Subject: The 2013 Obama Africa Visit: Henry Kissinger or Princess Elizabeth?
"To All The Enslaved
I write it all over the heavens
That encompass our earthly sphere:
It's not the tyrant we should abuse,
But the serf who works for the tyrant."
- Christian Morgenstern
INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL CONTEXT
If you listen attentively and careful to the rising, nauseating din of official intellectual clap-trap chatter of black Africa's ruling elites, quite busy in their frantic preparations for US president Barack Obama's 2013 Africa visit, you will be forgiven for thinking that the black African elites are engaged in a frenzied dress-rehearsal for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Africa's ruling elites are immersed in self-induced orgasmic excitement at the prospect, and in anticipation, of the Obama Africa visit, 2013. They are busy practicing the best photo-opportunity angles to capture the historic moment of America's first black president visiting sub-Sahara Africa for an extended period; the best smiles to beam; the best giggles to emote; the silken elocution of their speeches; the best attire to wear; their best half-truths to reheat; the worst inconvenient truth to hide.
There are already brutal intra-African elite skirmishes taking place about who has cracked the invitation to the official reception for Obama; who has been invited by the American Embassies, in the capitals of the three African states to be visited, to a select group to cozy up with Obama and his beautiful wife, Michelle; who has been given a nod to be present when Obama addresses this or that national parliament, or this or that business chamber, or this or that great African center of learning.
In South Africa, the unseemly squabble amongst the post-apartheid ruling white and black elites about Obama's forthcoming visit has taken a truly bizarre form of a clownish catfight between the ruling ANC and the ruling Democratic Alliance (DA - Western Cape Province) about who of the two has a greater claim to bragging rights over Obama's charm offensive. The two dominant SA political parties have rendered themselves oblivious, in their rat race to please and humor Obama, in front of the global media, to the great words of India's Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi's biographer, that "unfortunately, we deify and worship our heroes and so destroy them" (Foreword: Indira Gandhi - A Biography, 1995).
It is so unnecessary, sad and undignified.
In all the post-colonial years, black Africa's ruling elites have never been this animated and aroused politically at the prospect of a US presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa.
Quite clearly, as the US Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, once correctly remarked, Barack Obama is truly "a unique political phenomenon."
But is this black African ruling elites' kerfuffle around the forthcoming Obama visit all sensible? Is it more a sign of racial solidarity, if not racial insularity and crass provincialism, between the African and African American ruling elites? A coming out of a new 21st century "Black Power" on the global stage - governing, jonty, self-assured, showy and slightly arrogant?
Does Obama really deserve this embarrassing African flummery?
And what about the hundreds of millions of ordinary, poor Africans, who are perpetually excluded from cracking an invitation to premier state gala dinners or elite receptions for visiting heads of state, such as will be held for president Obama? How do they feel about Obama's impending visit to sub-Saharan Africa? Are they too blinded by a sense of racial solidarity in their assessment of the US presidency of Barack Obama? Or can they, once again, do better than their myopic, self-serving, greedy and acquisitive black African ruling elites?
What are ordinary Africans' assessment of president Barack Obama's four years in office, for themselves and their blighted lives? Does merely having a black America president in the US White House still mean a great deal to them at a normative, emotional level? Or do they now clamor for real meat and fat on the dry presidential bones?
In his UK Guardian article on Cornel West, the formidable African American intellectual, entitled "They say I'm un-American", Hugh Muir quotes West as saying about president Obama that:
"I would rather have a white president fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drone" (The Guardian, Monday, 13 May 2013).
What would black Africa's dirt poor masses understand by this most profound, most color-blind and deeply philosophical statement of Cornel West, the author of the classic, Race Matters?
[Interestingly, in this context, Cornel West once told Richard Wolffe and Daren Briscoe of Newsweek in July 2007, before presidential candidate Barack Obama became president, that his feeling about the African American presidential candidate is "I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for.
That is the fundamental question. I don't care what color you are. You see, you can't take black people for granted just 'cause you're black" (Newsweek, July 16, 2007, Cover story: "Black&White - How Barack Obama is shaking up old assumptions").
