Obama goes to African. Sometimes it is difficult to be the president
and President Obama’s trip to South Africa in respect to his proposed visit to
Nelson Mandela is a case in point. I
sense these two men have a great deal of respect for one-another. However, it
would be traumatic for Mandela to have President Obama and the required Secret
Service, photographer, nurses and physicians entourage visit him in his hospital
room. For obvious reasons, such a visit could turnout very badly for both men. Of
course, there are right wing detractors that will try to take advantage of the “visit
that didn’t happen”.
Regardless, the real purpose of the Obama trip is to
increase relations between the United States and this vast market of 54 to 57
countries; as a humanitarian I consider there to be 57 groups of people unfortunately
some are in disorganized unit but they are still people. I worked for a short
time in Zimbabwe, Africa as a teacher. It was not a good experience for lots of
reasons (Stevens Here: The High Road to
Mediocrity: Amazon Kinlel.com). One of the reasons was that the Ronald
Reagan’s State Department had decided that the United States would abandon the people
of the relatively new state of Zimbabwe as well as the continent of Africa to
the China; some of them considered Africa as a country.
At the time, the world looked at Robert Mugabe, leader of
the winning rebel faction that displaced English rule in what had been Rhodesia,
as some form of African savior. He could have been to Zimbabwe what Nelson Mandela
was to South Africa. Human emotions dominated logic and although highly
educated, he was also innately tribal and driven by lust for power—once given power;
he would do what ever he had to do to keep it. Once rejected by Reagan, Mugabe
turned to China. Obama is in Africa today to prevent other countries from doing
the same thing.
There is irony in all of this. At the time, shortsighted Reagan
isolationists, driven by xenophobia, saw Mugabe as being uncivilized and that format
as being the future of much of the African continent; therefore, they wanted no
part of it. In our country, both Republicans and Democrats saw what Mugabe was
doing as uncivilized but the same thing is now happening in our country, also
driven by xenophobia and greed, but our egos tell us it is in a “civilized” form;
voter suppression, corporations as people, gerrymandering, Hastert Rule, and
cloture in Congress. Obama is in Africa trying to undo what Reagan has done. He
is trying to work against the faction of isolationist Republicans who hate
foreign aid as much as they hate welfare. While it is true that Obama is not
welcome in Zimbabwe, he is welcome in many other African states. The interested
person can better appreciate the complexity of the situation by reading the classic
but mammoth book, The State of Africa, by Martin Meredith. We can look at Obama’s trip as only one fight
in a series of fights in the battle with China for African business. We lost
the first battle in Zimbabwe, avoided fighting in many other battles in different
countries, and in Mogadishu Somalia, however, Nelson Mandela won a major
victory in South Africa and now it looks like we have a forward-looking
president, President Obama, engaged in the next one. It is too bad that Mandela
and Obama could not cement the relationship with a handshake for the entire
world to see. Meeting or not, I think
that both men know the future could be and know the world wishes them well.
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