2011 Peace Prize Winner Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf struggles toward re-election.

After a storm, Liberia is beautiful. The West African country founded by freed American slaves is better known for 14 years of civil war that introduced child soldiers into the global lexicon, and sent ripples of toxic violence throughout the region. The storm has passed. From the rooftop of the gorgeous-but-gutted Ducor Hotel, you can see the nation’s potential: ports and rubber and abundant human resources. On the simple roads outside the capital, Monrovia, abandoned stone houses host ambitious, climbing plants—a metaphor for post-conflict Liberia if ever there was one.

The people of Liberia head to the polls Tuesday to elect a new government. Their second vote since civil war might have passed into the obscurity of distant democracy if the incumbent president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, hadn’t been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize last week. The citation, honoring her and two other female activists from Yemen and Liberia, gave confidence to advocates for a global feminism, particularly in the developing world. It also revived a debate about foreign intervention in a country struggling to normalize local institutions and exercise free choice.

The morning after the Nobel announcement, Monrovia’s city hall wore a hastily printed banner congratulating Sirleaf on her peace prize. Sirleaf’s opponent, George Weah, a famous former footballer and vice presidential candidate of the CDC party, quickly tamped down the hype. “She won it but I don’t know for what,” he told reporters. Winston Tubman, who is leading the CDC ticket, went further: “She does not deserve it. She is a warmonger,” he said, adding that the Nobel committee made “a provocative intervention within our politics.”

In the west, Sirleaf is well known as a canny, Harvard-credentialed activist who represents female power in a region where it’s often missing. She has long been welcome in Washington and at the Clinton Global Initiative, and a good deal of foreign investment in Liberia—from a Firestone tire plant to a mining project operated by Arcelor Mittal—can be traced to Sirleaf’s Rolodex. Her supporters believe this is great news for Liberia. “She’s been at the World Bank. This isn’t even a big job for her,” said Tulay Hansford, a 31-year old working on HIV awareness. “The world is dollar-driven, and she can play in that world … we are grateful for it.”

Elsewhere, Sirleaf’s reputation as a member of the global elite hurts her; few Liberians have heard of Davos. While some residents welcomed a positive story from Liberia, one Monrovian, who does not support Sirleaf, questioned whether the Nobel Prize committee had ever visited his country. “We talk about peace and reconciliation and it’s not here,” says Gayflor Mulba, a part-time student supporting the CDC. “She has failed to reconcile the Liberian people.” Another detractor chimed in, “No one with blood on their hands should control this country,” referring to Sirleaf’s admission of funding violent efforts to oust former dictator Charles Taylor. He called Sirleaf a rebel fighter “just like myself.”

The difference between international reverence and local skepticism can be jarring, but is just the beginning. This election, widely supposed to be headed for a runoff, will have resonance far beyond Liberia. First, it’s a test for female empowerment. The women of Liberia were essential to electing Sirleaf the first female president on the continent. Any crossover to the opposition party could be bad news for Sirleaf and other women running for office.

Second, it’s a rare change election in Africa. Recent analysis from The Economist showed just a trickle of successful transitions between parties in the region. The Mo Ibrahim foundation today announced its prize for good governance in Africa—which hasn’t been awarded since 2008. The world will be watching to see if Liberia can handle democracy more gracefully than its peers.

And, most importantly, it’s a referendum on the relationship between democracy and real progress. The opposition CDC party is making a populist push for change based on the Reaganism: “Are you better off than you were six years ago?” The answer is ambiguous. Residents credit Sirleaf for maintaining stability and improving security after endless war, but still suffer obscene shortages in clean water, electricity, fuel and formal employment—80 percent of the population is officially jobless. A Nobel Prize doesn’t feed the people—and young Liberians like 24-year-old Ben Joseph expect tangibles. “So many of us don’t have jobs or money to go to school, or to survive,” he said. “I need the government to work.”

Among those who remember the chaos of war, stability is more important. Sirleaf and her running mate Joseph Boakai—known in all campaign literature as “Ellen and Joe”—have insisted they need more time. A slogan emblazoned on a placard on Harriet Tubman Avenue reads: “If the plane not e’en landed, don’t change the pilot.” Another highly popular slogan: “Monkey still working; let baboon wait small.” The classic ruling-party argument holds sway with the monkey’s supporters. “There is actually nobody to replace her and continue the things the government has done,” says Allison Foday, a 49-year-old French teacher in Monrovia. “She should finish what she started.”

Corruption is also a perennial concern in Liberia, which has some of the most porous public institutions on the continent. Though Sirleaf has made efforts to minimize graft, she is suffering from her own 2005 pledge to be a one-term president. In a country where decades of misrule ground down faith in institutions, Sirleaf’s 2011 “never mind” both offends and frightens voters. “I was here during Charles Taylor’s time,” says Wres, a 37-year-old who voted for the second-tier Liberty Party in the previous election. “We needed change then and he just wouldn’t go.”

It’s unlikely Sirleaf will cling to power if she loses the first-round vote on Tuesday. But the threat of illegitimacy hovers over her cause—and the Nobel intervention only exacerbates the belief that, somewhere, strings are being pulled. A disputed outcome could lead to a hobbled presidency, or worse, violence when the results are announced. “If the vote is free and fair, Ellen will not win,” said a female CDC supporter who declined to give her name. “If she wins, people are going to be angry.”

It’s a charming reality of Monrovia that the “business centers” which dot the city are so called not for their printing and faxing capabilities, but because they are sites of airing “business”—literal chat rooms that hum with political debate. On Saturday, a statistical shouting match erupted between one of many women backing Sirleaf and a man supporting Tubman. “It’s not Tubman you are supporting,” says the woman, slicing the air with her right hand. “If George Weah left the CDC tomorrow, all these men you see in the streets would follow George Weah.” The alleged turncoat vigorously disagreed.

If tempers stay this hot, expect a high turnout and a very close race. There is no formal electoral polling in country, and so the political temperature is measured in boots—or more likely, sandals—on the ground. On the day of Sirleaf’s Nobel win, thousands of CDC supporters packed the streets of Monrovia, chanting for Weah long into the night. On Sunday, it was Sirleaf’s turn. She addressed a throng that nearly filled the city’s 33,000-seat Samuel K. Doe stadium. Her long chain of supporters drummed through the city, undeterred by the evening storm but ready for the rain to cease.

Dayo Olopade

There’s been lots of excitement about mobile phone apps in Africa, but what about using voice?

The global explosion of mobile phone technology has spawned a host of applications, products and services facilitating development outcomes from financial inclusion to improved maternal health. While these innovations have proven an essential lifeline for the world’s most vulnerable, most ignore the basic function of a mobile phone – its voice capacity.

A service called “I-Call” aims to solve the problem of education in Africa and other developing regions of the world by getting back to basics.

The organization helps to produce innovative educational modules that use phone calls to impart useful information on topics such as antenatal care giving or environmental stewardship. Callers in Kenya, for example, will hear a story featuring two household workers debating how and whether to separate their trash. The script, titled “Gold from Garbage,” takes a chatty, telenovella format, intended to promote the country’s nascent recycling program.

