[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 13 (Monday, March 30, 1998)]
[Pages 483-486]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the People of Ghana in Accra

March 23, 1998

    Thank you. President and Mrs. Rawlings, honorable ministers, 
honorable members of the Council of State, honorable Members of 
Parliament, honorable members of the Judiciary, nananom [to the chiefs], 
and the people of Ghana. Mitsea mu. America fuo kyia mo [My greetings to 
you. Greetings from America]. Now you have shown me what akwaaba 
[welcome] really means. Thank you, thank you so much.

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    I am proud to be the first American President ever to visit Ghana 
and to go on to Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Senegal. It 
is a journey long overdue. America should have done it before, and I am 
proud to be on that journey. Thank you for welcoming me.
    I want to listen and to learn. I want to build a future partnership 
between our two people, and I want to introduce the people of the United 
States, through my trip, to the new face of Africa. From Kampala to Cape 
Town, from Dakar to Dar-Es-Salaam, Africans are being stirred by new 
hopes for democracy and peace and prosperity.
    Challenges remain, but they must be to all of you a call to action, 
not a cause for despair. You must draw strength from the past and energy 
from the promise of a new future. My dream for this trip is that 
together we might do the things so that, 100 years from now, your 
grandchildren and mine will look back and say this was the beginning of 
a new African renaissance.
    With a new century coming into view, old patterns are fading away: 
The cold war is gone; colonialism is gone; apartheid is gone. Remnants 
of past troubles remain. But surely, there will come a time when 
everywhere reconciliation will replace recrimination. Now, nations and 
individuals finally are free to seek a newer world where democracy and 
peace and prosperity are not slogans but the essence of a new Africa.
    Africa has changed so much in just 10 years. Dictatorship has been 
replaced so many places. Half of the 48 nations in sub-Saharan Africa 
choose their own governments, leading a new generation willing to learn 
from the past and imagine a future. Though democracy has not yet gained 
a permanent foothold even in most successful nations, there is 
everywhere a growing respect for tolerance, diversity, and elemental 
human rights. A decade ago, business was stifled. Now, Africans are 
embracing economic reform. Today from Ghana to Mozambique, from Cote 
d'Ivoire to Uganda, growing economies are fueling a transformation in 
Africa.
    For all this promise, you and I know Africa is not free from peril: 
the genocide in Rwanda; civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, both 
Congos; pariah states that export violence and terror; military 
dictatorship in Nigeria; and high levels of poverty, malnutrition, 
disease, illiteracy, and unemployment. To fulfill the vast promise of a 
new era, Africa must face these challenges. We must build classrooms and 
companies, increase the food supply and save the environment, and 
prevent disease before deadly epidemics break out.
    The United States is ready to help you. First, my fellow Americans 
must leave behind the stereotypes that have warped our view and weakened 
our understanding of Africa. We need to come to know Africa as a place 
of new beginning and ancient wisdom from which, as my wife, our First 
Lady, said in her book, we have so much to learn. It is time for 
Americans to put a new Africa on our map.
    Here in Independence Square, Ghana blazed the path of that new 
Africa. More than four decades ago, Kwame Nkrumah proposed what he 
called a ``motion of destiny'' as Ghana stepped forward as a free and 
independent nation. Today, Ghana again lights the way for Africa. 
Democracy is spreading. Business is growing. Trade and investment are 
rising. Ghana has the only African-owned company today on our New York 
Stock Exchange.
    You have worked hard to preserve the peace in Africa and around the 
world--from Liberia to Lebanon, from Croatia to Cambodia. And you have 
given the world a statesman and peacemaker in Kofi Annan to lead the 
United Nations. The world admires your success. The United States 
admires your success. We see it taking root throughout the new Africa. 
And we stand ready to support it.
    First, we want to work with Africa to nurture democracy, knowing it 
is never perfect or complete. We have learned in over 200 years that 
every day democracy must be defended and a more perfect union can always 
lie ahead. Democracy requires more than the insults and injustice and 
inequality that so many societies have known and America has known. 
Democracy requires human rights for everyone, everywhere, for men and

