Trip to Africa Deeply Moves Several in U.S. Contingent

For several of the African Americans along, President Clinton’s African odyssey has been the emotional equivalent of President Richard Nixon’s trip to China.

With their president, they have viewed the haunting shores of West Africa from which many of their ancestors were taken in the dark days of slavery.

They have visited Robben Island, the prison home of Nelson Mandela, the South African leader whose incarceration for many of them was the symbolic fuel of their decades-long effort to persuade the U.S. government to act against apartheid.

And they stood by as Clinton apologized for the long U.S. neglect of the continent of their heritage.

The experience has been profoundly affirming for them personally. But, more important, they believe it finally will bring Africa into the mainstream, they said. “No longer is our history or our ancestry being marginalized or denied,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said on the boat back from a visit to Robben Island last week.

Just as Nixon’s trip to China gave Americans a glimpse of a society that had long been closed to them, black members of the delegation said, this tour will open Americans’ eyes to a continent they have chosen not to see.

Perhaps the most emotional moment of the entire trip will be the tour Thursday on Goree Island, off Dakar, the capital of Senegal. There they will peer through the “door of no return” of the castle where perhaps their ancestors started unwilling journeys to America and slavery--or death in the crossing.

“It never ceases to move you,” said Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of State for African affairs and an African American. “It’s the door through which the slaves marched before walking down a plank to the slave ships. You look out across the Atlantic toward America. It’s the most powerful image.”

African Americans along for all or part of this journey include leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement, members of Congress, business executives and Clinton administration officials.

For Waters and others, the trip felt like the high point of years of work on African issues, especially because their efforts seemed futile at times when the power structure in America did not seem to be listening. “This is not as though all of this happened at one time,” Waters said. “This is the culmination of years of work.”

In Waters’ case, the effort included struggling for and passing anti-apartheid legislation in the California Assembly in 1986. She served on the board of TransAfrica, a Washington-based group that lobbies on African and Caribbean issues, for 20 years. As part of that group, she protested U.S. support of the minority white government in South Africa and was arrested. The United States did not impose sanctions against South Africa because of apartheid until 1987. “Our top priority was dismantling apartheid and obtaining the release of Mandela,” she said of her efforts.

So for her, the highlight of the trip was visiting Robben Island, which became a museum about a year ago. She visited Mandela’s cell, walked though the courtyard where he exercised and labored breaking apart stones, and visited the quarry where he lost much of his eyesight from years of working in the glare of the limestone.

“It’s very moving,” she observed. “I worked for so many years to end apartheid. This closes that chapter [of my life] for me.”

For others, the most powerful experiences were different.

Rice said the trip combined emotions--from excitement to deep sadness. “The night before we left, I was like a kid before Christmas,” Rice said. “I did not sleep at all.”

The spectacle of hundreds of thousands of people in Ghana coming to see the president, she said, was all she could have hoped for. She cried at the end of Clinton’s speech in Rwanda, in which he said the United States was wrong to stand by while 800,000 people died in a genocide there.

Some African Americans found the scenes they witnessed on the trip reminiscent of their own experiences in the United States. “I found it striking how much Ghana and Uganda reminded me of growing up in the rural South,” Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said, referring to the inadequate schools and poor living conditions. “The whole trip has been fascinating.”

While Waters and a few other members of Congress accompanied the president throughout, a much larger contingent joined him just during his South Africa travel. The contingent caused eyebrows to rise back in the United States, with some Republicans saying it was too large. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) called the delegation a “fund-raising safari.”

In addition to a large contingent of administration officials, there were 40 other members in the delegation, 16 of them from Congress. Among them were big Democratic donors such as Robert L. Johnson, president of Black Entertainment Television; Ron Burkle, a California supermarket mogul; and Maurice Tempelsman, an international diamond dealer.

Clinton had no apologies for his expanded delegation, mentioning repeatedly the successful African Americans accompanying him and expressing his hope that their presence on the tour would lead to better relations between the United States and Africa. “It wasn’t so very long ago in the whole sweep of human history that their ancestors were yanked from the shores of western Africa as slaves. Now they come back to Africa . . . as leaders of America. And we hope that their success will play a role in our common triumphs, the United States and Africa.”

Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, called the criticisms preposterous, given the deep significance of this tour. “I think it’s a rather small delegation, given that he’s the first president to come here ever,” Mfume said, after a Clinton-Mandela news conference in Cape Town, South Africa. “There were many people who wanted to come who couldn’t be included.”

The trip had special significance for Mfume--both personally and in his role as leader of the civil rights organization. The NAACP has had ties for more than 80 years with the African National Congress, the movement that led the effort to end South Africa’s apartheid.

His goals as the NAACP representative, he said, were to “reaffirm the basic bond with the ANC that began in 1911” and lend his support for what he considers the main message of the trip: “Africa does not only exist but it matters.”

“We’ve been very supportive of the efforts here long before the anti-apartheid movement,” Mfume said. “As someone who worked in that movement for almost 30 years, going back to the days when I was in college . . . this is very important for me.”

Still, the mixed symbols at the news conference showed that the long struggle is not yet over. Mandela wore a colorful African print shirt, not the somber suits favored by Afrikaner leaders; the colorful flag of the new South Africa flew alongside the American flag; most of the South African officials lined up next to Mandela were black. But the porch behind the leaders was decorated with a white cherubic figure, reminiscent of minority white rule in South Africa; almost all of the South African journalists were white.

Mfume said he believes Clinton was the right president to make a new opening to Africa. “It’s kind of like when Nixon went to China,” he observed. “No one else could have done that at that time.” He also asserted that no president could have made this push as “credibly” as Clinton has because of his efforts to reform U.S.-Africa policy and his “career-long efforts to improve race relations.”

For the one Republican member of Congress on the trip, the significance of the journey had little to do with the symbols of slavery or apologies for mistakes in Africa policy by past administrations. For him, the trip was solely about the future.

“We will know the trip has been a success if the Senate passes the African Growth and Opportunity Act,” Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) said.

Royce was not alone in seeing trade and investment as a big part of Africa’s future relationship with the United States. Although the Congressional Black Caucus was split on the legislation, which passed the House last month, the administration strongly supports it.

“This new face that the president is putting on Africa will help it to grow and develop,” Waters said. “You will see businesspeople saying, ‘Oh, Africa must be all right now--the president went there.’ ”

* DISPUTE OVER U.S. GIFT: Two boats promised to California are going to Ghana. A3