The service provides a unique twist on traditional – and frustrating – automated voice menus. While many customer service calls require users to punch numbers and symbols in search of a live voice, “I-Call” is transforming that head-banging experience into a meaningful development solution. When prompted, listeners can navigate a “choose your own adventure” set of options that invites users to complete the story.

The system is notable for bypassing traditional pedagogical methods such as textbooks and lectures as well as traditional media such as radio, print articles, or pamphlets distributed by eager NGOs. The voice-based system builds on the familiarity of oral storytelling, and can reach individuals with specialized learning needs who may have left the formal education sector years ago.

“We deal with awareness raising, attitude and behavior change, things like that,” says Arndt Bubenzer, whose Common Sense consultancy developed the software behind I-Call. “We asked: How do we get an m-learning tool out to a large number of people without them being able to read or write?”

I-Call took the spotlight at the annual e-learning summit in Dar Es Salaam, a pan-African gathering focused on using information and connection technologies to distribute the most important commodity in Africa: knowledge. In resource poor settings, distribution headaches – whether for vital vaccines or Coca-Cola – are a chief obstacle to progress. I-call’s innovative teaching method bridges both the explosion of mobile technology and Africa’s need to know.

Voice services are some of the lowest hanging fruit in communicating with underserved populations. “In Africa, most of the lives are lost not because of a very serious complication but in how fast people can get information,” says Derrick Ntalasha of Zambia’s Copperbelt University.

Stakeholders seeking a direct and effective link with a specific population can use I-Call’s open source program to produce content for a targeted purpose. Local actors record the script, and users can call local numbers toll-free. The recycling story is a project developed and deployed by the United Nations Environment Program and Kenya’s National Environment Management Agency.

“Our goal is to produce something entertaining and interactive,” says Gabrielle Patsch, also of Common Sense. “We can work with anyone who has an idea.”

Other pilots – targeting expectant mothers, rural health workers and agricultural workers – are underway. Patsch stresses the ease of access their model provides. “You don’t need Internet access, you don’t need smart phones – once you have the number anyone with a phone can join in the conversation.”

How Nigerian voters are using technology to prove a point.

LAGOS, Nigeria—In a series of national elections this month, Nigerians will exercise democratic rights that recent events around Africa—from Egypt and Libya to the Ivory Coast—have revealed as precious. But for many citizens of the continent’s most populous country, democracy is often beside the point. State-neglected roads breed traffic and hurt commerce, but in cities, young men plug the gap, selling everything from wine glasses to fresh apples in traffic. Frequent power outages darken homes, factories, and stores—but those who can afford it simply buy a generator. For Nigerians living in poverty, extended clan and religious networks are more reliable safety nets than a national legislature that has passed only 10 substantive bills since 2007.

That is to say life in Nigeria has a certain “do it yourself” charm. To put this in perspective: The United States recently engaged in a pearl-clutching debate over a government shutdown that didn’t even happen. Nigeria’s most recently elected president went missing from November 2009 to February 2010—and then died.

Not that there wasn’t an uproar. But the Nigeria I know prefers steely self-reliance to, say, Tunisian-style protests—and could be forgiven for shrugging off this year’s vote. Incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, who took office last year after the aforementioned death of President Umaru Yar Adua, is widely expected to win a full term as president on Saturday. (The PDP has, in fact, never lost an election since the end of military rule in 1999.) Plus, it’s hot outside.

At the same time, most Nigerians I talk to are out to prove that Nigeria can, in fact, do democracy—especially after the 2007 “election” (plagued by ballot-box snatching and more) that was roundly criticized by international monitors. And so there are 67 million citizens registered to vote this weekend, a whopping 88 percent of the eligible population. The major increase has been attributed to the youngest quintile of the electorate: the 18-30 year olds who are perhaps most frustrated with the fatalism and dysfunction of the past.

“People felt like the government was just taking advantage of their silence,” says Nosarieme Garrick, who runs a Nigerian youth organization called Vote or Quench. “Now people are taking charge of their civic responsibility.”

“We’re tired of what the country is,” says Tony Bassey, a 25-year-old member of Nigeria’s National Youth Corps helping to monitor a Lagos polling unit. “Four years ago I wasn’t involved at all … but if you keep saying [politics are] dirty, you can never make it clean.”

The contrast between potential and performance is fascinating in Nigeria—the fourth-fastest growing economy in the world. Nigeria is a major oil exporter whose sagging infrastructure still requires it to import petroleum for local use. The country expertly polices most of the African continent, in military operations from Sierra Leone to Sudan—yet can’t squash poisonous regional tensions over oil and religion. Visiting Lagos in March, Bill Clinton remarked that “there is no reason why a country with so much resources and potential should be poor.”

Since 2007, Nigeria’s private sector has continued to anchor the West African economy. National GDP has grown at rates that outstrip recession-worn western economies, and the government has issued $500 million in international bonds to help fund infrastructure investment. But the most radical change may be how technology has transformed Nigerian civic culture. As telecoms compete for a market of 150 million Nigerians, Web literacy, email usage, and mobile-phone penetration has become among the highest on the continent.

During Saturday’s comparatively smooth first round of voting, for seats in the Nigerian National Assembly (postponed once by the beleaguered electoral commission), the new connections came in handy. I saw dozens of voters transformed into informal election monitors—snapping photos on their mobile phones and alerting friends when the lines were shortest. A local newspaper took note: “The tweets, Facebook updates, Skype messages, text messages and pictures that voters exchanged via email and mobile phones gave the addresses of the polling booths, the locations, the number of people accredited, those who voted and the votes that each party got.” Within 12 hours of the polls closing, a charming YouTube video documented the group count at one polling unit. If thugs tried to snatch that ballot box, they might have seen their face on the evening news.

This type of engagement is hardly heroic—and you won’t see Nigerians setting themselves aflame anytime soon. But it is a major shift in local civics, says Garrick, whose organization (which is completely virtual) staged a March debate in the capital, Abuja, that incorporated questions submitted via social media. These voters still worry about employment, education, and power generation, But “in the age of BlackBerrys and iPhones and all that, it’s easy for you to just plug in and connect with people at the grassroots level,” she says. “While it’s not all demographics that have access to these media, people understand that we can spread it and we have to start from somewhere.”

The real proof of progress: Several 2011 candidates have borrowed a page from the youth-and-technology-driven campaign of the first American president of African descent. The official website of General Muhammadu Buhari, for example, the candidate of the opposition CPC party, will seem eerily similar to followers of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. The site answers user questions, follows the candidate on the trail, and is generally more transparent than any Nigerian political watcher could have expected. “We were given a free hand,” says Tope Omotunde, one of the site’s designers. “We borrow brilliance when we see it.”

Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, a former anti-corruption commissioner and candidate of the ACN party, is firmly of the TED generation (and has in fact been a TED fellow). A recent email from his campaign borrowed the breathless enthusiasm—and slogan—of Obama for America. “The Time is Now,” the email read. “IT IS TIME TO STAND UP FOR NIGERIA!” Even the staffing of the Ribadu campaign recalls the kids couch surfing for Obama in 2008: “Young people have realized that sitting back at home is not going to work,” says communications director Deshola Komolafe, who quit her job to work on the campaign. “I had a nine to five job, but I’m here because I believe in this process and understand that it’s our time.”
Whether any of these candidates stand for change (Buhari, for example, was president for almost two years during Nigeria’s 20 years of military rule, and also ran for president in 2003 and 2007) is practically beside the point. What’s interesting is the extent to which candidates and citizens are embracing the informal networks that drive Nigerian society.

