Living History (65 page)

“Well, I won’t,” said Bill. “I’m going.”

I called Dr. Mariano from Bill’s bedside.

“Look, he wants to go,” I told her. “So we have to figure out how we’re going to get him there and back safely.”

“But he can’t be on an airplane so long,” she protested. “There could be blood clots.”

I looked over at my fuming husband, and thought that he might throw a clot if they didn’t let him go.

“What are they saying?” he demanded. “Can’t Yeltsin come here?” I asked him. “No!

I’ve gotta go.”

“He’s going to Helsinki,” I told Dr. Mariano. “Just make sure he doesn’t get a blood clot.”

“We’ll have to pack him in dry ice.”

“Fine, pack him in dry ice.”

Dr. Mariano finally relented and began assembling a flying medical team for the trip to Finland.

Chelsea and I left Bill’s bedside later that evening so she could get ready to attend the Viennese Opera Ball sponsored by the Austrian Embassy. She had taken waltz lessons, and her dad insisted she go. On Saturday, I went back to the hospital after doing a tour of our living quarters, looking for all the obstacles someone in a wheelchair or on crutches would face. With the help of a Navy physical therapist, I made a list of the work that had to be done before Bill came home: rugs and cords had to be taped down, a shower guardrail had to be installed, furniture had to be moved. This exercise gave me insight into what life is like every day for people in wheelchairs, including a prior White House occupant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On Sunday, Bill arrived at the White House in a wheelchair-compatible van, his leg stretched out in front of him. He went right to bed, but instead of falling asleep, he gulped down extra-strength Tylenol and watched the remaining college basketball finals on television.

I had been scheduled to leave with Chelsea on Saturday for Africa. I thought I should cancel the trip and accompany Bill to Helsinki or, at least, postpone our departure until he left on Tuesday. He wouldn’t hear of it. If we changed our plans, he reasoned, some people might think his operation hadn’t been a success. We arrived at a compromise: Bill would head to Helsinki on schedule, and Chelsea and I would leave for Africa on Sunday, only one day late.

In addition to the journalists and photographers who usually accompanied me, Vogue magazine sent acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz to chronicle our journey. Although she was famous for her portraits of celebrities, she threw herself into capturing the beauty and majesty of Africans and the landscape they inhabited. I had agreed to write the article that would accompany the Leibovitz photographs, and I wanted to shine a spotlight on self-help efforts supported by American foreign assistance and private charities, speak out about women’s rights, support democracy and encourage Americans to learn more about Africa. The importance of this last objective was illustrated when a journalist asked me before the trip, “What is the capital of Africa?” Bringing Chelsea along was, as always, a special treat for me, and her presence sent a message in places where the needs and abilities of young girls were too often overlooked: The President of the United States has a daughter whom he considers valuable and worthy of the education and health care she needs to help her fulfill her own God-given potential.

Chelsea and I first stopped in Senegal, ancestral home of millions of Americans who had been sold into slavery through Goree Island off the coast of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. At the small fort where slaves were held, leg irons and chains were still attached to the walls of musty cells, stark reminders of the human capacity for evil. This was where innocent people, ripped from home and family and reduced to chattel, were herded through the Door of No Return at the back of the fort, dropped onto the beach and loaded into boats to be rowed out to the anchored slave ships. I shut my eyes and breathed in the humid, stale air, imagining my wild despair if I or my daughter had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.

I later learned about efforts to eliminate a cultural practice that I consider another form of enslavement, female genital mutilation. In the village of Saam Njaay, an hour and a half from Dakar, a revolution in women’s lives and health was in the making.

Molly Melching, a former Peace Corps volunteer, had stayed in Senegal to co-found Tostan, an innovative nongovernmental organization that set up small-scale village-based business and education projects. As a result of Tostan’s work, women began speaking up about the pain and terrible health effects―including death―they had seen or experienced because of the ancient practice of cutting the genitalia of prepubescent girls. After Tostan organized a village-wide discussion, the village voted to end the practice. When male leaders from that village traveled to other villages to explain why the practice was bad for girls and women, other villages voted to prohibit it. The movement snowballed and its leaders petitioned President Abdou Diouf to outlaw the practice throughout the country.

When I met with President Diouf, I praised the grassroots movement and endorsed the villagers’ request that Senegal pass legislation banning the practice. I also sent a supportive letter to Tostan, which they used in their campaign. A law banning the practice was passed within the year, but enforcing it has been difficult. Deeply engrained cultural traditions die hard.

This example of popular action to improve people’s lives gave me hope as we traveled on to South Africa, the paramount symbol of change on the continent. Nelson Mandela was one of the leaders of that change. Another was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the vocal conscience of the anti-apartheid movement who inspired Mandela to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I met with Bishop Tutu and members of the Commission in Cape Town in an ordinary conference room where they were taking testimony from victims and perpetrators of violence as a means of exposing the truth and encouraging reconciliation among the races after generations of injustice and brutality.

Mandela and Tutu understood the challenge and the importance of institutionalizing forgiveness.

Under the process they established, those who had committed crimes could step forward and confess in return for amnesty. And victims could finally have answers. As one victim put it: “I want to forgive, but I need to know who and what to forgive.”

Mandela set the example of forgiveness. When he gave Chelsea and me a tour of the prison on Robben Island where he was confined for eighteen years, Mandela explained that he had years to think about what he would do when and if he got out. He went through his own truth and reconciliation process, which led him to make the remarkable statement I had heard at his inauguration when he introduced three of his former jailers. Forgiveness is not an easy task anywhere, anytime. The loss of life or liberty is always painful, more so if it results from what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the stale bread of hatred.”

For most of us mere mortals, forgiveness is harder to summon than the desire to settle old scores. Mandela showed the world how to make the choice to forgive and move forward.