To some in Africa, US President Barack Obama represents merely the pleasant and acceptable face of the American neo-imperialist interference in African affairs. His winning and sunshine smile, his authentic African name, surname and his Moslem middle name, coupled with his awesome African American physical handsomeness, are viewed by some Africans, now that he is US president, as a deceitful facade for an unrelenting and rapacious US foreign policy in Africa. The form has changed; the substance remains the same. The wolf is wearing a lamb's skin. Or to use a Biblical metaphor, it's an old white American wine in a new black bottle.
In this sense alone, Barack Obama, it is alleged, represents a far greater danger to Africa's post-colonial construct. His black skin makes him one of us, at least outwardly and viscerally. His African ancestry, his blackness, his soulfulness - all these things in Obama make Africans to lower their guards when dealing with his US administration; to be more trusting, understanding, and forgiving to his stated intentions towards Africa, even as many of these American policies remain fundamentally at odds with the African Renaissance agenda.
At the end of the day, some Africans fear, Obama is proudly a dutiful servant, if not a "serf", of "the tyrant" (Christian Morgenstern), that which former US president Dwight Eisenhower once referred to, in his 1961 Farewell Speech, as America's sprawling and formidable military-industrial complex. Or what today is universally understood to be America's "military-industrial-Wall Street complex."
This, they believe, is the naked truth about Obama.
In his insightful article of 07 November 2012 entitled "Africans pleased with Obama victory, but less enthusiastic than in 2008", which appeared in Canada's Globe and Mail, Geoffrey York wrote, amongst his other observations, that "a man in Malawi voiced his complaint with this tweet: 'Obama is as white as any US prez that has been." It is clear that the Malawian tweep was not referring to Obama's skin color here, but to Obama's unwavering commitment to eternal and immutable American foreign policy interests viz-a-viz Africa. In fact, the Malawian's tweet should have added that "Obama is as American as any US prez that has been."
For black Africa, how much does Obama really differ from his predecessor white US presidents?
Already in my The Thinker magazine article of 2012 entitled "The Obama Africa Dream", I pointed out that "it is true that Obama was elected not to be the President of Africa, but the USA. But so were his white predecessors in the White House I mentioned above. Yet despite the fact that they had no blood relation to Africa, the initiatives they took for Africa or for African Americans, massively advanced the historical interests of Africa and black folks around the world" (The Thinker, Volume 37, page 53, 2012).
Geoffrey York (Ibid) also pointed out that "After his election victory in 2008, Mr. Obama traveled to only a single country in sub-Saharan Africa, making a brief 24-hour visit to the West African nation of Ghana. His predecessors, George Bush and Bill Clinton, traveled more widely in Africa..."
Only 24 hour visit to sub-Saharan Africa by America's first black president in all his first four-year term?
Is the Obama Africa visit in 2013, therefore, a cause for celebration on the part of black Africans? Or should Obama's visit drive black Africans to greater vigilance during his forthcoming Africa visit? Will we be able to see beyond Obama's skin color, his African ancestry, his Afro hair, and his high-falutin speeches, to be able to dispassionately and objectively assess his true American foreign policy agenda regarding Africa?
Is the Obama Africa visit of 2013 an attempt at Africanisation of the American presidency? Or is it an attempt at Americanisation of African leadership and politics in the era of "Africa Rising" and during the decline of American imperial power around the world?
Following the election of Pope John Paul, the first citizen from the Soviet Eastern European Poland to head the Vatican, the universal, tongue-in-cheek question asked at the time was:
Has the Soviet Kremlin infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church, or has the Vatican infiltrated Moscow's Kremlin?
Obama's 2013 Africa visit raises a similar tongue-in-cheek question:
Is Obama's US presidency viewed by Americans as representing US's acceptable penetration and conquest of Africa's politics and economics in the post-Cold War and post-color era? Or is the Obama presidency viewed by black Africa's ruling elites as their first historic triumph over US presidential politics and their defeat over overt world-wide racism?
On 25 October 1996, the Philadelphia Inquirer carried a remarkable article by Trudy Rubin entitled "Foreign-policy future shock". Commenting on the place of foreign policy during the second US presidential debate at the San Diego Town Hall in that year, the article stated that foreign policy was "a sleeper" in the presidential election of that year.
