When President Obama delivered his Inaugural Address six months ago, there was a line in it that many Africans felt was written specifically for them — a kind of shout out across the Atlantic that the new, young president had not forgotten the fatherland.
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” the new president said, “know that you are on the wrong side of history.”
This, of course, could apply to a large chunk of the world. But in Africa, where Big Men still rule for decades, and corruption leaves the children sick and the schools bare, and government soldiers rape and kill with impunity, those words seemed to have extra resonance. Olara A. Otunnu, a former Ugandan foreign minister, remembered how that single line from the inaugural speech was “cheered throughout Africa and people were texting it to each other over their phones.”
“People were saying, ‘Our son is there, in the White House, God bless us.’ ”
On Friday, when President Obama stepped off Air Force One in Ghana for his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa, it was clear he was stepping onto a continent of stratospheric expectations. He was mobbed at the airport by drummers and dancers and seemingly the entire Ghanaian government, as if his arrival were a long-awaited homecoming.
In a way, it was. And it will be extremely interesting to see how Mr. Obama, who is celebrated for his coolness, his detachment and his hyper-rational outlook, manages all this hype.
After all, he is only human, despite what the ubiquitous, savior-like posters on the back of African buses might lead people to think. And he has a portfolio of problems to solve with more obvious American interests, like two wars, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the economy.
But talk about hitting the reset button, in a place where it could really matter. There is no denying that Mr. Obama, by the sheer dint of his Kenyan heritage, coupled with his progressive politics, his youth and his seemingly intuitive grasp of how people across the world interconnect, has an unprecedented opportunity to rewrite the America-Africa equation.
Still, how to get involved? And when?
P. L. O. Lumumba, a leading anticorruption activist in Kenya, said that the masses were ready to line up behind Mr. Obama and that he should use his incredible bully pulpit to pressure corrupt governments to reform themselves. This wouldn’t have to cost a lot of money. The audience is there. All that needs to be crafted is the message.
“The Obama administration should be tough as tough can be,” said Mr. Lumumba, who is named after one of the leading lights of Africa’s independence era, Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese hero who was assassinated in 1961 with the help of the C.I.A. Mr. Lumumba’s namesake brings up a compelling point. Mr. Obama spoke of the “wrong side of history.” Guess who was often on the wrong side of African history?
Take Congo, where American officials during the cold war backed the kleptomaniac dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko, for decades. Or Somalia, where the United States bungled a huge relief mission in the 1990s, setting the stage for the chaos there today and leading the Clinton administration to inaction over the Rwandan genocide, which cost one million lives while the whole world watched.
Clearly, Mr. Obama has not forgotten Rwanda. In a news conference in Italy before he left for Ghana on Friday, he said: “There are going to be exceptional circumstances in which I think the need for international intervention becomes a moral imperative, the most obvious example being in a situation like Rwanda where genocide has occurred.”
He also hinted at a broader Africa agenda, like helping the continent feed itself — points he punctuated with his own experience in the hardscrabble Kenyan village where his extended family lives.
But, as Ghana shows, all is not grim in Africa. “Part of the reason that we’re traveling to Ghana is because you’ve got there a functioning democracy, a president who’s serious about reducingcorruption, and you’ve seen significant economic growth,” he said at the news conference.
American officials, like Representative Donald Payne, a New Jersey Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on Africa, insist that Africa policy will now be more nuanced. “The whole thing can’t be the U.S.’s war against terror, whatever that was,” Mr. Payne said. Instead, he predicts the Obama administration will “concentrate on things that would prevent terror, like higher education.”
Africans have always had divergent views on America, Mr. Otunnu said. On the one hand, Africans idolized the United States as the land of opportunity and unimaginable wealth, the place they could hope one day to see with their own eyes, or better, to live in. They welcomed initiatives like the billions of dollars President George W. Bush spent fighting AIDS. On the other hand, the United States also evoked the dictators it had supported, and what were seen as harsh, neocolonial policies.
But with Mr. Obama in office, Mr. Otunnu said, “that changed suddenly overnight. The U.S. now has a very different meaning to Africans.”
Some of this, of course, is that Barack Obama is seen as kin. But there’s also the fact that he was an underdog in a fierce campaign and a black man elected in a white country, validation that America was indeed the land of opportunity. More than anything, his triumph served as a sharp contrast to a continent where name, class and ethnicity are still destiny, and, just in case destiny is ever interrupted, where many elections are still blatantly rigged.
The issues that many Africans are urging Mr. Obama to push — like more freedom, more democracy, less dictatorship, less corruption — are issues that previous American administrations have tried to push. In many cases, for example in Kenya or Zimbabwe, the American government must step gingerly, pressing reluctant leaders to implement reforms that the vast majority of people support.
Often, this is a complicated dynamic. Most of the American diplomatic corps are white and thus open to the brand of attack that bashes any criticism from white men as neocolonial meddling.Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator, remains a virtuoso at playing that game.
But with Mr. Obama, this won’t wash. Or at least, not as well.
“He’s not your typical Anglo-Saxon,” Mr. Lumumba said. Until this trip to Ghana, President Obama had stayed away from Africa. Darfur continues to be a mess and Congo a bloodbath, but Mr. Obama has said relatively little about either. His trip to Ghana is only a one-night stop.
But Mr. Otunnu said that Africa can wait. It’s how the traditional African chief works.
“He meets, he consults and then he decides,” Mr. Otunnu said. “The chief doesn’t rush.”
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