Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry's tour of Africa was a many-splendored thing. While the city for which he is nominally responsible continues to wallow in debt and scandalous mismanagement, the four-term former felon and his wife enjoyed an all-expenses-paid nine-day trip to the African/African- American summit in Zimbabwe (courtesy of summit organizer Rev. Leon Sullivan). Cora Masters Barry did her best to ingratiate the couple along the way. In Johannesburg, she said she felt "I'm just home. And it's good," she added, " when I turn around and look, that there are so many people who look like me and that they are running things, without someone else telling them what to do."
Of course, her words probably won't ingratiate her husband with the District's overseers on Capitol Hill, or with Andrew F. Brimmer, chairman of the D.C. financial control board, who was appointed to clean up Marion Barry's mess.
Brimmer also was along at the summit, albeit on his own dime. According to the Washington Post, Brimmer and Barry found plenty of occasions to spar. First Barry challenged Brimmer's endorsement of free-market reforms for Africa. Then, as the Post's Vernon Loeb reported, Brimmer embarrassed the Afrophile mayor with "a lesson on Victoria Falls -- a natural wonder several hundred miles west of Harare -- and scolded him for not knowing African geography.
"It literally creates rain," Brimmer said of the falls, "so you've got all the vegetation of a rainforest."
"'Where does the water come from?'
"'The Zambezi River,' Brimmer replied. 'one of the biggest rivers in Africa. '"
Also at the summit was a delegation of failed pols picked by President Clinton to promote his trade measures with Africa: Jesse Jackson, former New York City mayor David Dinkins, and Jack Kemp. Kemp fulfilled his endorsement duties on CNN. "This is a really new day. It's a new day as to how the United States looks at the continent of Africa in a post-colonial, post-Cold War world. It's got to be investment, trade, and education."
Hmm. How about a continental Empowerment Zone, with Marion Barry as administrator? After all, as Rev. Sullivan pointed out after Barry finished a speech in Harare, "This is his audience, this is his constituency."