Rubin went on to write, prophetically, that:
"Americans have been lulled - by luck, circumstances and intellectually lazy politicians - into assuming that the United States will remain the only superpower, indefinitely. And without cost. Such illusions are about to be punctured."
For far too long US presidential Africa policy has been the ultimate sleepers' "sleeper" of US foreign policy; the Cinderella of the multi-billion dollar US foreign policy behemoth. Against this background, it is no wonder that Barack Obama, the first black US president, is undertaking his first substantial official visit to sub-Sahara Africa only after completing his first full four-year presidential term, and a cool half a year into his second term. A greater show of US presidential disinterest to undertake a visit to our sub-Sahara region is hard to conjure.
Whatever that can be called, it certainly does not signify a sense of urgency, aplomb or alacrity, nor does it denote high priority Obama and his administration accord to African affairs. It speaks volumes about the Obama presidency's benign neglect of Africa. To rub salt into injury, the first black American president chose not to honor the recent continental commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), refusing to put in even if just a cameo appearance in Addis Ababa for the illustrious African occasion.
Part of this insouciant US presidential attitude to African affairs, including on the part of the first African American US president in US history, is explained by the morbid feature which Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer identified way back in October 1996 as "intellectually lazy politicians" of America, who are under the illusion "that the United States will remain the only superpower, indefinitely."
In the case of Africa, this American illusion on the part of "intellectually lazy politicians" assumes even frightening dimensions, believing as it does, falsely, that Africa will never ever challenge the US for supremacy as "the only superpower", and that "Africa Rising" is an ephemeral, optical illusion. The conventional wisdom among US voters and policy honks is that Africa will forever remain the world's poorest continent, the permanent laggard of the earth, whose face will remain disfigured, without end, by wars, diseases, civil strife, authoritarian rule, anemic economic growth and murderous child soldiers.
This dark, Kafka-sque American view of Africa contrasts with the strategic clarity and geo-political brilliance displayed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, both leading US Republican politicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, towards Communist China, which was then in a position very similar to that of Africa today - lagging behind, poor, despised, ridiculed, written off and highly misunderstood.
Writing as a Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon penned an astoundingly intelligent article for Foreign Policy magazine in October 19967 in which he stated, amongst other things, the following about China:
"...we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able to live in angry isolation."
In 1971, living up to his nous on China, president Nixon dispatched his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, on the first, secret and secretive mission to China. That maiden Kissinger visit to China laid the foundation for US-China rapprochement at the height of the Cold War, and was partly responsible for the phenomenal rise and rise of China of today, which China now is also challenging the US for global hegemony, in line with Trudy Rubin's prophetic insight of 25 October 1996.
Can Obama think about Africa of today in similar all-encompassing, transformational, Nixonian geo-strategic and geo-political terms? Do Obama and his US administration appreciate, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, that "there is no place on this small planet for a billion of (Africa's) potentially able to live" in perpetual marginalisation and calculated, deliberate exclusion from the meaningful centers of global decision-making, such as full membership of the UN Security Council confers? In the same way Nixon and Kissinger helped to pull Communist China from the periphery of global developments, can the 2013 Obama Africa visit help propel Africa from the margins of world affairs right onto the center stage?
(It is true that it took much more than just one visit of Henry Kissinger to China in 1971 to ‘reset' the US-China relationship. The vast extent of Kissinger's engagement with Chinese leadership between 1971 and 1973 is revealed in the book The Kissinger Transcripts - The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow, edited by William Burr, 1999. In the book's Introduction, page 17, it is stated that "neither Kissinger nor Nixon had any illusions about the difficulty of repairing, much less improving, relations with decades-old political and ideological adversaries." Neither should president Obama be under illusions about the difficulties of righting the Africa-US relationship, after centuries of abuse, followed by harmful neglect, on the part of successive white US administrations since 1776. It will definitely take more than one 2013 Obama Africa visit, and more than Obama's skin color and African ancestry, to put this singularly important relationship on the right path. But Obama's visit has the potential to be a watershed moment on a long journey of a thousand miles in Africa-US relationship).
