While touring in Africa, President Clinton apologized to the entire continent for the legacy of slavery, for having engaged in Cold War realpolitik in the region, and in general for the way Americans have stereotyped and mistreated the continent's residents over the years. While in Rwanda, the president also apologized for failing to intercede in recent intertribal violence that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

Clinton made some of these apologies in Uganda, where during the 1970s hundreds of thousands of its citizens were likewise killed under the regime of Moscow-backed Idi Amin, followed by yet more deaths under the lesser-known autocrat Milton Obote. Uganda was also never affected in any significant way by the coastal slave trade with Europeans, and the country's current president—the somewhat more benevolent dictator Yoweri Museveni—dismissed Clinton's apology for the slave trade as "rubbish." Museveni commented, "African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other, and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here today. And doubtless there remain pockets of slavery in the world."

The New Yorker noted some other recent apologies of note: the Internal Revenue Service apologized for being insensitive to taxpayers; journalist David Brock apologized to President Clinton for his "Troopergate" article that led to Paula Jones's harassment charge; Japan apologized for its treatment of British prisoners of war during World War II; Great Britain apologized for seizing the assets of Holocaust victims during the war; the Vatican apologized for ignoring the Holocaust while it was happening; the producers of "Air Force One" apologized to Kazakhstan for being portrayed in the film as a fictional rogue nation; Newt Gingrich apologized, in book form, for his political misjudgments; Australia's government apologized to its once-oppressed aborigines; New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani apologized for the previous administration's handling of the race riot in Crown Heights in which Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered; a French newspaper apologized for its position on the Dreyfus Affair; and British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for the Irish potato famine, which took place almost 150 years prior. Concerning more recent matters, President Clinton is expected to apologize to Chile for first saying it could buy high-tech weapons, then saying it could not, then changing his position yet again.

[Ed.: While in Uganda, Clinton also promised to deliver $120 million to help provide Internet access for schools that, as it turns out, lack electricity.]

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