Into Africa

By Johanna McGeary

Is it the media or the message? This is supposed to be the trip that changes Americans' view of Africa and rewrites the terms of U.S. policy. Yet the first, riveting picture bounced back across the Atlantic was of a frightened, scarlet-faced President Bill Clinton shouting "Back!" as he was nearly trampled by screaming, shoving crowds in Ghana's capital of Accra. Complained the Rev. Jesse Jackson, shepherding Clinton across the African continent: "A half-million people were reduced to 40. So America saw us through a keyhole rather than a door." Unruly mobs in sweltering heat, photo ops with men who came to power at gunpoint, people dancing in brilliantly colored garb: those were often the familiar scenes seized on by the press.

Yet in an era of imagery, the simple fact that Clinton is there, for so long--12 days, six countries--and with such a huge entourage of businessmen, politicians and press, is a telling new message. Sunning himself in the glowing welcomes he encountered everywhere, Clinton showed off his best self: his comfort in clapping to the beat of tribal music, the sparkle in his eyes as he reached out to people in the crowds. Dressed in a dark suit among a gathering of Africa's new leaders at Entebbe in Uganda, he conveyed the dignified persona of the world's unchallenged leader--or top CEO. Stripped to shirtsleeves, he exhibited his powerful empathy as he talked with Venuste Karasira, who lost his hand during a massacre of nearly 4,000 Rwandans.

If the President's talk of "partnership" at every stop has been noticeably short on specifics, it was still a refreshing shift from the usual patronizing handouts. Africans were still hearing a new emphasis. But it could have been something more. The message so far has been a series of set pieces illustrating bite-size issues rather than setting out a fully coherent policy. The one theme that came through loud and clear was apology for the past.

Clinton apologized for slavery: "We were wrong in that." He apologized for the support Washington gave dictators and kleptocrats in the name of cold war anticommunism. He apologized for the failure of the "international community" to act quickly enough in the Rwandan genocide: "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed in this unimaginable terror."

One wonders what Africans made of it all. The gods must indeed have seemed crazy in Wanyange, a cluster of mud huts on the shores of Lake Victoria, where a state-of-the-art metal detector had been plunked down in the middle of the red dirt road leading into the hamlet. The Secret Service deemed Rwanda's memorial to genocide victims, on a hillock at the airport, too dangerous a venue for Clinton's speech on the slaughter. A White House advance woman felt compelled to remind network correspondents that it would be "inappropriate" to deliver their stand-ups in cell No. 5 on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent nearly 18 years.

Yet if Africans and Americans come away from this presidential adventure with even a little of the "mutual regard and mutual respect" Clinton called for, he will have initiated an important turning point indeed.

--Reported by Karen Tumulty, with the President

With reporting by Karen Tumulty, with the President