Almost exactly twenty five years before the first historic visit of Henry Kissinger to China, another momentous, significant and highly publicized visit was undertaken by the world's foremost stateswoman of the time, Princess Elizabeth, who was heir-apparent to the British Monarchy at the time. But unlike the Kissinger visit that profoundly transformed the matrix of the US-China bilateral relationship, for the better, this one visit was very much status quo-affirming. In 1947, the young, attractive British princess visited South Africa, at the height of Britain's colonial empire over much of Africa, and in the wake of Britain's glorious triumph over Fascism during the Second World War. During her visit, Princess Elizabeth, who has just celebrated 60 years as Queen Elizabeth II, did not utter a single word of reprimand, condemnation or challenge to the vile and despicable human condition in which SA blacks lived.
Unlike Her Majesty's UK Prime Minister Harold McMillan's later "Winds of Change" visit to sub-Sahara in the early 1960s, the Princess' visit in 1947 was decidedly anti-Kissingerian in tone, pro-status quo in intent, and enormously disappointing in outcome. The visit represented an enormous loss of diplomatic opportunity. Princess Elizabeth's 1947 visit to Africa did not assist to pull colonised Africa from the margins of world civilizational march at the time. Her visit was more about pomp and ceremony, and affirming imperial rule over "the Realms", and less about the substance defining a new progressive, postwar and postcolonial paradigm for Africa-UK relations.
Will the 2013 Obama Africa visit carry the strategic and geo-political Kissingerian overtones? Will it be viewed by historians as having been of transformative significance for Africa fifty years hence? Or will the2013 Obama Africa visit, like the Elizabethan visit to Africa in 1947, be merely another occasion for young black African school kids to be frog-marched from their classrooms to stand guard and smile at a foreign dignitary along the routes of his motorcade?
That two billions African eyes will watch every gesture and every move of Obama during his historic sub-Sahara Africa visit in 2013; and that two billion African ears will listen attentively to his every word and will be glued to his every emphasis in tone - there can be little doubt.
Will the substance and outcome of his visit justify all the hype about and cost of Obama's 2013 presidential "Rumble in the Jungle"?
Will it live up to its top billing?
THE MEANING OF THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY FOR AFRICA - THE AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE
As he prepares for his visit to the three African countries, the US president will do himself a big favor by girding himself for a barrage of criticism against aspects of his Africa policy from some of his hard-to-please African critics. Given his African heritage, he will probably find such criticism more hurtful and stinging than the usual criticism he is daily subjected to from America's fringe Tea Party and neo-conservative radicals. Obama, in the mist of such unrelenting criticism of his foreign policies by his African critics, should maintain his legendary cool and sangfroid. He must also remember the powerful words of Winston Churchill that "courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
President Obama will need a lot of this type of Churchillian courage during his June-July 2013 official visit to Africa.
We listened attentively to president Obama when he delivered his speech in Cairo in July 2009. We again listened to him very attentively when he delivered his speech in Accra, Ghana in 2010. However, we are aware that not by speeches alone can the African masses live, even if these are thrilling and inspirational speeches by one of the greatest orators to ever occupy the most powerful office in the world, namely the US presidency.
In my Obama Africa Dream article (Ibid) I pointed out that Obama has the tendency to not to deploy his intellectual prowess, nor to display jivey emotions, when dealing with Africa. Interestingly, in his recent book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Jonathan Atler too lambasts president Obama in that his "detached and self-contained nature had hampered his presidency."
Obama should be aware that official African press releases about his forthcoming visit are bound to portray him as being either larger than life - a Superman, or to project him as Africa's African American savior.
He is neither.
Obama should not be crestfallen though at this prospect of African criticism of his policies by the miniscule and loud minority of African intellectual critics. Nor should he be dispirited by faux praises that are going to be heaped upon him by his grovelling black African hosts.
There is genuine good news galore for president Obama during his forthcoming sub-Saharan visit.
All of Africa remains profoundly proud that for the first time in US history, an African American, Barack Obama, is leading the world's sole superpower, the US; and for a second term at that. Africans across the continent celebrate this important achievement of America's quest for non-racialism, as much as Americans themselves do.
