President Obama’s visits to Kenya and Ethiopia can be justified as policy by the dreadful state of South Sudan, which borders both countries, but it is hard to escape the thought that he had personal reasons for wanting to visit Kenya, his father’s homeland, while still president. However, though joyfully received, he has not been an uncritical guest. His criticisms of the flaws of Kenyan society have been plain and well aimed. His attack on the scourge of FGM was quite without diplomatic circumlocution. “There’s no excuse for sexual assault or domestic violence; there’s no reason that young girls should suffer genital mutilation … These traditions may go back centuries; they have no place in the 21st century,” he said. This was a message that Kenya was ready to hear. Less so his advocacy of human rights for gay people. But he showed more courage than most spiritual leaders can muster when it came to telling an African audience news they don’t want to hear about the wrongness of homophobia.
The tremendous energy, ingenuity and optimism visible in Africa is often betrayed by the quality of the continent’s leaders, whose energy is directed to self-enrichment and whose optimism to supposing they can get away with it. It is not just Mr Obama’s views on women, nor his probity, that he might commend to Africa: there is also his willingness to resign when his term is up and his taste for fighting free and fair elections. We have come a long way since the enthusiasm that attended Bill Clinton’s visit to Africa in 1995, when the talk was all of a “new generation” of African leaders, committed to democracy and clean government.
Nowhere has the cycle of optimism and disillusionment run faster or further downward than in South Sudan, whose independence four years ago seemed like a triumph of Mr Obama’s Africa policy. Within two years the two leaders of the independence movement had started a civil war of astonishing horror and cruelty, which has produced two million refugees and persists unabated. It cannot even be blamed on Christian/Muslim tensions as the earlier war against the mostly Muslim north can be. Both sides in this war are notionally Christian.
Stopping the war there may be an achievement beyond Mr Obama, or anyone else. The oil reserves in the provinces most fiercely fought over are just too tempting to the utterly ruthless men who lead the opposing sides. But it is clearly a part of his purpose in Ethiopia to do what little he can. There is talk of sanctions and an arms embargo, neither of which seem to hold out much hope – arms will always find a way to oil wars, and sanctions will no doubt hurt civilians most. If the suffering of civilians could halt a war, South Sudan would by now have earned a millennium of peace.
All this will involve pragmatic cooperation with some nasty regimes, among them the Ethiopian one which is hosting the president. But that kind of engagement is unavoidable and morally defensible if things are to change. America’s power is weakening in Africa, just as the rest of the west’s has done. China is now an alternative market and source of investment, one which has no scruples about human rights. The effects of climate change are adding to human cruelty and encouraging it. Mr Obama’s message, and his example, may have a more lasting effect than the spectacle and popular rejoicing that greeted him.
