first lady’s name right.

But at the end of the visit the women presented Clinton with a three-legged cast-iron pot, as central to African cooking as the wok is to Chinese cuisine.

“You must cook something for your husband,” the presenter said. “And we want to know that you have cooked something.”

Clinton smiled.

The tour of the construction site, where women were at work hauling bricks, pushing wheelbarrows and mixing cement, was Clinton’s first stop upon arriving in Cape Town as part of her two-week tour of Africa.

Afterward, she ate lunch at a Cape Town vineyard and met with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is investigating apartheid-era political crimes. In the late afternoon, Clinton and Tutu planted a tree commemorating those who died in the struggle to end more than 40 years of white minority rule.

Clinton is expected to meet today with President Nelson Mandela and tour Robben Island, where Mandela spent many of his 27 years in prison. Friday, she is expected to leave South Africa for Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Uganda and Eritrea before returning home.

With dozens of security officers and a busload of reporters and photographers in tow, Clinton, who spent Tuesday in Johannesburg, has drawn crowds wherever she goes. But whisked from car to dais and back again, there is little chance to see anything that is not a heavily scripted ceremony.

In Johannesburg, Clinton’s schedule was meant to highlight her interests in women’s and children’s issues. She spent most of her day in Soweto, the city’s black area, visiting a U.S.-sponsored educational project, a memorial to the first student killed in the 1976 uprising and a home for abandoned children.

She ended her day with a round-table discussion on crime and domestic violence at the Johannesburg Child Protection Unit’s headquarters.