President Obama visits Africa
President Barack Obama visited Ghana this week, speaking widely of the victories and challenges the continent is currently facing.
Though Africa has made wide gains in the last century, conflicts and war are like “a millstone around Africa’s neck.”
“Despite the progress that has been made — and there has been considerable progress in parts of Africa — we also 
know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled,” Obama said in a speech to the parliament of Ghana.
President Obama said significant challenges, such as the conflicts in Darfur and Somalia, are facing the continent, but promised that the United States would help to bring peace to Africa.
Ghana, a West African nation, was chosen as the location for President Obama’s speech to the continent because of its strong democratic history despite its lengthy legacy of slave trade operations before independence.
“I think it’s important that the way we think about it, the way it’s taught, is not one in which there’s simply a victim and a victimizer, and that’s the end of the story,” he said. “I think the way it has to be thought about, the reason it’s relevant, is whether it’s what’s happening in Darfur or what’s happening in the Congo or what’s happening in too many places around the world, the capacity for cruelty still exists.”
President Obama said that Ghana has changed its image, which is often overlooked by Western citizens who largely see the continent as a place for charity and suffering.
While the nation-building the country exemplifies may lack “drama of the 20th century’s liberation struggles,” he said “it will ultimately be more significant.”
President Obama also touched on the ongoing issue of corruption in Africa, stating “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt,” he said. “No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there.”
In Kenya, his father’s home country, corruption still widely exists and human rights abuses are rampant.
“Make no mistake: history is on the side of these brave Africans, and not with those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power. Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions,” he said. He said his administration will work “to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don’t, and that is exactly what America will do.”
Unfortunately, President Obama made little note of the current genocide occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan, or the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudan’s President on war crimes.