Reclaim Naija is another civil-society organization tracking the entire electoral process using open-source mapping software called Ushahidi—known for its birth in Kenya and applications in crises everywhere from Gaza to Haiti. The group has enlisted the texting and tweeting public, as well as some unorthodox stakeholders, from hair salon owners to the men who drive informal motorcycle taxis, or okadas. Their populist rallying cry, in pidgin English: “If you see any mago mago or wuru wuru as you dey register or vote, report to ReclaimNaija!”

“It’s the most brilliant marketing strategy I’ve ever seen,” says Linda Kamau, a Ushahidi developer who traveled from Kenya to help the Nigerian group with their deployment. The okada man carries dozens of passengers daily—a fine perch from which to tell them which number to SMS in case their ballot box sprouts wings. Kamau says irregularities reported via Reclaim Naija helped election officials decide to delay the vote scheduled for April 2. “If the platform continues like that, it may turn out to be a service delivery tool well after the election is over.”

When talking about technology and democracy, the appropriate caveat is necessary: You can’t just sprinkle the Internet on an electorate and hope for the best. But the civil-society groups—ReVoDa, Sleeves Up, Enough is Enough—are multiplying, and mounting open challenges to Nigeria’s notorious system of political patronage. They are the product of both simmering frustration and new tools to express it.

And there are signs it may be having some small effect, on the style of discourse if not its content. When President Jonathan announced his candidacy—on Facebook—within 24 hours some 4,000 Nigerians had “liked” the idea. In Internet cafes and offices and from their mobile phones, ordinary citizens wrote Jonathan to express their hopes for and frustrations with leadership in Nigeria. Nwamaka Loveline, one of the 1.2 million Nigerians registered on the site, simply wished Jonathan well: “good luck to u my president, ur name speaks for u. we all stands for u. go ahead and become our president for 2011.”

Dayo Olopade

Why Valentine’s Day is the ultimate African holiday.

The road to Kitengela in southeastern Kenya is dotted with cement factories, scrub brush and the occasional zebra. Turning off the main road, the dust settles, revealing acres of billowing greenhouses that host the flowers that will be sold this Valentine’s Day.

Between chocolate from the west coast and roses from the east coast, love is a big business in Africa.

Globally, almost 200 million rose stems are sold on Valentine’s Day—and most lovers have no idea that their holiday gifts are grown in African soil. Arwin Patil, manager for Prima Rosa Flowers, which plants 70 hectares near Kitengela, says their farm produces 400,000 stems daily—and has taken orders for two million flowers this Valentine’s Day. Of western cluelessness, he says, “yes, flowers come from Kenya, but how would they know that?”

But the international trade in cut flowers has long been an east African specialty. In Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya, hundreds of smallholder flower companies harvest roses, carnations, lilies and chrystanthemums for bulk export. Each day, massive airliners head from the horn of Africa to Amsterdam, Geneva, New York or Dubai—bearing bouquets for special occasions halfway around the world.

While Africans are fueling today’s romantic rendezvous, the growers who pick and sell flowers don’t believe in love so much as opportunity. Agriculture accounts for about a quarter of Kenya’s GDP, with nearly three fourths of the population depending on the sector directly or indirectly. In central Nairobi, a vendor named Kingoro trims thorns from a stack of roses. He’s single, but still, he says, “Valentine’s day is good to me.” He sells stems of lilies and birds of paradise, and roses in ribbon-wrapped baskets for the equivalent of 45 dollars a pop. Of the booming international flower trade, he says, “It’s good for them to support us.”

While many American roses are grown in California, east Africa is the largest supplier of roses to the EU—a significant contributor to regional income generation and economic development. The industry has accounted for $300 million in Kenya’s foreign exchange earnings, and new, African-owned farms are blooming across the border in Ethiopia and Tanzania. The World Bank has begun using the east African flower industry as a template for other industrial policies in the region.

And while nothing says Valentine’s Day like a bouquet of red roses, a heart shaped box is never far behind. And on the west coast of Africa, chocolate is king.

Cote D’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria produce over two-thirds of the world’s supply of cocoa—ninety percent of which is grown by smallholder farmers. This long history of producing cocoa has attracted western companies like Nestle, Cadbury and Cargill, but hasn’t brought awareness to their consumers. While Belgium and Switzerland have built brands around chocolate indulgences, it’s Africans who grow the beans that go into the millions of Lindt, Mars and Cadbury chocolates that that will be sold today.

As with flowers, African chocolate matters as more than just food: Cocoa has played a role in resolving the recent electoral crisis in Cote D’Ivoire—opposition leader Alassane Outtara issuing a one month ban on production as a means of defunding deposed president Laurent Gbagbo.

Global demand for chocolate is big and getting bigger, with $5.5 billion worth of cocoa bought and sold every year. Americans consume 25 percent of the chocolate produced worldwide (Europe buys half, and the African continent consumes just three percent), but rising global incomes have created demand for chocolate—once considered a luxury—in emerging markets worldwide.

This is good news for Africa. While the flower industry took a hit during the global recession in 2009, sales have rebounded and continue to drive foreign exchange earnings. Trends in the global chocolate industry, on the other hand, have shifted toward fairly traded and organic chocolate with higher cocoa content (demand for dark chocolate is growing at 30 percent a year). African farmers are well-positioned to capitalize on this demand—not as a matter of romance, but as a hard-headed business opportunity.

There is work to do—trade policies that support smallholder farmers are sorely needed, from the US and other advanced economies. Local governments could do more to reduce the tax burden on these producers and stand up for fair labor practices. Supply chain improvements will help Africa to spread even more love around the world.

But this is just one of many unrecognized ways in which Africa enriches the global economy. Individual consumers can take the time to recognize and support African flower and chocolate producers—much the same way fairly traded tea and coffee have become a source of sustainable income in east Africa.

Even after Valentine’s Day, it’s a win-win.

The State Department’s highest-ranking Latina handles the biggest problems on the planet.

Maria Otero represents an international powerbroker in a world increasingly skeptical of its role. As American undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, she has a historic workload. Her mandate includes, essentially, the problems too big for the U.S. to solve on its own. On her agenda: nothing less than refugees, human rights, science and technology, and climate change. A few months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—her boss—added the issue of global water security to the pile. And on Human Rights Day this week, Otero led the charge for freedom—while trying to reconcile U.S. talk with its actions at home and abroad.

No big deal.

In the hectic world of 21st-century diplomacy, Otero is unusually calm, and very frank about the pros and cons of representing America. “Obviously we know that the U.S. is a superpower and that the U.S. position holds a lot of influence,” she says, sitting in her well-appointed office in Foggy Bottom. “But what [other countries] appreciate most is our ability to work through the multilateral agencies and mechanisms that we set up… We see other countries welcoming that approach, rather than a more unilateral approach that the U.S. followed during the Bush years.”

