Hillary Clinton’s seven-nation trip to Africa started off in Kenya yesterday. Several critics of Obama’s first Africa trip, which took him to Ghana, thought that maybe he ought to start with Kenya, given both that country’s troubled recent history and Obama’s own familial ties to the East African nation. But as with so many of the early criticisms of Obama, that one seemed to lack any real argument and seemed more of a short-term “gotcha” than a substantive criticism. But now Clinton, the face of Obama’s diplomatic team, has commenced her trip in Nairobi, making the earlier criticism seem even sillier. Criticisms that Obama has not yet accomplished X or Y after only six months in office have become somehow legitimized as Republican talking points; that does not make them true.
Clinton is balancing her trip, visiting three of the continent’s most important players in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria, touching down in Angola and Liberia, countries still freshly scarred by conflict, as well as the still bloody Democratic Republic of Congo, and then making what amounts to a fueling stop in Cape Verde. In Kenya she also hopes to address the crisis in Somalia.
In addition to geographical balance, Clinton (and Obama, via a video presentation) has thus far tried to maintain equilibrium between an affirmative message and a cajoling one, celebrating the US-African partnership and encouraging trade in her opening address to delegates at the African Growth and Opportunity Act Summit in Nairobi while at the same time condemning corruption and misrule . And even before Clinton landed in Kenya the United States expressed “deep concern” over what it called a “climate of impunity” in Kenya in response to the decision to utilize only local courts rather than a special tribunal to deal with the post-election violance that ravaged the country in December and January 2007-2008. This balancing act bears watching as the trip progresses. Obama is tremendously popular in Africa. It seems clear that he should be able to leverage this popularity into persuasion in Africa. but let’s give it more than six months, shall we?
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