Like the rest of the continent, South Africa still has to contend with overwhelming poverty, crime and disease, but I was encouraged by the hope I saw in the faces of students―

from the uniform-clad children learning English in a classroom in Soweto (thanks, in part, to a USAID project) to the budding scientists and poets at the University of Cape Town. And when I gave a speech on a dusty patch of land at the edge of Cape Town, I met women who were actually building a better future for themselves and their children. With ceremonial markings painted on their faces and voices raised in song, they pushed wheelbarrows, poured concrete and mixed paint for their new dwellings. Homeless squatters who had lived in deplorable conditions, they had formed their own housing and credit association, modeled on the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India that I had visited. Pooling their savings, they bought shovels, paint and cement, learned how to lay foundations and put in a sewer line and started their own community. When Chelsea and I visited, they had built 18 homes; when I brought Bill there a year later, there were 104. I loved a line from one of their songs that translated roughly as “Strength, money and knowledge―we cannot do anything without them.” Good advice for women everywhere.

I left South Africa well aware of the challenges its leaders faced, yet optimistic about its future. But in Zimbabwe, its landlocked northern neighbor, I found a country whose great promise was being stunted by disastrous leadership. Robert Mugabe, the head of state since the country’s independence in 1980, had grown increasingly autocratic and hostile to his perceived enemies. President Mugabe said little during my courtesy visit with him in the presidential residence in the capital, Harare. He paid close attention to his young wife, Grace, while I made conversation with her, and he periodically broke into giggles for no apparent reason. I left believing that he was dangerously unstable and hoping he would relinquish power. My opinion has been borne out in recent years, as Mugabe has suppressed all political opposition and sanctioned a terror campaign to drive white farmers off their land and to intimidate blacks who challenge him. He has plunged his people into chaos and famine.

I later met with a group of women in politics, the professions and business at an art gallery in Harare. They described the tension that exists between the rights they hold on paper and the ancient customs and attitudes that still prevail. They recounted stories of women being beaten by their spouses for having “bad manners” or wearing pants. One woman summed up the problems they faced: “As long as you have a law that a man can have two wives, but a woman cannot have two husbands, you are not dealing with reality.”

I left Harare feeling dispirited at the deterioration of services and facilities and the manifest failures of a leader who had stayed too long in power. But my spirits lifted at our next stop, Victoria Falls, where the Zambezi River cascades into a magnificent gorge.

Chelsea and I walked through mist rising from the pounding waters, and watched it turn to shimmering rainbows in the morning sun. Africa’s breathtaking beauty and natural resources must be protected while economic opportunities for people expand. But that is no simple challenge, as I learned during my visit to Tanzania, a sprawling East African country formed in 1964 from two former colonies whose names entranced me as a child: Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In the capital, Dar es Salaam, I met President Benjamin Mkapa, a cheerful former journalist who had worked hard to develop a national economy that benefited from the country’s natural resources and strategic location on the Indian Ocean. With the vigorous assent of his wife, Anna Mkapa, and the women ministers in attendance at our meeting, I encouraged the president to eliminate laws that limited women from owning and inheriting property, restrictions that not only were unfair but hobbled the economic potential of half the country’s population. In 1999, Tanzania passed the Land Law Act and the Village Act, repealing and replacing the laws that had previously discriminated against women.

Tanzania is also a crucial actor in bringing peace and stability to war-torn central Africa.

In Arusha, I visited the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was investigating genocide. The success of this tribunal, which has the power to try and punish war criminals, is vitally important for all Africans, but especially for women and children, who are often the first victims of civil strife. In Rwanda, rape and sexual assault were committed on a mass scale, tactical weapons in the genocidal violence that raged there in 1994. In Kampala, Uganda, I met with a delegation of Rwandan women whose soft, musical voices belied the horrors they had survived. One young woman described how, after being attacked with a machete, she tried to reattach her partially severed arm with string while she futilely sought medical care. When infection inevitably set in, she hacked off the arm herself. The women gave me a photo album filled with pictures of bones, skulls, dazed survivors, and orphaned children. I could barely force myself to look. I regret deeply the failure of the world, including my husband’s administration, to act to end the genocide.

Uganda was memorable for other reasons. In the face of the African AIDS epidemic, Uganda’s government made a commitment to prevent the spread of the HIV virus through an intervention and education campaign. The consequences of the global AIDS

pandemic were and still are most severely felt in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that accounts for 70 percent of all the world’s HIV/AIDS cases. Every segment of society has been affected by the crisis. In some of the worst hit countries, such as Uganda, infant mortality was rising at alarming rates in the late 1990s and life expectancy was plunging.

Economies were suffering under the weight of shrinking workforces and overburdened health care systems. During Bill’s Administration, the U.S. tripled funding for international AIDS programs in just two years for prevention, care and treatment, and health infrastructure.

USAID increased condom distribution, providing one billion around the world, and the U.S. worked with other countries to create and fund a broad global partnership, the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS, which has developed coordinated strategies for fighting the disease. Acknowledging Africa’s urgent needs, Bill signed an Executive Order to help make HIV/AIDS-related drugs and medical technologies more affordable and accessible in beneficiary sub-Saharan African countries. The Peace Corps began training all 2,400 volunteers in Africa as AIDS educators.

With USAID support, a pioneering anonymous testing and counseling center in sub-Saharan Africa was established in Kampala. As I drove in from the airport at Entebbe, I saw billboards touting the ABCs of AIDS prevention: Abstain, Be faithful or wear a Condom. The campaign was led by Uganda’s charismatic President, Yoweri Museveni, who believed in confronting head-on problems that traditionally had been ignored and neglected in the rest of the continent. Equally involved in the campaign against AIDS