Clinton On Black Pride Expedition
Eric Ellis, San Francisco
03/24/1998
IT'S unlikely President Bill Clinton will watch last year's cult hit movie When We Were Kings on Air Force One when it takes him and his delegation on an historic safari through Africa.
The documentary depicted what was supposed to be a triumphant bonding of African "brothers". It showed American blacks, in the guise of boxers Mohammed Ali, George Foreman and notorious fight promoter Mr Don King, returning to their roots to stage the 1974 world heavyweight title bout - the infamous "Rumble in the Jungle" - in the now deceased President Mobutu Sese Seko's corrupt Zaire.
The chaos that ensued outside the ring was far more entertaining than what happened inside. Far from being united against real or imagined white oppressors, the film highlighted how far apart African life and African-American life have become, and depicted elementary cultural blunders.
It's a more relevant group that Mr Clinton takes with him on this latest US sortie to Africa, in which he will visit Ghana, Senegal, Botswana, Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa over the next 12 days.
The visit is only the second by a US president. Mr Jimmy Carter led a delegation 20 years ago.
Among the 300-plus delegation is the elite of Afro-American society - overwhelmingly Democrat supporters. A notable absence will be Washington lawyer/lobbyist Mr Vernon Jordan, Mr Clinton's friend and golf partner.
Leading that list is the Reverend Jesse Jackson, officially Special Envoy for the President, and the Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa.
His Secretary of Transport, Mr Rodney Slater, and Secretary of Labor, Ms Alexis Herman will also be there, as will his loyal but embattled private secretary Ms Betty Currie, who recently found herself a closer friend of Ms Monica Lewinsky than perhaps either had imagined.
Others include the outspoken Harlem Democrat Congressman Mr Charles Rangel, the Louisiana Democrat Mr William Jefferson, and fiery Ms Maxine Waters, whose congressional district takes in South-Central Los Angeles, the depressed black ghetto where the 1991 LA riots ignited.
Mr Kweisi Mfume, the executive president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is on board, as is Mr Robert Johnson, head of Black Entertainment Television and one of the US's richest men, and various mayors voted into office largely by blacks.
Among the more interesting of these is Mr Wellington Webb, the first black mayor of Denver, the leader of the cities in the US West that have boomed as a result of "white flight" or "white fright" - migration from crime-ridden big cities like New York, Chicago and LA to Colorado, Utah and Arizona.
Cities like Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix are becoming the backbone of the Clintonian New Economy, their outer suburbs characterised by sprawling freeways that dump affluent whites into glass towers housing high-tech pioneers.
In Florida last January, Mr Webb led 200 US mayors in a Summit on Africa which urged a credo of "trade, not aid" to bring the world's poorest region into the economic mainstream. That followed last year's Summit of the Eight meeting in Denver, when leaders of industrialised nations pledged to spur on and consolidate African democracy and economic stability.
Mr Webb had hosted a "town hall" meeting in Denver just days before the summit, which he claims was instrumental in getting Africa added to the official agenda.
"America should redefine its relationship with Africa," he said. "It's time we placed Africa at the top of our foreign policy agenda.
"African-Americans should have the same sense of allegiance, of support, for working with African countries as Irish-Americans have for working with Ireland."
Spurred by Denver's expanding cable and satellite television industry, Mayor Webb will lead a Colorado-only business delegation to Africa later this year in the hope that African cities like Nairobi, Kinshasa and Lagos will wire up to the information superhighway with US technology, just as Asia has.