The Bolivian-born Otero made history in 2009 when she became the highest-ranking Latina in Clinton’s State Department.

A petite brunette with a shock of gray in her hair, Otero speaks four languages and wields a sarcastic wit as well as serious street cred from her time running Accion International, the largest microfinance institution in the world. One of nine children, she’s now one of a team of high-powered women at the State Department (Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter, Undersecretary for Public Affairs Judith McHale, and Ambassador-at-Large for women’s issues Melanne Verveer) whom Clinton has hired to change the face of American foreign policy.

Otero—whose first job after moving to the U.S. at age 12 was working at a Giant supermarket in upper Northwest Washington, D.C.—turns out to be the perfect proxy for the woman who hired her. “She’s strong, capable, focused and she’s an industry builder,” says Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of the Acumen Fund, who has known Otero for years. “What you see is what you get—that’s how she is all the time.”

While the secretary of State spends much of her time working on nuclear treaties, Mideast peace and the other trappings of hard-headed realpolitik, State Department officials acknowledge that Otero’s portfolio—focusing on women, the poor, and other vulnerable populations—are those that are closest to her heart.

Human rights in particular keep her up at night. “I’ve met young women who were trafficked and abused, who were somehow removed from their parents side, some of these girls at age 12,” says Otero. Her crusade against modern slavery “has been put on the map front and center,” she says. “It is seen as a human security issue and it’s seen as a horrific crime.” At Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative in New York this year, Otero buttonholed Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whose foundation has focused on the issue of human trafficking. “We have to find a way to work together,” Moore gushed. In the time it takes to travel down a floor, Otero agreed heartily.

Otero’s management background helps her cajole nonprofits, development experts, business stakeholders—and yes, actors—into coordinated action on the pressing issues of the day. “My position right now seems to be a logical extension of the work that I have done in the past,” she says. “At Accion we knew that you could be a business that does good but also does well.” The new thinking among economists, investors and diplomats respects that the private sector has a role to play in global development, says Otero. “There is a recognition on the part of business that they can meet their own bottom line if they pay attention to these issues.” She cites a recent deal with Procter and Gamble to provide low-cost, clean water solutions to those affected by summer flooding in Pakistan.

While Otero acknowledges that governments and business are both essential to global progress, she says, “One of the most important things that [Clinton] has emphasized and pushed is the really important role of civil society in addressing the question of human rights.” This means empowering activists like Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was barred from accepting the Nobel Peace Prize this week. “We recognize that there are many brave human rights and religious leaders and others that are working hard in their own countries,” she says of Liu Xiaobo. “Our effort is to recognize the importance of human rights defenders, and to help protect them when necessary.”

For Otero, this also means turning an eye inward—to the United States’ increasingly checkered record on human rights.

Clinton has added the U.S. to a list of countries being monitored for violations of human rights. But the recent release of some 250,000 classified State Department diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks has provoked criticism of the U.S. government for trying to suppress free expression on the Internet—a subject Clinton has made a hobbyhorse since a landmark speech on “the freedom to connect” delivered last January.

Otero would not comment on WikiLeaks, but counts Internet freedom as a fundamental right protected by the International Declaration of Human Rights. “Many governments don’t see technology as a symbol of progress… But this concept of free expression is at the core of what Secretary Clinton is moving forward,” she says. “Today it’s tweeting, tomorrow it will be something we won’t even remember later.”

The continued detention and operation of the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay is another sore subject for many in the human rights community. “The problems with torture, with indefinite detention, military commissions—the whole system that’s been set up—thas damaged the United States’ credibility when it talks about human rights abroad,” says Maria MacDonald of Human Rights Watch. “It gives some people who don’t want to respect human rights the argument that, well, the U.S. needs to get its house in order.”

Otero acknowledges the slow progress on closing the prison, but says her colleagues at State and the White House coordinate regularly on how best to do so. The president’s “intention and his continued objective of closing down Guantanamo is at the core of what we do,” she says. “To the degree that we practice these human rights, we will be able to carry out our own work in addressing human rights globally.”

Behind the scenes of Wikileaks, State’s office of eDiplomacy has been working for more, not less transparency.

Two days after what the Italian foreign minister called “the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” the State Department’s counteroffensive was in full swing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had launched a frantic damage control operation, reaching out to world leaders whose feathers had been ruffled by public disclosure of American diplomats’ blunt private assessments of them. Calls went out across the globe to atone for what Clinton termed “an attack on the international community.”

But here on the sixth floor of State Department headquarters, in the office of eDiplomacy, the atmosphere was comparatively calm. Here, a team of 60 is hard at work modernizing the way American diplomats talk to each other confidentially. Here, cables of the sort currently wreaking havoc among America’s allies and enemies alike no longer exist—replaced by a highly secure system dubbed Diplopedia, by which ambassadors and their staffs can compare notes, pass tips—and yes, offer withering reads on the objects of their diplomatic entreaties.

Of course no system is fool-proof, and it’s hard to stop an inside job—the working theory of how State’s cache of sensitive cables wound up in the newspaper. But the leaders of the eDiplomacy initiative are confident their project will make the department’s internal traffic far more secure. “Our security gurus have spent a ton of time making sure that system is buttressed, and I don’t know we’ve had many attacks. That is our firewall against the outside,” says Richard Boly, director of eDiplomacy.

“The cables are a mid-20th century technology,” says Bruce Burton, who has been with State since 1975. Boly estimates that the all-text, point to point cable system that carried the WikiLeaks revelations represents only 10 percent of communications. “We retained it because people are familiar with it…. But with the end of the Cold War and 9/11 the realization was that we had a real information management problem and we needed to do much better.”

Today Diplopedia, which is accessible only from secure State Department servers, has nearly 13,000 articles created by 4,000 employees. It hosts unclassified pages titled “Assignment Iraq,” “Keeping Your Principal Informed,” Crisis Management” and “A Foreign Desk Officer Survival Guide.” Pages on another internal site, “Communities,” offer in-depth coverage of regions, embassies and topics of the kind transmitted over official cables. One community page, “Japan Economic Scope,” provides daily updates on “Business and Energy” and “Politics and Reform.” “It’s incredibly intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial at the same time,” says Raina Kumra, a senior new media adviser for State.

On Monday, as news of Wikileaks rocketed around the department, a page popped up on Diplopedia offering guidance on how to handle the fallout. The page, seeded by the eDiplomacy team, includes the unclassified situation reports and other resources, including outside web links to Wikileaks, says Boly. “It’s a place where you can point people. Because it’s a wiki, if someone finds something new, they can add it.”

The WikiLeaks dump may have caused the current panic, but former Secretary of State Colin Powell created the Diplomatic Innovation Division (DID) in the wake of 9/11, when failures to connect and coordinate between agencies and departments resulted in the most devastating attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. Burton says his office got their wake-up call much earlier: “The Department of State’s 9/11 came four years earlier after the embassy bombings in east Africa,” he says. “We needed to know we have the right people with the right information. And we need technological solutions to overcome that.”

