0
JOHANNESBURG: Theodore Roosevelt left a bloody trail of conquest across Africa in 1909, returning home with the carcasses of lions, elephants and rhinos he shot in the bush.
Bill Clinton’s trip in 1998 was easier on Africa’s wildlife: he was given a live goat named after him.
In between, few US presidents have been sighted in sub-Saharan Africa — a vast continent whose continued poverty and brutal ethnic warfare challenge Washington’s evolving vision of a global “Pax Americana”.
George W. Bush starts his own African adventure this week, visiting five countries in a whistle-stop tour from July 7-12.
The hunting rifles are likely to be left in Washington, but the challenges of drawing Africa and America closer remain after decades of estrangement and unfulfilled promises.
“Largely Bush’s Africa trip is a publicity campaign to convince a rather unconvinced African public that he really cares about African issues and America is not the aggressive imperial state that many have characterised it recently,” said Professor Kevin Dunn, an expert on US Africa policy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
TEDDY ON SAFARI: Imperial swagger was the order of the day when Roosevelt went to Africa, a trip that has become stuff of presidential legend even though it took place after he left office in 1908.
Accompanied by his son Kermit, Roosevelt embarked on a year-long safari across what was then British East Africa and the Belgian Congo before ending in Sudan.
Famously proud of his reputation as a “man of action”, Roosevelt did not disappoint in Africa. Officially on a mission to collect specimens for the Smithsonian museum in Washington, Roosevelt and his son gunned down more than 500 animals including 17 lions, 11 elephants and 20 rhinos.
Roosevelt hailed the body count as “the most noteworthy collection of big animals that has ever come out of Africa,” and wrote stirring accounts of the trip which gave many Americans a first-hand look at the life of a big game hunter.
“The big beast stood like an uncouth statue, his hide black in the sunlight,” Roosevelt wrote of one rhino which wandered into the sights of his double-barrelled rifle.
THE LONG PAUSE: It took another 70 years for Africa to get its first official visit by a US president, when Jimmy Carter travelled to Nigeria and Liberia.
Carter hailed a new era of closer US ties to Africa but his attention was soon side-tracked by the biggest foreign policy debacle of his presidency — the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis — and Africa receded once again into the background.
President George Bush, the current incumbent’s father, paid a brief visit to Africa in 1993, using the final days of his presidency to thank US troops engaged in humanitarian work in war-ravaged Somalia, an almost archetypal African tragedy of famine, fear and bloodshed.
Dressed in camouflage fatigues, Bush paid quick visits to an orphanage in Baidoa, dubbed Somalia’s “City of Death” for its alarming lawlessness, before being whisked offshore to stay overnight in relative safety aboard a US warship.
The mission ended in disaster months later, after 18 US soldiers were killed when militiamen downed a Black Hawk helicopter, sparking an intense and bloody fire fight.
THEN CAME CLINTON: Africa saw its first lengthy visit by a US leader in 1998, when Clinton spent 12 days touring six African countries in what was one of the longest overseas trips of his presidency.
Clinton, at last, was a leader who appeared to truly enjoy Africa and its people and Africans responded in kind, giving the US president wildly enthusiastic receptions from his first stop in Ghana to his last in Senegal.
Clinton made the right symbolic stops, meeting survivors of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, spending time with South Africa’s Nelson Mandela in his former apartheid prison cell, and at the “Door of No Return” on Senegal’s Goree Island, where slaves left Africa for lives of servitude in the United States — if they survived.
On the way he received a new Nigerian name — Sandaugi Okoro Omowale, which means, in part, “child who has returned home” — and the goat, which was presented to him by a Senegalese village.
On Hillary Clinton’s orders, the goat stayed behind in Africa. But the president went home with fond memories of the continent, and in 2000 paid a second, briefer official visit to Nigeria and Tanzania.
George W. Bush looks unlikely to get the same friendly reception when he makes his inaugural African trip.—Reuters
