Jimmy Carter's legacy remains in Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Jimmy Carter was the first president of the United States to make a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa. He once mentioned that helping Zimbabwe transition from white rule to independence was “our single greatest success.” And when he died at age 100, his foundation’s work in rural Africa had nearly fulfilled its mission of eliminating a disease that affected millions, for the first time since the eradication of smallpox.

The African continent, a booming region with a population that rivals China’s and is expected to double by 2050, is where Carter’s legacy remains most evident. Until his presidency, U.S. leaders had shown little interest in Africa, even as independence movements swept the region in the 1960s and 1970s.

“I think the day of the so-called ugly American is over,” Carter said during his warm reception in 1978 in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. He said the official visit left behind “the previous indifference of the United States,” and joked that he and Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo would grow peanuts together.

Cold War tensions drew Carter’s attention to the continent as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence. But Carter also drew inspiration from the missionary traditions of his Baptist faith and the racial injustice he witnessed in his homeland in the American South.

“For too long our country ignored Africa,” Carter told the Democratic National Committee in his first year as president.

Soon, African leaders received invitations to the White House, intrigued by the sudden interest from the world’s most powerful nation and what it might mean for them.

“There is an air of freshness that is invigorating,” said Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda during his visit.

After his first trip to Africa, Carter said, “There is a common theme that runs through the advice given to me by the leaders of African nations: ‘We want to manage our own affairs. We want to be friends of both great superpowers and also of the nations of Europe. We don’t want to choose sides.’”

This theme resonates today, as China also competes with Russia and the United States for influence and access to African raw materials. But no superpower has had an emissary like Carter, who made human rights a central pillar of US foreign policy and made 43 more trips to the continent after his presidency, promoting Carter Center projects that sought to empower Africans to determine your own future.

As president, Carter focused on civil and political rights. He later expanded his efforts to include social and economic rights as key to public health.

“They are the rights of human beings by virtue of their humanity. And Carter is the person in the world who has done the most to advance this idea,” said Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, a Sudanese legal expert.

Even as a candidate, Carter reflected on what he might accomplish, telling Playboy magazine, “I might now have to abandon my presidential campaign and begin a crusade for black-majority rule in South Africa or Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It could be that later on, we discover that there were opportunities in our lives to do wonderful things and we didn’t take advantage of them.”

Carter celebrated Zimbabwe’s independence just four years later, welcoming new Prime Minister Robert Mugabe to the White House and quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Carter told me that he spent more time in Rhodesia than in the entire Middle East. And when you go through the archives and look at the administration, there is actually more about southern Africa than there is about the Middle East,” said historian and author Nancy Mitchell.

Relations with Mugabe’s government soon deteriorated amid a deadly crackdown, and by 1986, Carter led diplomats out of the capital. In 2008, he was no longer welcome in Zimbabwe, a first in his travels. He described the country as “a lost cause, a shame for the region.”

“Whatever the Zimbabwean leadership may think of him now, Zimbabweans, at least those who were around in the 1970s and 1980s, will always regard him as an icon and a tenacious promoter of democracy,” said Eldred Masunungure, a political analyst in Harare.

Carter also criticized the South African government for its treatment of black citizens during apartheid, at a time when South Africa was “trying to curry favor with influential economies around the world,” President Cyril Ramaphosa said on social media site X following Carter’s death. .

The think tank founded by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in 1982 played a key role in monitoring African elections and stopping fighting between warring forces, but fighting disease was the third pillar of the Carter Center’s work.

“The first time I came here to Cape Town, I almost got into a fight with the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, because he refused to allow AIDS to be treated,” Carter told a local newspaper. “That’s the closest I’ve come to getting into a fist fight with a head of state.”

Carter often said that he was determined to survive the last Guinea worm to infect the human race. Affecting millions of people, the parasitic disease has been nearly eliminated, with only 14 cases documented in 2023 in a handful of African countries.

Carter’s mission included organizing a four-month “Guinea worm ceasefire” in Sudan in 1995 so the Carter Center could reach nearly 2,000 endemic villages.

“It taught us a lot about having faith,” said Makoy Samuel Yibi, who leads the Guinea worm eradication program for South Sudan’s Ministry of Health and grew up with people who believed the disease was simply their destiny. “Even poor people call these people poor. That the leader of the free world pays attention and tries to elevate them is a touching virtue.”

Such dedication has impressed health authorities in Africa over the years.

“President Carter worked for all humanity, regardless of race, religion or status,” former Ethiopian Health Minister Lia Tadesse said in a statement shared with The Associated Press. Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent with more than 110 million people, had no cases of Guinea worm in 2023.