To get an idea of how the office is moving diplomacy into the 21st Century, compare the 1979 State Department cable (released by Wikileaks) parsing the “Persian psyche”—publicized in the WikiLeaks explosion—with the online interface on Haiti disaster coordination. The Diplopedia page for Haiti, created within hours of the January 12, 2010 earthquake, allowed State employees to understand country clearance requirements, the training needed to help Americans evacuate, and allowed donations to the Red Cross.

“This allies with all of our foreign policy goals,” says Kumra. “You go from need to know to need to share. Even with the leaks, we still stand on the side of need to share.”

The eDiplomacy team wants to allow diplomats to communicate freely—perhaps not with the Wikileaks audience, but with one another. Internally, Clinton has insisted that employees use the online “Sounding Board” to advocate for changes in department protocol. The system—not unlike a “311” number for municipal complaints, has produced solutions, from a new system for locating phone numbers around the world to a grassroots movement to allow agency blackberries to snap photographs.

“Secretary Clinton is a big proponent of what we’re doing,” says Burton. “Her reaction to the Wikileaks has been angry but very responsible. They haven’t clamped everything down.” “I don’t see security and openness as mutually exclusive,” says Boly. “Should the person who gets struck by lightning be more fearful of lightning or less?”

A reading of the internal sites shows that diplomats still express the freewheeling assessments of foreign and State Department affairs that categorize some of the leaked cables. But there have been few editing wars of the type seen daily on Wikipedia, and the ban on anonymous posting keeps many of the posters honest. “Anyone can go in and contribute, which is a big selling point,” says Jamie Findlater, who works on outreach for DID. The postings do not represent official US policy, but the question of accuracy is not a worry for the e-diplomats, who enjoy telling career employees: “If you see something wrong, fix it.”

At the oldest U.S. government agency, there is some resistance. “There are a lot of people who think no things should be transparent,” says Boly. “And it would be naïve to think that all those people who deal with those functions be transparent…but I see it as a necessary prerequisite for a more transparent relationship with the public.”

Still more updates to State communications and intelligence sharing are on the way: “The Corridor,” an internal social network like Facebook or Linked in, will allow diplomats to see where their work histories and postings overlap. “So often, you’re standing in an elevator with someone who worked in Columbia and you need their expertise, but you don’t even know it,” says Kumra. Clinton’s “Virtual Student Foreign Service” puts the work of 79 embassies from Iraq to China in the hands of American college kids.

The irony in all this is that these initiatives are meet the very creed WikiLeaks’ embattled leader, Julian Assange, professes to believe in: that open governments are better governments.

The American tech giant is diving into Africa–but are locals interested?

The Google office in South Africa is no different from the Google office in Washington — from the outside. Tucked into a sprawling, high-tech office park in Johannesburg, Google’s hip, young Africa team has taken the company’s beanbag-chairs-and-jeans culture global. But in practice, their mission is different — and far more difficult. They’re out to prove that Google can be an African verb.

Since 2007, the American search giant has entered the African market head first, establishing offices in Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Kampala, with its largest presence in Nairobi. It has placed a premium on improving access to the Internet and importing its well-known suite of applications (Maps, Gmail, Books, Chat) to African users. It has held six “G-Africa” gatherings designed to build the brand among local webheads, most recently in Kenya, with another planned for Cape Town in November. But despite all the money and attention Google is pouring into the continent, some developers and engineers here say that the company doesn’t quite “get” Africa. Within the vibrant, competitive, and decentralized African tech space, Google is going to have to do more than just show up.

Just as other multinational companies have discovered in recent years, Google knows that there is a lot of money to be made in urbanizing, newly wired African markets. In June, consulting firm McKinsey concluded that rates of return on investment in Africa are higher than in any other developing region. Since then, global banks and corporations have brokered regional mergers and acquisitions worth more than $15 billion.

When it comes to Western tech companies, Google is unmistakably ahead of the curve. While Finnish Nokia and Canadian BlackBerry have offices and research centers in Africa, Silicon Valley darlings like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter don’t have a single warm body on the continent.

This commitment to Africa has produced some exciting firsts. Google Earth’s high-resolution satellite imagery was central to the recent excavation of new hominid fossils in South Africa. Browsers in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Senegal can search in the Amharic, Shona, and Wolof languages, respectively. “The whole goal of the Africa team is to make the Internet an integral part of African lives,” says Bridgette Sexton, a Google development manager who helps organize the G-Africa program.

In many ways, Google is well suited to the challenge. An Internet company can circumvent bad roads, casual corruption, and limited purchasing power — the traditional barriers to doing business in Africa. In a region where there are 10 times more cell phones than desktop computers, Google is piloting its recently announced “Mobile First” strategy, with strong results: The company recently took a prize from the Mobile World Congress for “best use of mobile for social and economic development” for creating Africa-specific applications like “SMS Tips,” which answers questions on health or agriculture sent through text messages, and “Google Trader,” which matches small businesses and buyers in real time. “Everyone in Africa is a power phone user,” says Stefan Magdalinski, head of Mocality, an online directory for businesses in the region. “No matter how [simple] your phone is, you know every feature, every application, and you use every one.”

Local programmers are making their own contributions. Alex Nyika, a 26-year old Ugandan programmer, developed “iChecki”– a real-time, GPS-based tracker for Nairobi’s notoriously unpredictable public transit “matatu” vans — as an app for Google’s Android phones. Although the Android operating system trails emerging-market leader Nokia in Africa, American competitors Apple and Microsoft are even further behind.

Google hopes to consolidate that advantage by training more African designers in Android protocols. “These are the guys [who] will create the companies that will be our Facebooks and Googles,” says Tidjane Deme, Google head for Senegal. “We try and give them tools to bring content online.” At G-Kenya, Joe Mucheru, head of the Africa practice, announced that programmers like Nyika can now join the global Android Market.

But when it comes to translating this advertised openness into a connection with local designers and consumers, the company has hit some snags. “You’re not thinking of Africa if you’re going to launch an Android phone for over $100,” says Erik Hersman, a Nairobi-based technologist who recently hosted a group of 25 Googlers at the iHub, a shared office space for local programmers and entrepreneurs. “They launched Android Market, but there’s no Google Checkout for us to receive money. It’s a huge hole that almost all the tech companies have in Africa. They globalize, but they don’t engage.”

Take Gmail, for example. Globally, the service has trailed those provided by Yahoo! and Microsoft. Magdalinski suspects it’s just too complicated for African modems. “Gmail is always loading with flashy chat and all this JavaScript,” he says.* By contrast, “Yahoo! loads fast — it works on a shit modem in an Internet cafe.” (As in the United States, users can opt to load a stripped-down in-box, but new applications like Google Chat to SMS — rolled out in Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya this year — require using the clunkier version.)

Likewise, Google proudly unveiled digital maps of several African cities that had never been well cataloged — even driving a red, camera-mounted Toyota Prius around certain cities in South Africa to create “Street View” maps in time for this year’s World Cup. But in practice, Google has left out wide swaths of African cities — the Kibera slums of Nairobi, most notably. Google’s “Map Maker” permits users to fill in the blanks, but has yet to account for the visual orientation (“bear left at the Tusky’s roundabout”) more familiar to locals than Google’s gridded logic. And, despite partnership with the Grameen Foundation and South African telecom MTN, the prizewinning Google Trader has barely made a dent in challenging existing classified services. A search for a used car, for example, turns up only 17 ads over the last six months.

