Obama launches Africa tour in Senegal

DAKARNAMPA/AFP US President Barack Obama opened business on a long-awaited African tour yesterday by paying homage in Senegal to the innocents forced into the slave trade. The week-long, three-nation visit is meant to finally honour unfulfilled hopes for America's first black president in Africa. The US president stepped off Air Force One into the African night on Wednesday with his wife Michelle, and daughters Sasha and Malia, and met Senegal President Macky Sall yesterday, before holding a press conference. His motorcade sped through streets cleared by police, as a local radio station played a musical arrangement of one of his 2008 "Yes We Can" campaign speeches, evoking better days during Obama's increasingly grim second term. "A visit like this by an American president, any American president, is powerful," a White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Air Force One, when asked about Obama's visit to Goree off the Senegal coast. "I think that will be the case when President Obama visits and I'm sure particularly so, given that he is African American." Obama, whose late father was from Kenya, claims a spiritual connection to Africa, but a crush of international crises in his first term thwarted his hopes to travel extensively in the continent. He did manage a short trip to Ghana in 2009. His tour is designed to highlight Africa's emerging economic potential and growing middle class, as well as youth and health programmes, and to emphasise US engagement in a region benefiting from a wave of Chinese investment. "We are not too late," said Carney, pointing out that although Obama had been kept away, Vice President Joe Biden visited Africa in the first term, and there were also wide ranging diplomatic efforts by the administration on the continent. But there has been disappointment in Africa, after Obama's 2008 election caused euphoria and an expectation that he would put Africa policy at the top of his agenda. The current US president also travels in the shadow of his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who are remembered fondly for their economic development and HIV/Aids programs. There is one glaring missing stop on Obama's itinerary: Kenya. Officials said that the indictment of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, over previous election violence, made it politically impossible for Obama to stop by on this tour.