So Obama will be treated like a rock star, and not a prodigal son, during his 2013 visit to Sahara Africa. African drum-majorettes will march down dusty and asphalt African paths to announce his arrival on our ancient continent.
Obama's visit will be the biggest African party since the Soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010. The African middle class in particular will receive him with the same ecstasy and gusto as it just reserved recently for its other two demi-gods, namely Justin Bierber and Bon Jovi.
However, the pride being felt by hundreds of millions of Africans across our continent towards Obama's seminal political achievement is being corrupted and corroded by the enormous disappointment that many Africans felt for much of his first four-year term. Obama, during his first presidential term, paid only a cursory and perfunctory attention to African issues, hardly beyond the narrow and narrow-minded dictates of the national security imperatives of the US hegemonic military-industrial-Wall Street complex.
During his first term as US president, Obama paid more attention to the 6-million strong Jewish State of Israel, than he did to the whole 1 billion strong African continent, despite his African ancestry. This we Africans cannot comprehend. It makes Africans indignant, even livid, towards some of president Obama's foreign policies. In this regard, the majority of Africans are mindful of the criticism by the much-venerated US author of Color Purple, Alice Walker, of Obama's stance on the inhuman and illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. In a recent Open Letter to Alicia Keys, Walker wrote:
"...our government (Obama in particular) supports a system that is cruel, unjust, and unbelievably evil" (Rolling Out, article by Stereo Williams, 29 May 2013).
It is a sentiment many Africans across the continent share about president Obama's Israeli policy. Unfortunately, our fawning African leaders, who will be hosting Obama, are not strong enough to convey this public sentiment to Obama in person during his forthcoming visit.
And that is a great pity.
Africa's relationship with the first US black president is therefore a deeply complex and muti-dimensional affair, compounded by the fact that it is also a deeply ambivalent, highly contested and much misunderstood relationship between Africans and Obama, which relationship occasionally displays symptoms akin to an Oedipus complex, regarding the two parties declared love for Mother Africa. For an example, Obama, as US president, has not wasted time to visit his white mother's ancestral Ireland, but has up to now prevaricated and procrastinated on visiting his paternal ancestral Kenya, although his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, publicly lauds his Kenyan roots.
Clearly, working on the Africa-US relationship is going to be enormously difficult in the remaining less than four years of Obama's second presidential term. But it is a vital job and very important for Obama's enduring legacy. As George Orwell's fictional character, Squealer, in Animal Farm, advised:
"Do not imagine that leadership is a pleasure. It is a heavy responsibility."
A better and sounder US-Africa strategic relationship is certainly a good thing for the world, yet so difficult to get right, even with a black man at the helm of the US administration. However, all Africans are keen to work with president Obama, in earnest, on the relationship, to the mutual benefit of the USA and Africa.
So Obama should not sulk, or grow skittish, or throw his hands up in the air, or pucker his forehead, when Africans criticize his controversial drone policy over Somalia, Libya, Mali, Djibouti, and Niger, which he is implementing unilaterally; he should take it on his chin when they lambast his administration's participation in NATO's illegal and destructive aerial bombardment of Libya and the ouster of Gaddafi; he should turn the other cheek when they bemoan his siding with neo-colonial France's efforts to re-colonise the African countries of Niger, CAR, Chad, Ivory Coast and Mali; he should bite his tongue when they excoriate his prioritising of US-Israeli relations over African-US relations; he should "unclench" his fist, to borrow Obama's own expression, when they are flabbergasted by his outdated and moribund views about Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe; he should count up to ten when they misunderstand his pivot towards Asia, when there is no talk on the part of his administration of any US's leaning, let alone "pivot", towards Africa, at the very historic and promising African moment the UK The Economist magazine recently defined as "Africa Rising." For very good reasons, Obama's African critics are not tickled by his policies on all these issues, to put it mildly, if not diplomatically. And the less said about the Nobel Peace Prize winner president Barack Obama's controversial decision to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, which action will fuel the Syrian civil war, the better.