“I’m a huge Google fan; I have Google merchandise and a Google coffee cup,” says Rob Spokes, head of Quirk Marketing, a leading South African web-services firm. “But there’s very little scope for development here.” Stafford Masie, head Googler in South Africa who left the team for personal reasons last year, says, “There’s no imagination” on the ground. “I couldn’t do what I wanted there.” (It took Google six months to replace Masie’s successor, Stephen Newton, who quit in May.)

Then there is the issue of whether African techies need or want Google around. In mid-2009, Google approached Teresa Clarke, then a managing director at Goldman Sachs and proprietor of Africa.com. “They made me a pretty generous offer,” says Clarke. But she ultimately turned them down, preferring to develop her own news site. Clarke is still in contact with Google about future partnership, but others are spurning Google more definitively. Jessica Colaco, a self-described “technology evangelist” in Nairobi who manages the iHub says, “I want to be Jessica Colaco, not Jessica who works for Google…. I’d rather do my own thing.”

Maybe this is part of the reason why Google isn’t yet making a profit in the region, and the focus on social services carries a whiff of corporate social responsibility. Google rebuts that its push is part of a short-term strategy for innovation and a long-term strategy for, well, world domination. “It’s a volume play,” CEO Eric Schmidt told me in September — a response to the overwhelming numbers of Africans coming online. Google’s piecemeal withdrawal from a market of 340 million Chinese web surfers makes Africa’s 500 million mobile web users a worthwhile consolation prize.”We are not positioning ourselves as a charity or NGO,” says Julie Taylor, one of Google’s 50-plus employees in the region. “Africa is the last frontier for the Internet.”

There is definitely space for Google in Africa. The company wouldn’t share projections for profit outside South Africa (which makes money), but “the economic opportunity of the Internet both for Africans and in the longer term for Google is significant,” says Taylor.

And of course, not everyone is giving Google the brushoff. Loren Bosch, a sales director for Internet Solutions, one of the oldest information-and-communications-technology solutions firm in Africa, welcomes Google’s incursion. “We’re excited about all those guys coming here. The more of them enter the space here, the better the environment will become and the more resources are available in the market,” he says.

To succeed, Google has to live out its biggest selling point: its openness to new ideas. The company has spent millions contrasting its open-source, free-web, access-for-all vision with its more reticent American competitors. But, Deme told a gathering in Washington, “We’re still doing what I don’t like. We’re going there and telling them what to do.” Now it must make good on the promise to be innovative and adaptive, even willing to change its model — rather than simply export it — to Africa. If not, the company will go down with every other misguided incursion in African history, something that’s not lost on the Googlers themselves. “There’s a difference between California and Africa,” says Sexton. “You have to be a local company if you’re working here.”

Dayo Olopade

The first lady once known as “The Closer”  went missing this election year.

At rallies today in Pennsylvania and Nevada, First Lady Michelle Obama—known as “The Closer” on the 2008 campaign trail—is making a last-ditch closing argument for the Democrats.

She’s hit eight cities in the last two weeks, emerging from months of political hibernation—OK, speaking out for healthy food and better schools—in an 11th-hour push aimed at staving off a scheduled landslide. Making whistle stops in New York, California, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Washington State, she’s determined to rally the base. “We can’t stop now; we’ve come too far,” she told a dinner crowd in Seattle—adding a “Yes we can!” fist pump as an afterthought.

If anybody can, Michelle can—at least on paper. At a time when her husband’s approval rating has plummeted, hers stand strong at 70 percent—making her one of the most popular figures in Washington. And she appeals to a crucial constituency—female voters, a decisive bloc this fall. “She’s a terrific asset to Democrats this cycle,” says Jen Bluestein, communications director at Emily’s List. It helps that Mrs. Obama projects that purple glow her husband used to talk about. “She’s very popular with Democrats but she’s also increasingly popular with Republicans and Independents,” adds Hari Sevugan, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee.

But on the trail, Obama has yet to embrace the trend toward bare-knuckled female political empowerment.

Which raises a tough question: Could the country’s most popular female political figure have started earlier, shouted louder, and helped turn the straying sisters around? Or has the first lady—who famously coined the title “mom-in-chief”—relinquished the feminist brand, to the detriment of the Democrats?

As far as the East Wing is concerned, Obama has played ball. “She always wants to be value added toward what the administration is doing,” says Katherine McCormick-Lelyveld, Obama’s press secretary. “The midterms are a key part of that.”

But “She’s become perhaps more guarded and more cautious in her presentation,” says Patrice Yursik, a black beauty blogger who attended a California women’s conference at which Michelle Obama spoke last month. “There was no mention that we’re even in an election season.”

There’s no doubt the Dems need help. If the trendlines showing up in regional polling hold true on Election Day, the Republicans will be the party making gains with female voters and candidates. In 1992, there were 140 Democrats and 82 Republican women running for the House; in 2010, the GOP has fielded an equal number of women—many of whom are poised to win. Forget Christine O’Donnell: Gubernatorial candidates Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Susana Martinez of New Mexico and New Hampshire senator-in-waiting Kelly Ayotte are just three female politicians now expected to expand the GOP map.

Meanwhile, prominent Democratic women—senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Patty Murray in Washington—are on the ropes. First-term House members Betsey Markey and Ann Kirkpatrick face tough challenges as well. Kamala Harris, a rising Democratic star running for attorney general in California, is in the fight of her life.

The irony is that the losing team has long supported policies that help women. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have stepped up their rhetoric on women and the economy in the last two weeks. But Michelle Obama may have missed an opportunity to lead the charge.

The political potency of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has led progressive women to call for one of their own to match the ex-governor’s volume and reach. Writing in The New York Times, Rebecca Traister and Anna Holmes sought “a smart, unrelenting female, who, unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women.” Palin has her “Mama Grizzly” candidates—why not “Obama Grizzlies?”

Members of the White House political team conceded that Republicans have regained ground in the suburbs, where many of Obama’s biggest fans reside. In Illinois, losses in counties ringing the first lady’s hometown have put the governorship and the president’s former Senate seat in jeopardy. What’s more, traditionally Democratic women are tuned out. “We always have trouble with lower-income women—they trend Democratic, but they have so many things to think about,” says Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois. Durbin added that Obama has been very effective in connecting with the economic and social needs of working women and families, in small groups at the White House.

But the woman who conspicuously coined the term “mom-in-chief” has yet to embrace the trend toward unapologetic female political empowerment.

Indeed, Obama’s current popularity rests on perceptions of her commitment to gauzy personal issues. “What we hear the most from the field is her commitment to helping families,” says Sevugan. “[Voters] see her as someone who has the same concerns, a regular person who’s a mom and who is a wife.”

“She is demonstrating a tremendous sensitivity to issues that one would consider to be extremely important to children,” adds House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. “People love her for it.”

