But Obama's finger wagging could not expunge how the U.S. government had long propped up Africa's most oppressive governments.

In the 1990s, Africa saw a surge of democracies in areas that for centuries had known little except kings, tyrants, or colonial conquerors. While democracy is often touted as the best way to strengthen civic bonds, representative government has too often been a horror show in Africa.

Bad luck for albinos

Prior to a 2008 election in Cote d'Ivorie, a spokesman for the Ivorian police warned that "the organs of children will be particularly in demand" for human sacrifices. A news analysis explained that child abduction "may worsen in the run up to presidential elections later this year as political hopefuls use traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances." Uganda saw a surge in "good luck" child mutilation and murder prior to its 2016 election. A Suffolk University Law Review article explained that "where more than six million [Ugandans] believe in witchcraft, it is not uncommon for political leaders to turn to the practice [including child sacrifice] to win political office."

The chief of Uganda's Anti-Human Sacrifice and Trafficking Task Force observed: "We even suspect that senior politicians, senior civil servants who have that belief, who believe in witchcraft and go to that level of sacrifice to maintain their jobs or get work." In 2015, a United Nations human-rights expert denounced attacks on albinos in six nations due to "an apparent increase in demand for body parts of persons with albinism … in the run up to elections." Tanzania's Deputy Home Affairs Minister Pereira Silima announced in 2015: "I want to assure my fellow politicians that there won't be any parliamentary seat that will be won as a result of using albino body parts."

While elections sometimes spur child sacrifice, voting has repeatedly spurred far worse carnage in Africa in "winner trample all" elections. American Enterprise Institute African expert Mauro de Lorenzo observed: "Look carefully at what happened in Rwanda, Zaire, and Burundi, 1990 to 1994. In each case, the rapid imposition, from outside, of the structures and mechanisms of multiparty democracy leads directly to the unprecedented cataclysm that subsequently engulfed each place."

Political clashes in Rwanda paved the way to a genocide that killed 800,000 people. A 1993 election in Burundi helped spur the slaughter of 25,000 people. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Joshua Kurlantzick observed that "Africa is now paralyzed by the rise of a new, but not necessarily better, form of government — failed democracy…. In these countries, elections have become referenda on tribal or religious identity, solidifying antagonisms between groups…. Too often, it is entrenching old hatreds, and leaving in power leaders who can claim they were elected while tearing apart civil society."