Jimmy Carter said, “Our country has ignored Africa,” but he didn’t.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president to make a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa. He once called helping Zimbabwe’s transition from white rule to independence “our greatest success.” And when he died at age 100, his foundation’s work in rural Africa had nearly reached its quest to eliminate a disease that affected millions, for the first time since the eradication of smallpox.

The African continent, a booming region with a population rivaling that of China and 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 days of the so-called ugly American are over,” Carter said during his warm reception in 1978 in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. He said the official state visit had swept away “past indifference from the United States,” and he joked that he and Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo would embark on peanut farming together.

Cold War tensions brought Carter’s attention to the continent as the United States and the Soviet Union vied 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 has ignored Africa,” Carter told the Democratic National Committee during his first year as president.

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

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PHOTOS: “Our country has ignored Africa,” Jimmy Carter said. He didn’t do it

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“There is an air of invigorating freshness,” said visiting Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda.

Carter observed after his first trip to Africa: “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 with the two great superpowers as well as with the European nations. We don’t want to choose sides.

This theme is echoed today as China also battles with Russia and the United States for influence and access to African raw materials. But neither superpower has had an emissary like Carter, who placed human rights at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and made 43 additional trips to the continent after his presidency, promoting Carter Center projects. aimed at empowering Africans to determine their 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.

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

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

Carter hailed Zimbabwe’s independence 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 he spent more time in Rhodesia than in the entire Middle East. And when you look at the archives and the administration, you actually find more information about southern Africa than the Middle East,” said historian and author Nancy Mitchell.

Relations with Mugabe’s government deteriorated rapidly amid a deadly crackdown, and in 1986 Carter led a diplomats’ walkout in the capital. In 2008, Carter was barred from entering Zimbabwe, a first on his trip. He called the country a “desperate case, an embarrassment to the region.”

“Whatever Zimbabwean leaders think of him today, Zimbabweans, at least those who were around in the 1970s and 1980s, will always consider him an icon and a tenacious promoter of democracy,” said Eldred Masunungure, a Harare-based politician. analyst.

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

The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter think tank, founded in 1982, played a key role in observing African elections and brokering ceasefires between warring forces, but fighting disease was the third pillar of the work of the Carter Center.

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

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

Carter’s quest included arranging a four-month “ceasefire” in Sudan in 1995 so that the Carter Center could reach nearly 2,000 endemic villages.

“He taught us a lot about faith,” said Makoy Samuel Yibi, who runs the dracunculiasis eradication program for South Sudan’s health ministry and grew up with people who believed the disease was simply their destiny. “Even the poor call these people poor, you see. That the leader of the free world pays attention to them and tries to elevate them is a touching virtue.

Such dedication has impressed health officials 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 AP. Ethiopia, the continent’s second most populous country with more than 110 million people, recorded no cases of dracunculiasis in 2023.

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Associated Press journalists Farai Mutsaka in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Michael Warren in Atlanta contributed.