But her home-and-hearth appeal hasn’t closed the deal in this noisy campaign season. Murray, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senators Russ Feingold and Michael Bennet, and Illinois Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulas all rallied with the first lady, yet are even or trailing in recent polls.

Of course, Mrs. Obama isn’t a magician—she isn’t even an elected official. And there may only be so much any first lady can do to move the electoral needle. But while the Democrats have many female surrogates—Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, DNC Co-Chair Donna Brazile, even Obama’s close friend Valerie Jarrett—none have been able to pack the punch of Palin. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the party’s most influential female leader, is legally barred from campaigning.) As not just mom but woman-in-chief, Obama seemed the most likely voice to break through.

Part of the difficulty in converting Obama’s warm fuzzies into Democratic votes is her general approach to campaigning. On the trail, she has tended to cast political arguments in terms of family. “When I think about the issues facing our nation right now, I think about what that means for our girls,” she told a crowd in Ohio, where she made her first joint appearance with the president since 2008.  “I think about what that means for the world that we’re leaving for them and, quite frankly, for all of our children.” During the flurry of debate over Arizona’s controversial immigration policy, she deflected a question from a second grader whose mother was in the United States illegally with a “yes, sweetie.”

When she hit up an October women’s conference in California, capped by a debate between gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, she spoke for 25 minutes, not about the economy that’s driving voters from Democrats, but about military families—an area of deep commitment for both Obama and second lady Jill Biden. “Michelle Obama has become very astute about what the public is going to say about her and the reaction of their political opponents will be to things that she wears, things that she says, and especially appearances  she makes,” says Yursik. “It was a genuine plea, but who in their right mind is going to say something negative about her talking about military families?”

Courtney Martin, writing in The American Prospect, took the critique further: “Unlike Palin, who is aggravating because she’s all style and no substance, the first lady is driving many a feminist batty because she’s got so much substance but is shrouding it in nonthreatening style.”

There are those in both the East and West wings who feel more aggressive politics would be inappropriate.  “I think she’s been wise to be careful and cautious,” says Juleanna Glover Weiss, a Bush administration alumnus now consulting for the Ashcroft Group. “This is not her world, it’s her husband’s world.” What’s more, this behavior is not surprising for first ladies, who are typically “not involved in the sort of horse trading that you see when we’re talking about partisan politics,” says Hilary Shelton, NAACP Washington bureau director and senior vice president for advocacy.

But the former nonprofit executive knows how to turn the screws when it counts. Behind the scenes of her hula-hooping and harvesting, Obama has been a tenacious lobbyist for healthy living policies to match her personal effort. When she invited members of Congress to the White House to discuss school lunch policy, they were skeptical that a bill could be passed in the face of food and soft drink industry opposition. But the first lady had done her homework—personally lobbying industry executives and including them in the conversation. “Last time we did a child nutrition bill, you couldn’t even discuss much less win a vote on the question of healthy foods and soda pop,” says Education Committee Chairman George Miller. “She was our icebreaker.”

And, in 2008, Obama was known for her willingness to “go there” when her husband could not. Nearly three years ago, she addressed a group of black women in South Carolina who were worried that her husband was too good to be true:

I equate it to that aunt or that grandmother that bought all that new furniture—spent her life savings on it and then what does she do? She puts plastic on it to protect it. That plastic gets yellow and scratches up your leg and it’s hot and sticky. But see grandma is just trying to protect that furniture—the problem is—it’s that she doesn’t get the full enjoyment—the benefit from the furniture because she’s trying to protect it. I think folks just want to protect us from the possibility of being let down—not by us—but by the world as it is. A world—they fear—is not ready for a decent man like Barack. Sometimes it seems better not to try at all than to try and fail.

The frank and funny speech was a hit, and marked the beginning of the surge in black voter support for her husband in the state that would lead to his securing the Democratic nomination for president.

The protective plastic is also a metaphor for Obama’s engagement since taking “office.” The mom-in-chief message just hasn’t roused the country—including its male half—that seems ready for strong women to lead well.

The DNC estimates that today’s rallies will draw tens of thousands more to hear Obama’s closing argument. It may be that 2010 hasn’t gotten the best of Obama. “She’s done what she can but a lot of what she can do is limited by family—and that’s not going to change,” says senior White House adviser David Axelrod, who adds that 2012 will show a return to fighting form. “It’s always different when you’re campaigning for your husband.”

And for Obama, it could be just the beginning: On one of the first lady’s summer trips to the Gulf Coast, residents waved “Michelle 2016” signs as a greeting.

Dayo Olopade

The Ex-Secretary of State clears her throat on race, George W. Bush and the Tea Party.

From her view of the Tea Party movement (surprisingly sympathetic) to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s performance in the job she once held, Condoleezza Rice fired up her book tour Wednesday night with a spirited conversation at a dinner hosted by The Daily Beast and Credit Suisse. Though her just-released Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family departs from the standard trope of revelatory White House gossip (that will be coming in a second book), Rice tackled many of the hot-button issues in the current election cycle.

Since leaving government in 2009, it’s easy to imagine that Condoleezza Rice has become just another civilian. But the piano playing, figure-skating, sports enthusiast Soviet expert has never been just another anything. Indeed, interviewed on stage by Daily Beast editor in chief Tina Brown what she had learned about herself in writing her memoir, Rice acknowledged the downside of being a child prodigy. “I was a bit of a brat,” she says with a laugh. “My parents had to put up with a lot.”

But while her life and rise to power is an extraordinary American story—her father taught one of the girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963—even Rice didn’t seem interested in sticking to the “family memoir” script.

On stage, she launched a fairly robust defense of, if not the Tea Party itself, the sentiments behind it: “I certainly don’t agree with everything said by the Tea Party,” she said. “I see people saying the conversation in Washington and the conversation in the rest of the country is not the same conversation… Listen Washington: Out here we’re losing something that’s very essential to being American.”

She likewise brought up—unprompted—this week’s resignation of Michelle Rhee, the controversial chancellor of the Washington DC public school system. “When we’re living in a country where I can look at your zip code and know whether or not you’re getting a good education, somebody ought to be angry,” she said at the dinner, held in Credit Suisse’s New York tower off Madison Park.

The passionate engagement with education reform is not surprising: Rice, who serves presently as a professor at Stanford University, comes from a family with generations of experience as educators and academics. “My parents and my grandparents believe that if you have a good education you are going to be armored against all the bad things that can happen to you,” she told the crowd, which included Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., along with Barbara Walters, Christiane Amanpour, Andrea Mitchell,  Pete Peterson, and a host of others on hand for the Daily Beast’s dinner series celebrating women of stature.

Indeed, there are a number of connections between her demanding, Republican home in Birmingham and the most pressing issues in contemporary politics.

With respect to the ongoing conflict in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, she told me her experience with segregation colors her impressions of the situation. “I understand the Palestinian mother who has to tell her child they can’t get on the highway because they’re Palestinian. I know what that is. And I can understand the Israeli mother who has to worry if her child is going to be bombed in a terrorist attack. That’s biographical.”

ikewise, her support for the second amendment was forged at the barrel of a gun: She recounted an evening in 1963 on which her father sat on the porch with a rifle to ward off white vigilantes. The other blacks who took up arms were, in her estimation, “a well-regulated militia.” In the language of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” she now calls the whites who burned crosses and blew up churches “homegrown terrorists.”

