Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

spouses for having “bad manners” or wearing pants. One woman summed up the problems they faced: “As long as you have a law that a man can have two wives, but a woman cannot have two husbands, you are not dealing with reality.”

I left Harare feeling dispirited at the deterioration of services and facilities and the manifest failures of a leader who had stayed too long in power. But my spirits lifted at our next stop, Victoria Falls, where the Zambezi River cascades into a magnificent gorge.

Chelsea and I walked through mist rising from the pounding waters, and watched it turn to shimmering rainbows in the morning sun. Africa’s breathtaking beauty and natural resources must be protected while economic opportunities for people expand. But that is no simple challenge, as I learned during my visit to Tanzania, a sprawling East African country formed in 1964 from two former colonies whose names entranced me as a child: Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In the capital, Dar es Salaam, I met President Benjamin Mkapa, a cheerful former journalist who had worked hard to develop a national economy that benefited from the country’s natural resources and strategic location on the Indian Ocean. With the vigorous assent of his wife, Anna Mkapa, and the women ministers in attendance at our meeting, I encouraged the president to eliminate laws that limited women from owning and inheriting property, restrictions that not only were unfair but hobbled the economic potential of half the country’s population. In 1999, Tanzania passed the Land Law Act and the Village Act, repealing and replacing the laws that had previously discriminated against women.

Tanzania is also a crucial actor in bringing peace and stability to war-torn central Africa.

In Arusha, I visited the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was investigating genocide. The success of this tribunal, which has the power to try and punish war criminals, is vitally important for all Africans, but especially for women and children, who are often the first victims of civil strife. In Rwanda, rape and sexual assault were committed on a mass scale, tactical weapons in the genocidal violence that raged there in 1994. In Kampala, Uganda, I met with a delegation of Rwandan women whose soft, musical voices belied the horrors they had survived. One young woman described how, after being attacked with a machete, she tried to reattach her partially severed arm with string while she futilely sought medical care. When infection inevitably set in, she hacked off the arm herself. The women gave me a photo album filled with pictures of bones, skulls, dazed survivors, and orphaned children. I could barely force myself to look. I regret deeply the failure of the world, including my husband’s administration, to act to end the genocide.

Uganda was memorable for other reasons. In the face of the African AIDS epidemic, Uganda’s government made a commitment to prevent the spread of the HIV virus through an intervention and education campaign. The consequences of the global AIDS

pandemic were and still are most severely felt in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that accounts for 70 percent of all the world’s HIV/AIDS cases. Every segment of society has been affected by the crisis. In some of the worst hit countries, such as Uganda, infant mortality was rising at alarming rates in the late 1990s and life expectancy was plunging.

Economies were suffering under the weight of shrinking workforces and overburdened health care systems. During Bill’s Administration, the U.S. tripled funding for international AIDS programs in just two years for prevention, care and treatment, and health infrastructure.

USAID increased condom distribution, providing one billion around the world, and the U.S. worked with other countries to create and fund a broad global partnership, the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS, which has developed coordinated strategies for fighting the disease. Acknowledging Africa’s urgent needs, Bill signed an Executive Order to help make HIV/AIDS-related drugs and medical technologies more affordable and accessible in beneficiary sub-Saharan African countries. The Peace Corps began training all 2,400 volunteers in Africa as AIDS educators.

With USAID support, a pioneering anonymous testing and counseling center in sub-Saharan Africa was established in Kampala. As I drove in from the airport at Entebbe, I saw billboards touting the ABCs of AIDS prevention: Abstain, Be faithful or wear a Condom. The campaign was led by Uganda’s charismatic President, Yoweri Museveni, who believed in confronting head-on problems that traditionally had been ignored and neglected in the rest of the continent. Equally involved in the campaign against AIDS

was Museveni’s wife, Janet, who was an active participant in the National Prayer breakfast.

When I helped dedicate the AIDS Information Center, I learned from an American doctor there that the policy of testing and providing results in the same day, pioneered at the clinic, was being put to use in the United States. Our foreign assistance was advancing the search for a vaccine and cure in Uganda, and the U.S. was also benefiting.

No issue is more critical in Africa than stopping the ongoing conflicts―tribal, religious and national―that destroy lives and impede progress on every front. Eritrea is Africa’s newest nation, a democracy born out of a thirty-year civil war of independence from Ethiopia, in which women fought alongside men. As I stepped off the plane in Asmara, I saw a red, white and blue banner that said, YES, IT DOES TAKE A VILLAGE.

Women in brilliantly colored dresses greeted me by throwing popcorn at me, a welcoming practice meant to protect visitors from evil forces and to assure good fortune. As we drove from the airport, another large banner proclaimed, WELCOME, SISTER.

The President of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, and his wife, Saba Haile, a former freedom fighter, lived in their own small house, but they received me at the Presidential Palace. As we watched folk dancers perform in a courtyard built by the Italians during their colonial occupation, I asked President Afwerki, who had given up his university studies to fight in the resistance, if he had ever found time to dance during their long war. “Of