Monday, August 17, 2009
It seemed fitting, somehow, that one of America's most misunderstood women would be misrepresented in the world's most misunderstood region.
I'm speaking, of course, of Hillary Rodham Clinton in Africa last week. Clinton went to all the chaotic, crucial countries that President Obama avoided on his victory tour there in July. She went to Nigeria, Africa's rowdiest and most important member. She went to Liberia, the conflict-torn nation that also happens to be the first African country to elect a woman president. She went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an anarchic place that has spent the last decade discovering new ways to use rape as a strategy of war. And she went to Angola, a resource-rich country which has just emerged from two decades of civil war and is quietly becoming the decade's next success story.
These countries are where America needs to be focusing: They are rich with resources and problems, and most of them are being re-colonized by China as we speak. Clinton understood this. She may not make the wisest decisions, but she always does her homework. So she marched in, and she said what needed to be said: that governments need to hold timely, fair elections (Angola), that high levels of corruption are unhelpful (Nigeria), that stronger countries should really do something about perennial basket case Zimbabwe (South Africa), that rape victims are human beings and deserve to be treated as such (Democratic Republic of Congo). Pity that the only things America heard about her trip was that she's still "in Bill's shadow" and that she, along with everyone else, thinks that some shenanigans went down during America's 2000 presidential election.
The Bill moment was particularly egregious. Here Clinton was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women and girls. She was there to draw attention to the desperate plight of rape survivors - more than 500,000 women have been raped during the 15-year conflict. For many years it seemed like the only reason why anyone was fighting was to capture, and violate, women. And just to drive the point home that this is not a country that understands gender equality, there's a clueless student, asking Clinton what her husband thought about a local issue.
I'd have snapped too.
But rather than focus on this, Westerners only saw another chapter of the Clinton psychodrama, another chance to snigger at the Clintons' peculiar arrangement.
Then there was her moment of honesty in Nigeria, Africa's poster child for, well, everything: creativity (in both economic development and crime), energy (some of the world's greatest parties happen in Lagos), corruption (the country's entire leadership structure, from the capital to the villages, is seized by it) and nationalism (one of the reasons some rebels have consistently been able to bring Chevron to its knees is because they, and a large portion of the population, believe that Nigeria's oil resources should belong to Nigerians). Clinton had been berating Nigeria about good governance. In the course of doing so, she happened to mention that the great experiment of America has a democracy that is still "evolving," and mentioned the 2000 elections as an example.
It was a surprisingly Chomskyan moment for Clinton, and perhaps not the most diplomatic thing she's ever said. But it was true, and it no doubt bought her a great deal of good will in a country that views us with suspicion. More to the point, it offered an opportunity for Westerners to view African countries in a new way - as compatriots in our journey, people facing a different set of struggles that are surprisingly familiar. We ignored the opportunity. And that's our loss, not Clinton's.
Caille Millner is a Chronicle editorial writer. You can e-mail her at cmillner@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/17/EDKI198PBI.DTL
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