Obama visits Africa for 1st time since 2009

DAKAR, Senegal -- President Barack Obama is visiting Africa on a mission to make up for lost time.

Lagging behind former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as China, in engaging sub-Saharan Africa, Obama has assembled a weeklong, three-country itinerary to begin taking a more active role in pushing U.S. investment and strengthening democratic institutions on the continent.

He arrived last night in Senegal to start a trip that also will take him to South Africa and Tanzania. The visit is his first to the region as president since a one-day stop in Ghana in 2009.

"There are other countries getting in the game in Africa -- China, Brazil, Turkey," White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said before Obama left Washington. "If the U.S. is not leading in Africa, we're going to fall behind in a very important region of the world."

Obama is on the continent as former South African President Nelson Mandela, 94, who inspired the president's early political activism, lies critically ill in a Pretoria hospital where he's been fighting a lung infection since June 8. Mandela's death would upend Obama's schedule.

The week's events are designed to encourage U.S. trade and infrastructure development as well as more traditional goals of disease prevention and treatment and food security. "The Obama administration doesn't want the military engagement and drone bases to be the take-away legacy that they have in Africa," said Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy center.