President Clinton and the first lady, wearing the traditional Ghanaian dress, stand with Ghana President Jerry Rawlings. (AP)

By John F. Harris and
Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 22, 1998; Page A01

For five years, it usually took a crisis to vault Africa to the top of President Clinton's agenda. There was a U.S. military debacle in Somalia, a terrifying genocide in Rwanda -- and long periods with few signs that a continent of 700 million people was commanding much attention in Washington.

Clinton embarks on a six-nation, 11-day sub-Saharan odyssey designed to transform perceptions about the U.S.-Africa relationship on both sides, according to senior U.S. officials. It is the most extensive visit to the continent ever made by a U.S. president and the longest overseas tour of Clinton's presidency.

President Clinton's itinerary Monday: Arrive Accra, Ghana. Private meetings with President Jerry Rawlings; public address; tour of Peace Corps projects; meeting with U.S. Embassy community. Depart for Uganda. Tuesday: Arrive Kampala, Uganda, 2 a.m. Wednesday: Arrive Kigali, Rwanda, 9:45 a.m. Afternoon to Entebbe, Uganda. Thursday: Arrive Cape Town, 1 a.m. Friday: Meeting with President Nelson Mandela. Saturday: Departure for Johannesburg. Sunday, March 29: Arrive Gaborone, Botswana, 1 p.m. Monday, March 30: Private visit to Chobe National Park, Botswana. Tuesday, March 31: Arrive Gaborone. Continue to Senegal; arrival in Dakar, 8:25 p.m. Wednesday, April 1: Dakar. Thursday, April 2: Dakar. Departure for Andrews AFB. SOURCE: White House

To his African audience, Clinton hopes to rebut the belief that the United States is unaware of or indifferent to the continent except when things are going catastrophically wrong.

To the American audience watching his travels, Clinton hopes to rebut the belief that Africa is a place where, with few exceptions, things go catastrophically wrong.

"We have to demystify Africa for Americans," said White House national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger. "We have a very one-dimensional view of the 'Dark Continent' and there is a sea change going on there."

As a counter to decades of headlines about famine, AIDS, ethnic killings and corrupt dictatorships, Clinton will spend most of his time promoting a message that large parts of Africa are on a promising path toward stability, democracy and economic growth. "A new generation of Africans," Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright declared in a speech at George Mason University last week, "has come of age raised in the era of independence, liberated from Cold War divisions and determined to assume an equal place at the world table."

In Africa, many government officials and scholars say they welcome the visit and the heightened global profile it will bring. But there is considerable skepticism as well, from people who note that U.S. policy toward Africa historically has been inconsistent, and that today U.S. and Western aid is declining. Some wonder whether the brief attention generated by Clinton's visit will be followed by sustained interest in new development and trade partnerships.

"It's a welcome focus on Africa, in as much as it highlights the intentions of the administration to back up its words in Africa with action," said Bahle Sibisi, South Africa's chief director of foreign trade. "Hopefully, the talk about Africa would go beyond just being talk."

Clinton's itinerary has been chosen to complement his sunny-side-up message. He arrives Monday in Ghana, a former military dictatorship that in 1996 had free elections. Clinton will go to Uganda, where political opposition is prohibited, to hold a summit of regional leaders to promote human rights and democracy.

From there, Clinton and a delegation of nearly a thousand U.S. officials and invited guests, security officers and traveling news media will go to Rwanda, the stop in which Clinton will deal most bluntly with one of Africa's recent horrors. A brief airport visit in the capital city of Kigali was added to Clinton's Africa tour only two weeks ago, after the rest of the schedule had been established for weeks. The president will meet with genocide survivors and appeal for an end to ethnic warfare.

Clinton will spend three days in South Africa, the symbolic centerpiece of the trip. Clinton will meet with President Nelson Mandela, celebrating the end of apartheid and the emergence of a multiracial democracy there.

The final stops are in Botswana, which has used its generous diamond resources to fashion a comparatively healthy economy, and Senegal, a former French colony where Clinton will promote the administration's plan for an all-African peacekeeping force designed to intervene in outbreaks of civil strife.

None of the six countries have been visited by a sitting U.S. president before. Clinton's itinerary, and many of the issues he will press -- such as the need to provide small "micro-credit" loans to entrepreneurs in African villages -- follows closely a trip that first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made to the continent a year ago.

The White House is counting on the trip to beam a series of vivid and emotionally powerful images to audiences back home: Clinton walking with Mandela on Robben Island, where Mandela was imprisoned for much of three decades because of his stand against apartheid. Clinton gazing at elephants and giraffes on safari in Botswana. And Clinton touring Goree Island in Senegal, the port where untold numbers of Africans were loaded on ships and sent across the Atlantic into slavery in America.

This will be his first trip abroad since the Monica S. Lewinsky controversy broke, and aides are viewing the occasion with anxiety as well as relief. With a huge traveling press corps, advisers say they are under few illusions that Clinton can leave behind his problems. They worry that his one planned news conference on the trip, in Cape Town with Mandela by his side, could become a spectacle in which Clinton is quizzed about his sex life in front of one of the world's most admired leaders.

Along with managing the imagery, Clinton and his advisers will face some policy tests. One will come in Uganda, at the regional summit on human rights and conflict prevention. Attending the session will be several leaders with records that have been broadly criticized in the United States and Africa on precisely these grounds, including Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader who recently won power in a military coup in Congo, formerly Zaire. Clinton must decide how hard to publicly press these leaders for change.

Even those leaders held up for praise by the administration have checkered democratic credentials. Both Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni rose to power through armed conflict. While there have been elections in both countries since then, critics have said the governments have not allowed genuine multiparty competition.

"These rebel leaders are not democrats, they are people who shot their way to power," said George Ayittey, a Ghana native and political scientist at American University. "You see this [administration] emphasis on leaders, leaders, leaders. You should shift the focus and place the emphasis on institutions."

The other broad policy theme of Clinton's journey will be encouraging African commerce. Since 1990, a majority of the 48 sub-Saharan nations have taken at least tentative steps away from command economies and toward free markets. The Clinton administration is trumpeting trade legislation, which has passed the House and is pending in the Senate, that would eliminate trade barriers and provide debt relief to African nations that agree to reform their economies.

U.S. trade with Africa is minuscule: 1 percent of total U.S. exports, and 2 percent of U.S. imports. But U.S. officials note that the United States exports more to Africa than to the former republics of the Soviet Union, and that some 100,000 U.S. jobs are dependent on this trade.

While the African trade bill has drawn bipartisan support, there are many detractors. Some say the emphasis on commerce has allowed people to justify cutting back on traditional development assistance. U.S. aid to Africa is $700 million annually, down from $1.3 billion in 1994.

Many Africans decry the fact that wrenching economic overhauls have not been rewarded with more debt relief -- total debt in sub-Saharan countries totals $200 billion -- and more foreign investment.

"Africans are carrying out the reform programs, but we see very little foreign investment coming into Africa from the U.S.," said Kenneth Kotelo, of South Africa's Pretoria-based Africa Institute.

Much of the investment that has occurred, moreover, has been in oil-rich Nigeria, a military dictatorship that has made little, if any, of the political progress Clinton is extolling.

Such problems have left some Africa experts with muted expectations.

"Africa has been treated in U.S. foreign policy circles as an infant, as an afterthought," said Makau wa Mutua of Kenya, director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "The one good thing that might come out of this trip is that Africa cannot be ignored."

Harris reported from Washington, Duke from Johannesburg.