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women, for children and the elderly, for people of different cultures 
and tribes and backgrounds. A good society honors its entire family.
    Second, democracy must have prosperity. Americans of both political 
parties want to increase trade and investment in Africa. We have an 
``African Growth and Opportunity Act'' now before Congress. Both 
parties' leadership are supporting it. By opening markets and building 
businesses and creating jobs, we can help and strengthen each other. By 
supporting the education of your people, we can strengthen your future 
and help each other. For centuries, other nations exploited Africa's 
gold, Africa's diamonds, Africa's minerals. Now is the time for Africans 
to cultivate something more precious, the mind and heart of the people 
of Africa, through education.
    Third, we must allow democracy and prosperity to take root without 
violence. We must work to resolve the war and genocide that still tear 
at the heart of Africa. We must help Africans to prevent future 
conflicts.
    Here in Ghana, you have shown the world that different peoples can 
live together in harmony. You have proved that Africans of different 
countries can unite to help solve disputes in neighboring countries. 
Peace everywhere in Africa will give more free time and more money to 
the pressing needs of our children's future. The killing must stop if a 
new future is to begin.
    Fourth and finally, for peace and prosperity and democracy to 
prevail, you must protect your magnificent natural domain. Africa is 
mankind's first home. We all came out of Africa. We must preserve the 
magnificent natural environment that is left. We must manage the water 
and forest. We must learn to live in harmony with other species. You 
must learn how to fight drought and famine and global warming. And we 
must share with you the technology that will enable you to preserve your 
environment and provide more economic opportunity to your people.
    America has good reason to work with Africa: 30 million Americans, 
more than one in ten, proudly trace their heritage here. The first Peace 
Corps volunteers from America came to Ghana over 35 years ago; over 
57,000 have served in Africa since then. Through blood ties and common 
endeavors, we know we share the same hopes and dreams to provide for 
ourselves and our children, to live in peace and worship freely, to 
build a better life than our parents knew and pass a brighter future on 
to our children. America needs Africa, America needs Ghana as a partner 
in the fight for a better future.
    So many of our problems do not stop at any nation's border, 
international crime and terrorism and drug trafficking, the degradation 
of the environment, the spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria, and so 
many of our opportunities cannot stop at a nation's border. We need 
partners to deepen the meaning of democracy in America, in Africa, and 
throughout the world. We need partners to build prosperity. We need 
partners to live in peace. We will not build this new partnership 
overnight, but perseverance creates its own reward.
    An Ashanti proverb tells us that by coming and going, a bird builds 
its nest. We will come and go with you and do all we can as you build 
the new Africa, a work that must begin here in Africa, not with aid or 
trade, though they are important, but first with ordinary citizens, 
especially the young people in this audience today. You must feel the 
winds of freedom blowing at your back, pushing you onward to a brighter 
future.
    There are roughly 700 days left until the end of this century and 
the beginning of a new millennium. There are roughly 700 million 
Africans in sub-Saharan Africa. Every day and every individual is a 
precious opportunity. We do not have a moment to lose, and we do not 
have a person to lose.
    I ask you, my friends, to let me indulge a moment of our shared 
history in closing. In 1957 our great civil rights leader, Martin Luther 
King, came to Accra to help represent our country as Ghana celebrated 
its independence. He was deeply moved by the birth of your nation.
    Six years later, on the day after W.E.B. Du Bois died here in Ghana 
in 1963, Dr. King spoke to an enormous gathering like this in 
Washington. He said these simple words: ``I have a dream, a dream that 
all Americans might live free and equal as brothers and sisters.'' His 
dream became the dream of our Nation and changed us in ways

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we could never have imagined. We are hardly finished, but we have 
traveled a long way on the wings of that dream.
    Dr. Du Bois, a towering African-American intellectual, died here as 
a citizen of Ghana and a friend of Kwame Nkrumah. He once wrote, ``The 
habit of democracy must be to encircle the Earth.'' Let us together 
resolve to complete the circle of democracy, to dream the dream that all 
people on the entire Earth will be free and equal, to begin a new 
century with that commitment to freedom and justice for all, to redeem 
the promise inscribed right here on Independence Arch. Let us find a 
future here in Africa, the cradle of humanity.
    Medase. America dase [I thank you. America thanks you]. Thank you, 
and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:40 a.m. in Independence Square. In his 
remarks he referred to Nana Konadu Rawlings, wife of President Rawlings.