Obama should thus not be too defensive when Africans tell, him during his visit, that they don't like the fact that his War on Global Terror is the prism through which he views, in the main, US-Africa relations and African developments in general, especially in north Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region of Africa.
CONCLUSION - THE ‘AUDACITY' OF AFRICA'S HOPES
In her Open Letter to Alicia Keys, Alice Walker wrote about the "soul danger" that the Jewish State of Israel represents to Alicia Keys, if she proceeded to visit there. I submit that the 2013 Obama Africa visit too potentially represents a "soul danger" to progressive African politics, governance and strategic foreign policy posture. This is largely because president Barack Obama has permitted his liberal heart to be alienated from his centrist intellect, and from his conservative ‘George W Bush" body politic. The result is a deeply reactionary Obama foreign policy towards Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, during his first term in office.
However President Obama should be complimented for his inspired choice of the three African countries he will be visiting in 2013. Senegal is a country where African slaves were shipped to Europe and the Americas in a cruel and inhuman white European transatlantic slave trade through the Goree Island, which slave trade was the basis of US's founding "sin". It is possible that some of these African slaves were the great, great, great, great-parents of president Obama's wife, First Lady Michelle Obama. Tanzania is a country where African slaves were shipped to Arabia through Dar-Es-Salaam and the magical island of Zanzibar, during slave trade by Arab Moslem slave traders and invaders.
It was also in Zanzibar, crucially, where Barack Obama Senior adopted the religion of Islam and the middle name Hussein. South Africa is a country where racial discrimination was made official, legislated state policy, and Robben Island, one of the historical places Obama will visit during his stay in South Africa, was the world's most notorious political prison in the 20th century, and where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for over 18 years for his principled opposition to legislated racial discrimination in South Africa. Obama has made it clear in his writings that his political consciousness was awoken by his student-era involvement in the US university disinvestment campaigns against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The momentous symbolism about the three African countries president Obama will be visiting is as powerful as it is unmistakable.
This is good.
So Obama can allow his Africa visit in 2013 to bring his liberal heart back in tune with his centrist intellect and back into his ‘George W Bush' presidential body politic. He can also allow the ethos, pathos and bathos of Africa's politics and humanity to purify and ennoble his first African American US presidency. He should take a calculated risk and allow for a greater Africanisation of the his American presidency, way beyond the mere symbolism of the presence of his black skin and kinky Afro hair in the White House. He should use his historic sub-Saharan Africa visit to "pivot" US policy towards the African continent too.
If Obama speaks less and listens more during his forthcoming 2013 Africa visit, he will hear, unmistakably, the voices of hundreds of millions of dirt-poor Africans, across our continent, silently recite the powerful words of Beethoven, arguably Europe's greatest musical genius, uttered in a moment of great despair born of his deafness:
"I shall seize fate by the throat.
It shall never wholly overcome me."
Obama's visit comes at the time when Africa, as attested by the salutary phenomenon of "Africa Rising", has seized fate by the throat, and has refused it to wholly overcome this beautiful ancient continent of ours, even during the period of Africa's greatest despair a decade ago, when much of the Western world, including the US, nearly gave up, and nearly turned a deaf ear, on Africa's desperate cries for help. For Africa, the worse is over and a brighter future beckons.
And so with his 2013 Africa visit, Obama may just be able to surpass Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's great, historic diplomatic triumph regarding Communist China.
That alone would be president Barack Obama's best riposte to Cornel West's powerful and thoughtful question to Obama:
"What kind of courage have you manifested in the instances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for?"
It will be Obama's best demonstration that he does not take black Africa for granted, just because he is black.
Indeed, if it is true, as claimed by Dr. Pallo Jordan, a leading ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) member, on the occasion of president Obama's re-election as US president, that "it is when the US remembers its own revolutionary roots that it is at its best." (Business Day, "Obama's triumph is a victory for African dignity, 08 November 2012), then president Obama's 2013 visit to Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa is as good as any US presidential foreign visit to remind both the US, Africa and the rest of the world of what the US is about when it is at its very best and closest to its revolutionary roots.
Welcome to sub-Sahara Africa, Mr. President.
Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director of the Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA). He can be contacted at [email protected] and followed on Twitter here.
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