Bush’s visit is all the buzz, in Africa and back in the States. I had a similar experience to The New York Times when doing some legwork for my own frequent employer: In Kigali, as in Tanzania, if you ask random folks about George W. Bush, they start talking about Barack Obama. Rwandans love Obama — mostly, they tell me, because he “has African origin.” On Friday, I asked two people standing around outside a little shop in Kigali center what they think of George Bush, and one said, “Who we love is Barack Obama.” It took only a couple of minutes for a crowd of over twenty excited African men to swarm around me, cheering for the candidate. “If Rwandans could vote in America’s election,” another person told me later, “Obama would get 8 million votes.”
The layers of irony here are worthy of a geological measuring tool. Is it fair to call Obama the anti-Bush? And besides, this is Rwanda—Clinton country, after all. It’s so deeply Clinton country, in fact, that when I asked Rwandans why they liked America and George Bush so much, they said, “The Clinton Foundation does good in Rwanda, so of course we love George Bush.”
And now, from the Department of That’s-Not-What-I-Meant, the Tanzanian president ducks the Obama question….like this. From the above-linked Times article, italics mine:
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“Well, I don’t think I can venture into that territory either,” he said. “Of course, people talk with excitement of Obama — well, our excitement is that President Bush is at the end of his term, and the U.S. is going to get a new president, whoever that one is. For us, the most important thing is, let him be as good a friend of Africa as President Bush has been.”
And you can get the story that I helped write on Bush’s visit to Africa here.
