When President Barack Obama delivered his Inaugural Address six months ago, there was a line in it that many Africans felt was written specifically for them — a kind of shout out across the Atlantic that the new, young president had not forgotten the fatherland.

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” the new president said, “know that you are on the wrong side of history.”

This, of course, could apply to a large chunk of the world. But in Africa, where Big Men still rule for decades, and corruption leaves the children sick and the schools bare, and government soldiers rape and kill with impunity, those words seemed to have extra resonance. Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan foreign minister, remembered how that single line from the inaugural speech was “cheered throughout Africa, and people were texting it to each other over their phones.”

“People were saying, ‘Our son is there, in the White House, God bless us.’”

On Friday, when Obama stepped off Air Force One in Ghana for his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa, it was clear he was stepping onto a continent of stratospheric expectations. He was mobbed at the airport by drummers and dancers and seemingly the entire Ghanaian government, as if his arrival were a long-awaited homecoming.

In a way, it was. And it will be extremely interesting to see how Obama, who is celebrated for his coolness, his detachment and his hyper-rational outlook, manages all this hype.

Talk about hitting the reset button, in a place where it could really matter. There is no denying that Obama, by the sheer dint of his Kenyan heritage, coupled with his progressive politics, his youth and his seemingly intuitive grasp of how people across the world interconnect, has an unprecedented opportunity to rewrite the America-Africa equation.

Still, how to get involved? And when?

‘Wrong side of history’

PLO Lumumba, a leading anticorruption activist in Kenya, said that the masses were ready to line up behind Obama and that he should use his incredible bully pulpit to pressure corrupt governments to reform themselves. This wouldn’t have to cost a lot of money. The audience is there. All that needs to be crafted is the message.

“The Obama administration should be tough as tough can be,” said Lumumba, who is named after one of the leading lights of Africa’s independence era, Patrice Lumumba, a Congolese hero who was assassinated in 1961 with the help of the CIA. Lumumba’s namesake brings up a compelling point. Obama spoke of the “wrong side of history.” Who was often on the wrong side of African history but America?

Take Congo, where U.S. officials during the Cold War backed the kleptomaniac dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko, for decades. Or Somalia, where the United States bungled a huge relief mission in the 1990s, setting the stage for the chaos there today and leading the Clinton administration to inaction over the Rwandan genocide, which cost 1 million lives while the whole world watched.

Clearly, Obama has not forgotten Rwanda. In a news conference in Italy before he left for Ghana on Friday, he said: “There are going to be exceptional circumstances in which I think the need for international intervention becomes a moral imperative, the most obvious example being in a situation like Rwanda where genocide has occurred.”

He also hinted at a broader Africa agenda, like helping the continent feed itself — points he punctuated with his own experience in the hardscrabble Kenyan village where his extended family lives.

Not all is grim

But, as Ghana shows, all is not grim in Africa. “Part of the reason that we’re traveling to Ghana is because you’ve got there a functioning democracy, a president who’s serious about reducing corruption, and you’ve seen significant economic growth,” he said at the news conference.

American officials, like Rep. Donald Payne, a New Jersey Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on Africa, insist that Africa policy will now be more nuanced. “The whole thing can’t be the U.S.’s war against terror, whatever that was,” Payne said. Instead, he predicts the Obama administration will “concentrate on things that would prevent terror, like higher education.”

Africans have always had divergent views on America, Otunnu said. On the one hand, Africans idolized the United States as the land of opportunity and unimaginable wealth, the place they could hope one day to see with their own eyes, or better, to live in. They welcomed initiatives like the billions of dollars President George W. Bush spent fighting AIDS. On the other hand, the United States also evoked the dictators it had supported, and what were seen as harsh, neocolonial policies.

But with Obama in office, Otunnu said, “that changed suddenly overnight. The U.S. now has a very different meaning to Africans.”

Some of this, of course, is that Barack Obama is seen as kin. But there’s also the fact that he was a black man elected in an overly white country, validation that America was indeed the land of opportunity. More than anything, his triumph served as a sharp contrast to a continent where name, class and ethnicity are still destiny, and, just in case destiny is ever interrupted, where many elections are still blatantly rigged.

The issues that many Africans are urging Obama to push — like more freedom, more democracy, less dictatorship, less corruption — are issues that previous American administrations have tried to push. In many cases, for example in Kenya or Zimbabwe, the U.S. government must step gingerly, pressing reluctant leaders to implement reforms that the vast majority of people support.

Often, this is a complicated dynamic. Most of the American diplomatic corps are white and thus open to the brand of attack that bashes any criticism from white men as neocolonial meddling. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator, remains a virtuoso at playing that game.

Until this trip to Ghana, Obama had stayed away from Africa. Darfur continues to be a mess and Congo a bloodbath, but Obama has said relatively little about either. His trip to Ghana is only a one-night stop. But Otunnu said that Africa can wait. It’s how the traditional African chief works.

“He meets, he consults and then he decides,” Otunnu said. “The chief doesn’t rush.”

A new beginning

In Ghana on Saturday, Obama became a potent symbol of a new political era but also as a messenger with a tough-love theme: American aid must be matched by Africa’s responsibility for its own problems.

“We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans,” Obama said in an address to Parliament in the capital, Accra, that was televised across the continent.

While citing Africa’s sometimes “tragic past” and acknowledging the ravages of colonialism, he said, “It is easy to point fingers and to pin the blame for these problems on others.

“But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants,” he said.

He delivered a strong and at times even stern message in words that, had they come from any of his predecessors, might not have been received the same way. Instead, it was cast by the White House as hard truths from a loving cousin who could say what no one else could.

“No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers,” he said. “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the port authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy, that is tyranny, and now is the time for it to end.”

“Africa doesn’t need strongmen,” he added. “It needs strong institutions.”

As he did in his address to the Muslim world in Cairo last month, he used the details of his biography to soften the sometimes blunt language.

“My grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya,” he said, “and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life.”

For all the attention to his arrival here, the White House worked to keep it relatively low key. For a president accustomed to drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands, Obama chose instead venues with limited attendance.

Whatever political calculation may have gone into that choice, it was certainly driven at least partly by security. When Bill Clinton came here in 1998, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to see him, creating a chaotic scene that left some injured.

Obama wanted to showcase an African government that exemplified his goals for the region and the choice of Ghana, given that both Clinton and Bush came here, the latter just last year, illustrated how few models there are. With a functioning democracy that has managed several peaceful transitions of power, this small nation of 23 million people, is the favorite American success story in sub-Saharan Africa.

By contrast, Obama bypassed his father’s native Kenya, a reflection of the political instability and tribal clashes that have plagued the country in the past couple of years.

His approach here follows that of Bush, who was widely credited with doing more for Africa than any previous president. Like Obama, Bush tried to frame policy by rewarding good governance and building institutions through programs like the Millennium Challenge Corp., including $547 million for Ghana, which is building the George W. Bush Motorway in his honor. He also poured record sums into fighting AIDS in Africa.

Even Obama, who typically talks about the mess his predecessor left him, took time out to say he was “building on the strong efforts of President Bush” in Africa. Just prior to landing here, Obama pressed the world’s other rich nations to pool together $20 billion over three years to fight hunger, not just by delivering food but by teaching struggling farmers how to better grow crops for their own people.

But he spent little time talking about what America would do for Africa and instead focused on what Africa should do for itself. He called on the people of his father’s continent to build the sort of society that he never saw: prosperous, democratic, honest and free of disease.

“You can do that,” he said. “Yes, you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”