IN HIS speech, Mr Obama was to urge Africans to embrace a future of accountable leaders and open markets. To ensure a wide audience, the administration organised watch parties at embassies and cultural centers across Africa. But the speech was also a splash of cold water for Africans still nursing grievances over colonial rule.

'For many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance, (insisting) this was somehow the consequence of neocolonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism,' Mr Obama told AllAfrica.com last week. 'I'm not a believer in excuses.'

Those sentiments led Mr Obama to avoid his father's native Kenya for this stop. Tensions in Kenya remain high after a disputed 2007 election and subsequent ethnic bloodshed. Yet in Ghana, Africa's grievous past was also part of the picture.

Mr Obama was touring Gold Coast Castle, a seaside fortress converted to the slave trade by the British in the 17th century. In its dungeons, thousands of shackled Africans huddled in squalor before being herded onto ships bound for America.

While Michelle Obama's great-great-grandfather was a slave in South Carolina, his African origins are not known.

The castle visit mirrored ones paid by Mr Clinton and George W. Bush to the slave-trading post of Goree Island, Senegal - with the added impact of Mr Obama's mixed-race background and history-making election.

In Ghana too, Mr Obama followed in Mr Clinton's footsteps. In 1998, a surging crowd cheered Mr Clinton in Accra's Independence Square and toppled barricades after his speech. Mr Clinton shouted, 'Back up! Back up!', his Secret Service detail clearly frantic.

Mr Bush's reception last year was less tumultuous, but equally warm. At a welcoming banquet, Mr Kufuor noted huge increases in US development aid and AIDS relief - and named a highway after Mr Bush. Earlier, Mr Bush hosted Mr Kufuor at one of his few White House state dinners.

Mr Obama - son of a Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas - first toured Africa in 1992. The newly minted Harvard law school grad savoured its sights, sounds and tastes.

In 'Dreams from My Father,' he recalled running his hand over his father's burial plot. 'I had sat at my father's grave and spoken to him through Africa's red soil,' he wrote. -- AP