African Media Welcome Clinton's Visit
FrontLines - September 2009
Patricia Matolengwe, right, managing director of the South African Homeless People’s Federation, signals singers as Clinton looks on. Clinton revisited a Khayelitsha housing project she originally saw as first lady 12 years ago.
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African media writers saw Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s seven-country visit to Africa as a sign of a new era of relations, based on something other than Cold War ideology, interest in African natural resources, or humanitarian
gestures. They welcomed her “tough words” that called on Africans to build stronger civic and democratic institutions.
After her visit to rape victims in Goma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s private newspaper Le Potentiel said that Clinton now knows “what makes the heart of the Congolese beat.”
In Angola, after Clinton met with President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, the government-supported Jornal de Angola said, “Gone are the days when the United States supported UNITA [the former rebel group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola] to oust the Angolan authorities.”
Congo’s private Forum de As praised what it saw as the Obama administration’s desire to break with “unilateralism.”
After Clinton delivered strong statements against corruption and poor governance, Kenya’s Daily Nation wrote, “it is actually a shame that we need pressure from the USA to do what is right.”
In Nigeria, the independent Daily Champion said that “Mrs. Clinton only reminded us of what we already know.” And the Daily Independent wrote that “if Nigeria’s leadership had not brought the nation to this humiliating position through persistent
misgovernance and indecent greed, Mrs. Clinton’s visit would have focused, not on corruption and electoral malfeasance,
but on trade relations and investments.”
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