Clinton Will Stress Positive In Africa Wants American Audience To Realize Africa Matters
Today, when President Clinton begins the longest foreign trip of his presidency, a 12-day visit to sub-Saharan Africa, he will be touring a region very different from the one last traveled by an American president when Jimmy Carter came to this country 20 years ago.
Back then Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, was one of the few to have experimented with democratic politics. There was no hint of an end to apartheid in South Africa. And politically, Africa was distinguished mostly by dictatorial rule and economic disaster.
Today, military-ruled Nigeria, where Clinton is pointedly not stopping but where the pope began a visit Saturday, stands out as one of a dwindling number of countries whose leaders were not elected. The anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela is completing his first term as president of South Africa’s new nonracial democracy.
And in place of the ruin that was prevalent throughout Africa as recently as a decade ago, reforms have bolstered a continentwide economic expansion to an estimated 4 percent annual growth this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Thus, for the first time, Africa’s growth rate has been lifted above its rate of population increase.
Clinton’s trip will take him to six countries - from Ghana and Uganda to Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal. In his planned series of upbeat speeches and public appearances, he will be emphasizing the positive changes that have recently swept Africa.
One clear aim will be to persuade an American audience with few notions of the continent that Africa not only exists but matters. But to his hosts, as well as to the public back home, Clinton will also be emphasizing a point just as important as the positive changes: Where Africa is concerned, the United States has changed dramatically as well.
Through a recent series of African visits by other senior administration figures - Vice President Al Gore, two secretaries of state and Hillary Rodham Clinton - the president’s themes for this trip have been gestating, going through public auditions all the while.
Rhetorically the expected watchwords - mutual respect, shared economic interests and deep veins of common history - all mark a substantial, even dramatic, break with a past in which Africa was rarely treated seriously by the world’s most powerful nation.
Indeed, Africans have often complained that when their continent was dealt with at all, it was as a sideshow in America’s Cold War competition, or as a humanitarian response to disaster.
“Clinton’s visit is dealing mostly in symbols, but symbolism is sometimes very important,” said Donald Henry, who was the U.S. representative to the United Nations during the Carter administration. “The focus that President Clinton brings to this trip will be critical in terms of bringing the problems and progress of Africa into a new focus for the American people.” xxxx DELEGATION GOING WITH CLINTON Some of the prominent black Americans traveling with President Clinton on his six-nation trip to Africa: Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater Labor Secretary Alexis Herman The Rev. Jesse Jackson Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer Robert Johnson, president of Black Entertainment Television NAACP President Kweisi Mfume Bishop Fred Calhoun James of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Lottie Shackelford, executive vice president of Global USA