In a sense, Rice seems to believe biography is destiny. (Her longstanding relationships with the fathers of Madeline Albright and Benjamin Netanyahu seem to bear this out.)

Though her discussion of domestic and foreign affairs was that of a daughter and private citizen, Rice subtly defended the elephant in the room: The record of President George W. Bush, and her own legacy as the first black female secretary of state.

Rice emphasized the Bush administration’s focus on immigration reform. “I live in California and I see the stresses and strains it puts on the state,” she said, parting company with the hard-line view more in vogue these days in the Republican Party. “This country was built on immigrants, and if we are not committed to immigration we’re going to go to the sclerotic demographics of Europe and the tragic demographics of Russia.”

Rice also stood up for the neoconservative project of the Bush years and a “long view” of history—one that might change public perception of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The arc of history is long, not short. It was the people who took good decisions in 1946 and 1947 and 1948 who made it possible for the Cold War to end on Western terms.”

As the Mideast peace talks bog down, Rice is actively monitoring the situation she tried to resolve at a summit in Annapolis in 2008. She believes recent moves from Palestinian Authority leaders to unilaterally declare a state would be “disastrous,” though praised their recent contributions to West Bank security.  “It’s an orderly place now,” she says. With respect to a two-state solution, she believes “Israelis are ready for this…Arabs are ready for this…. But it’s going to take some very tough decision on the part of the Palestinian leaders.”

Perhaps her most controversial defensive maneuver was her one-to-one comparison of Bush and President Barack Obama:  “On the day the president is inaugurated, he is the smartest, most amazing, most incredible human being, and aren’t we lucky. And a year or two years later we say ‘How could we ever have elected this person president?’ It’s just something in our politics.”

Well, not quite. Obama began his presidency far more popular than Bush was at a similar juncture; according to the Pew Center, Obama’s approval rating was 30 points higher than Bush’s at the time of inauguration. And Obama’s current ratings are actually lower than Bush’s were at the same point in his presidency. Bush’s numbers began to plummet as the Iraq war dragged on, whereas Obama’s woes appear to be a function of the sluggish American economy and the unwinding of the two wars begun by his predecessor.

For Rice to call the situation “just something in our politics” hints at her protective stance toward the president she served—and the memoir yet to come.

Dayo Olopade

The prizewinning documentary Budrus allows Israelis and Palestinians to imagine peace.

The first thing I learned in Jerusalem: “There are glass walls all over this city that Israelis and Palestinians don’t cross.” So says Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer who has been monitoring tensions in the holy city for 30 years. There are real fences as well—after grapes and olives, the region’s most fruitful crop is barbed wire—but on my first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, organized by the New America Foundation, I saw virtual barriers eclipse the official ones.

We visited the once-bustling center of Hebron, a major Palestinian city reduced to chilly silence by a policy of curfews and checkpoints known as “sterilization.” A young Palestinian vendor named Islam tagged along until we hit the invisible glass; he fell back while we walked onto the land he cannot touch. Mikhael Menkin, a former IDF soldier leading our group, was unfazed. “We’re at a point where nobody has to say anything or do anything—we know our roles.”

Budrus, a prizewinning new documentary produced by nonprofit Just Vision, intends to break the glass. The film begins in 2004, as bulldozers rumble toward the sleepy town of Budrus. “We must empty our minds of traditional thinking,” local leader Ayed Morrar tells the villagers, distraught that the wall dividing Israel from the West Bank will uproot their olive groves and cleave their cemetery. Over 10 months, the men and women of Budrus stage 60 nonviolent protests, which gain Israeli and international support—and stop the wall. The film, screened at a host of international festivals and released in major American cities this month, is uplifting, despite its subject matter.

As the United States-led peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority stall out, the message of Budrus is sorely needed. Though there hasn’t been a suicide bombing in Israel in more than two years, mutual suspicions still run deep. Members of the far-right Zionist community justified the building of settlements on Palestinian lands with continual reference to “Arab riots” in the mid-20th century. And, walking through the gentrifying, historically Arab neighborhood of Ajami at the southern tip of Tel Aviv, a young student stopped to glare. When our guide, Ph.D. student Sami Abu Shehade, greeted him in Arabic, the child laughed and answered back: “Why didn’t you say you were Arab?” “And what if I wasn’t?” Sami replied. We discovered the answer to that question moments later, when another boy hurled a rock at our foreign bodies.

Since the outbreak of the second intifada and the subsequent construction of a security barrier between Israel and Palestine, it seems the glass walls are hardening. The Israeli students we met at the tony IDC university in Herzliya, on the sea shores just north of Tel Aviv, is unlikely to encounter the Palestinian students whom I met in Ramallah—themselves more likely to see an Israeli armed behind a security checkpoint than at any of the bars or restaurants in the de facto Palestinian capital. Whereas once 120,000 Palestinians used to commute to Israel from the Gaza Strip, the blockade has halted interactions between ordinary people.

In the small town of Walajeh outside Jerusalem, Budrus is happening today. The proposed route for the separation barrier will cut through the town’s 200-year old olive groves and cemetery. One house will be walled off completely. And yet, says Joseph Dana, a journalist and activist who brought us to Walajeh, “Every day these people look over here and see the wall going up—and they probably have no idea what this town is called.”

The movie Budrus is just one way activists are using media tools to try and bring down the walls. Gisha, an Israeli human-rights organization, has created a video game called “Safe Passage” demonstrating the stifling constraints on movement between the West Bank and Gaza. If you want to know what the daily commute is like for a merchant who cannot sell his goods, or a student who cannot attend university because of the Israeli blockade, you don’t have to travel to Gaza to find out.

Similarly, Facebook has been a principal organizing tool for Israelis and Palestinians challenging the construction of illegal settlements in the East Jerusalem quarter of Sheikh Jarrah. For over a year, urban Israeli settlers have been forcibly evicting Palestinians in the neighborhood from their homes. One such victim, Nasser Galwi, spent five months sleeping on the streets after a phalanx of 900 Israeli soldiers tossed him and 54 others out of their apartments. Similar clashes have erupted in Silwan, another East Jerusalem neighborhood recently profiled on 60 Minutes.

Israelis and Palestinians who first met online are now gathering every Friday in Sheikh Jarrah to protest “one of the most worrying events in East Jerusalem,” says Avner Inbar, an Israeli who has worked closely with the protest organizers. “I know it’s the right of the Jewish people to live in peace—but not on my land,” says Galwi.

Some commentators, most recently Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, doubt whether virtual connections can change the world. But in this drawn-out conflict, where walls of all kinds are a habit, virtual contact takes on greater significance—and can build the “strong ties” that characterize successful social movements throughout history.

“The possibility of meeting someone like-minded in your real life—your work, your neighborhood—is so negligible,” says Didi Remez, a liberal Israeli activist. “I go to the protests and I see a physical manifestation of the Internet.”

Or as Iltezam Morrar, of Budrus, puts it: “It’s good to remember if you’re small, and have nothing, you can [still] do all this.”

Dayo Olopade