Bexley grad advises Clinton on U.S. policy toward Africa

By Barbara Carmen
Columbus Dispatch

When President Clinton flew home from Nigeria last month with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, another passenger on Air Force One pushed her work aside just long enough to enjoy the moment

Not bad for a Bexley High School cheerleader.

In high school, Gayle E. Smith learned little about Africa: the Nile was there.

Today, as President Clinton’s national security adviser for African affairs, Smith guides policy and enjoys a front-row seat to history.

She’s watched Africa struggle to survive war, genocide and famine. And she has played a key role as Africa becomes a player in the global economy.

“Contrary to perceptions of Africa as a disaster, dependent, it is anything but that,” she said. “I have never encountered people in my life who have so inspired me.”

Through the years, Connie and Harrison Smith have worried about their middle child. Her letters have mentioned she was sneaking behind rebel lines in a war zone to make sure aid arrived.

Today, their voices convey pride. At 44, Gayle is a key member of the administration and a passionate voice for strengthening U.S. ties with Africa when a simmering feud between Uganda and Rwanda about how to end a rebellion in Congo erupted in battle last year, Clinton dispatched her to Kigali and Kampala. She helped engineer a cease-fire that lasted nine months.

When Sierra Leone melted down into a violent civil war in May, she cut short a visit with her parents and caught the next plane for Washington.

When an embassy blows up, her beeper goes off.

She joined the administration in 1994 as an adviser. Two years ago, she became special assistant to the president and  “How she got there is kind of interesting,” Harrison Smith said. “We’d sent her to Europe as a college graduation gift. Next thing we know, we get a letter saying, ‘I’m going to Egypt to get a job.”’

That was 20 years ago. She went to Africa as an editor for Sudan Now. She befriended refugees from Eritrea and north Ethiopia.

They would invite her for dinner and tell their stories. She learned the politics and the history, and began covering the war for American newspapers.        

“My first year, we walked from eastern Sudan for months,” she said. “Mostly we walked at night because they bombed during the day. You’d start walking at 5 in the afternoon and stop at 3:30 in the morning and kind of lie down wherever you were and go to sleep.        

“During the day, you could interview people and go to villages. But you didn’t move around a lot. And you didn’t wear earrings or a watch because it would reflect the sunlight. There was a lot of bombing, though they weren’t very accurate.”        

Smith learned to tell the difference between the sounds of incoming and outgoing fire. And she learned Tigrinya, the language in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.

“You’d be walking along with all these fighters, and you’d really want to talk with them. ‘Why did you put your life on the line?’”

As war raged, farmers fled. Famine followed. Smith, by then working for church-based aid agencies, went into rebel areas where government and the United Nations could not operate. Her job was to ensure that help went where it was intended.

“To see grandmothers, women who IN had raised families and worked very hard with very little, it got to the point where they ate dirt,” she said.     

The central government then bombed the relief centers to prevent aid from going to areas controlled by rebels.

“So you’d be sitting in a relief center and the MiGs would be flying overhead. I mean, how bad can it get for any human being?

“When I would come back to the states, it was hard to believe the reality here and the reality there could have been put on the same planet.”

She stayed in Africa, traveling to Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and Congo, before joining the National Security Council in the White House two years ago.

“The president had decided that the U.S. ought to engage in Africa much more substantially,’ she said.

Her first words to Clinton were memorable.

She said, “Nice hair.” He laughed.

She loves working for him. Her job includes providing the president with information and helping coordinate American policy.

“President Clinton has done two things which are extraordinary,” Smith said. “One is to look at Africa with equality. “The other is to recognize that it is in our best interest to engage in Africa. You can’t just proceed with a global economy and leave 700 million people in the dust.”

And Gayle Smith has helped make sure that that won’t happen.