Jimmy Carter made 43 trips to Africa during his life. He is remembered for his fight to suppress infectious diseases such as the previously common smallpox.
The former president Jimmy Carter’s state funerals continue today for the second day in the United States.
The life work of the president, who died at the age of 100, is remembered all over the world, especially in Africa.
Unlike his successors, Carter, during his term in office from 1977 to 1981 and beyond, made relations with the rapidly developing continent a priority.
He visited sub-Saharan Africa, Liberia, as the first US president in 1978. He met with African leaders already during his senatorial term.
– We have ignored Africa for too long, Carter told the Democratic National Committee in his first year in office.
Among the current leaders of the United States, the president Joe Biden visited Angola and Cape Verde last year. Before that, President Barack Obama visited Kenya and Ethiopia in 2015.
The bitter history of the cotton fields influenced the interest in Africa
According to experts The formation of Carter’s African policy was partly influenced by his youthful experiences in Georgia.
In the southern state, racial discrimination was common in the 1920s and 1930s. American Civil War the legacy still seemed strong. The northern states had demanded the abolition of forced slave labor and civil rights from the southern cotton plantation owners.
In international politics, the aftermath of the Cold War was experienced during the Carter period. The West and the Soviet Union argued about the division of the African states’ interests. Natural resources were already of interest to the great powers at that time. However, President Carter kept human rights prominent in US foreign policy.
He emphasized the right of Africa to decide the direction of its future. The president strongly supported, for example, Zimbabwe’s transition from a British colony and white minority rule to an independent state in 1980.
From supporting the independence of Zimbabwe to the curfew
He characterized the transformation of the former Rhodesia as “the greatest single success”.
Relations with the independence leader and the first prime minister to Robert Mugabe however, weakened in the 1980s. Mugabe ruled the country derailed into economic chaos with autocratic measures, and Carter, who was working as a diplomat, was even banned from entering the country.
In Nigeria, the world’s most populous country, Carter received a very warm welcome during his state visit in 1978. He joked that he would start nut farming with his host’s president Olesegun Obasanjo’s with. The president’s family, like many other Georgians, worked in nut production.
Many African leaders received invitations to the White House.
– There is an encouraging and refreshing freshness in the air, praised the president of Zambia, who visited Washington Kenneth Kaunda.
African health promoter
The former president’s Africa orientations are relevant again, when China’s interest in Africa’s natural resources and markets is also growing. The race is on. Improving healthcare is also still topical.
The foundation, founded by President Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter in 1982, has long-term activities such as election observation and peace promotion. The foundation also fights to eradicate tropical diseases.
Carter declared his special goal to eradicate dracunculiasis, caused by a parasitic worm, from humanity. The disease is also known as guinea worm. It is contracted from dirty drinking water.
In this goal, the president succeeded almost perfectly. For example, in the second most populous country in Africa, Ethiopia with 110 million inhabitants, not a single infection was found in the second year, in 2023.
AP