A conversation with former president William Jefferson Clinton in Africa—and about Africa: since leaving the White House, he continues to focus on the continent

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Earlier this year, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, heading a delegation of the William J. Clinton Foundation, made what has now become an annual humanitarian trip to four African countries. The nine-day tour through South Africa, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania focused on the foundation's ongoing work on HIV/AIDS, malaria and other health-care initiatives and economic development in those countries. EBONY Senior Editor Sylvester Monroe and Staff Photographer Valerie Goodloe traveled with Clinton. The following are excerpts from a wide-ranging, hour-long interview in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in which he talked about--among many other subjects--the good news out of Africa, including the work of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, the disconnection between Africa and African-Americans find lessons African-Americans might take from the hopeful work of developing post-colonial Africa.

EBONY: Why should the average American, Black or White, care about Africa?

CLINTON: I think there are several reasons. First of all, we have deep historical ties to Africa. Most all African-Americans literally trace their ancestry there, you know; a handful cannot go back farther than some place in the Caribbean. But nearly everybody, if you take a DNA test, we could all trace our ancestry back to Africa.

But secondly, Africa represents an enormous opportunity for America. You know, in a world that is increasingly interdependent, even if we never adopt another trade bill, there is going to be more trade, there is going to be more investment. If we want to maintain our middle-class lifestyle, and with 4 percent of the world's population, and 25 percent of its gross domestic product, we've got to sell some things to other people ...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If you're thinking 10, 15 years down the road, we need Africa as a partner. What would we do if things went south with China? What would we do if India and Pakistan got in a protracted conflict? What if everything else went bad, Africans would be the most reliable partners we had ...

But for whatever reason, this is one part of the world where people still think pretty highly of Americans. And if we help them deal with the health-care issues and we help get their children in schools and support strategies that we know will help them grow the economy, then we'll have a region with more partners and fewer terrorists, and we'll have a future that we can share. So this is in our direct and immediate interest ...

The point is Americans should care. And they should want a percentage of our tax money spent helping Africans help themselves out of the extreme poverty, the disease, the lack of education opportunities, because they will be better strategic partners and better economic partners and because we have a historical obligation there.

EBONY: Most of what we hear in the American media about Africa is HIV/AIDS, war, genocide, famine and leadership corruption ...

CLINTON: Yeah, but there is another Africa out there.

EBONY: That's my question. What is the good news?

CLINTON: There is another Africa out there, even though I work on these problems. I work on these problems so that more Africans can be liberated and claim the good Africa.... Take Rwanda, devastated by the 1994 genocide; now look at what they're doing. They're growing rapidly; they have all kinds of partners, including [Microsoft's] Bill Gates and me. They've opened themselves to the world. They've even developed a film industry, for goodness sakes. They've got everything in the world going for them. They're well organized and moving forward ...

There is a positive African success story. There's still too much poverty, there's still too much AIDS, TB and malaria and tropical illnesses. There are still too many children who aren't in school. There's still Darfur and the scars of the wars in the Congo and Sierra Leone, and there's still too much corruption. But there's an increasing capacity, increasing education, increasing health care and increasing sophisticated understandings among people in government about how to grow the economy.

There is another African story, and one of the reasons I do this work, now that we do development work ha Malawi and Rwanda. I like it because it's just not working against problems; we're working for opportunities. We're going to be able to do economics, education and even health care. Even in the health-care thing, that's an economic boon and an opportunity. If you saw what we were doing in Malawi, building that hospital and that housing for health-care workers, one of the things we did was to help create the other Africa and have 500 construction jobs, and a bunch of them went to women.

Women in Africa, in a rural African nation being trained to be construction workers, and that's really a story I hope you can tell. This is not a hopeless situation here; yes, there are a lot of problems, but the biggest problem here is not corruption. The biggest problem here is incapacity, the lack of organized systems. The sort of things that all your readers, even your low-income readers [have], but the opportunity is markedly greater [for them] than for most of these African kids. I believe if we give them a chance to define their future and to claim it, we'll all be better off.