The neglected continent

CELEBRITY GOSSIP can dominate the Republican presidential primary, from Fred Thompson's acting to Rudy Giuliani's marriages, so it's a challenge to be Senator Sam Brownback, conservative candidate from Kansas, taking a thoughtful stand on the important but unpopular issue of Africa.

"I fundamentally believe that we're at an Africa-centric moment," Brownback said yesterday during an interview at the Globe. He made a case that, for its own self-interest, the United States should pay more attention to Africa's people and politics, and to its growing economic relationship with China.

Offering a travel alert for tourists and students, Brownback said, "Don't take the cruise," but go to Rwanda instead. It will cost the same and they'll be deeply changed by the trip. Brownback himself has visited Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Congo, and talked to refugees, women who were gang-raped, and a local leader who wanted to rebuild roads, bridges, and power plants.

Last night, Brownback was scheduled to be the first presidential candidate - Democrat or Republican - to speak at a lecture series sponsored by Boston University's African Presidential Archives and Research Center. The name of his talk: Africa, Al Qaeda, and US Security: How Better US-Africa Relations Benefit US Security Interests.

Such lectures are a chance to shed television's sound bite limits and instead talk substance. And with Africa, one topic has to be oil. Africa provides the United States with roughly 19 percent of its oil imports, according to the US Department of Energy.

"If you don't have a plan to engage Africa, you don't have a national security plan," says Charles Stith, former ambassador to Tanzania and the director of BU's African presidential center.

Stith argues engaging Africa is a chance to better connect to its Muslim community - to show the world the war in Iraq is not a war on Islam. And in addition to dealing with glaring emergencies such as AIDS and Darfur, Stith says, the United States should invest more in Africa's infrastructure, in its teachers, telecommunications, and healthcare.

Acting with similar concerns, Brownback championed a "neglected diseases" amendment that has become law. It encourages pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for sleeping sickness, river blindness, and other illnesses that afflict Africa but get little commercial attention because there's so little profit. In return, participating companies get faster Food and Drug Administration assessment of more lucrative drugs.

Low in the polls, Brownback may not come close to winning his party's nomination. Instead, his victory may be in prompting the United States to modernize its Africa policy.