Obama brings Africans pride and a challenge

ACCRA, Ghana -- President Barack Obama expressed pride on visiting the continent of his father yesterday. He challenged its people to shed corruption and conflict in favor of peace.

Campaigning to all of Africa, he said, "Yes you can."

"I say this knowing full well the tragic past that has sometimes haunted this part of the world," Obama told a riveted Ghanaian Parliament. "I have the blood of Africa within me."

In the faces of those who lined the streets and in many of Obama's own words, this trip was personal. Beyond his message, the story was his presence -- the first black U.S. president coming to poor, proud, predominantly black sub-Sahara Africa for his first time in office.

The emotional touchstone of his visit was a tour of Cape Coast Castle, the cannon-lined fortress where slaves were kept in squalid dungeons, then shipped in chains to America through a "Door of No Return" that opens to the sea.

Obama, whose father was Kenyan, absorbed the experience with his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia.

"I'll never forget the image of my two young daughters, the descendants of Africans and African-Americans, walking through those doors of no return but then walking back [through] those doors," he said later at a grand departure ceremony.

"It was a remarkable reminder that, while the future is unknowable, the winds always blow in the direction of human progress."

The White House said Obama held no big public events in a city frenzied to see him because Obama wanted to put the light on Africa, not himself. But reality proved otherwise.

Obama billboards dotted the roads. Women wore dresses made of cloth bearing his image. Tribal chiefs, lawmakers, church leaders, street vendors -- to them, it felt like history.

"All Ghanaians want to see you," said Ghana's president, John Atta Mills, before feting Obama to a breakfast banquet of hundreds of guests at the coastal presidential castle.

To their disappointment, most people did not see him. The lack of open events and the heavy security kept many in this West African nation away from Obama. They watched him on TV.

Overall, there was no dampening the tone of joy. Headlines screamed of Obama fever.

"It makes us proud of Ghana," said Richard Kwasi-Yeboah, a 49-year-old selling posters of the American president. "We're proud he chose us. It proves that Ghana is really free."

Obama's message yesterday was that African nations crippled by coups and chaos, as Ghana has been in the past, can reshape themselves into lawful democracies. He said it takes good governance, sustained development and improved health care.

And, he said, the moment is now.

"Africa doesn't need strongmen," Obama said. "It needs strong institutions."

Obama bluntly told Africa to take more responsibility for itself but proclaimed: "America will be with you."

Obama also got openly personal -- recalling the grandfather who endured being called "boy" as a cook for the British in Kenya, the father who once herded goats in a small Kenyan village.

When Obama left after addressing Parliament, a choir sang a song to his campaign theme of "Yes we can," a line he used himself.

Evoking the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Obama noted that King was in Ghana in 1957 to hail Ghana's independence from the British. He quoted King as calling the moment a triumph of justice,and told young Africans they must remember that.

"You can conquer disease, end conflicts and make change from the bottom up," Obama said. "You can do that. Yes you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move."

Ghana and the U.S. have something of a diplomatic kinship. Obama is the third straight U.S. president to visit this tropical nation; George W. Bush was here just last year.

That reflects just how much the United States wants this country to be a model of democracy and invests tens of millions of tax dollars to help it.

Obama will return to Africa. But he suggested that he won't go for the traditional reason of devoting a trip to Africa alone -- treating it as if it is separate from world affairs -- but as part of his multinational travels.

"What happens here," he said, "has an impact everywhere."