Clinton Praises South Africa

President Clinton told the South African Parliament Thursday that he is deeply honored to be the first U.S. president to visit South Africa.

He spoke in the wood-paneled chambers of a parliament that once was part of an apartheid government. Mr. Clinton said he was particularly pleased to be addressing a South African parliament that is "truly free and democratic at last."

He reiterated his theme that the U.S. is seeking a new partnership with African nations. The chamber burst into applause as Clinton used a South African term for the act of building together. And he added that he is indeed seeing a new renaissance in Africa

Before his speech, Mr. Clinton met South African President Nelson Mandela and his heir apparent, Thabo Mbeki, and promised that aid would remain part of his program to bolster African development.

Earlier Thursday, Clinton helped to lay a brick foundation for a shack-dweller's new home, symbolically helping to build a new South Africa as he kicked off a four-day state visit.

The president, who flew into Cape Town in the early hours from Uganda, unexpectedly joined his wife Hillary on a visit to a model housing scheme on the impoverished Cape Flats that flank the beautiful city.

The Clintons went to see the partially U.S.-funded project where women are building their own homes to escape a life in the shacks of squatter camps like those that glare at visitors as they drive into the city from the airport.

The president, on the fourth stop of a six-nation African safari, said their self-help was a shining example.

"What you are doing here, building your homes and saving for them, should be a model for people who do not have very much all over Africa and all over the world," he told a cheering and singing crowd.

"All over the world people will see what you are doing in this neighborhood and will say, I want to do that."

Mandela, accompanied by his Mozambican companion, Graca Machel, greeted Clinton with a hug in the square outside South Africa's parliament and the two stood for a 21-gun salute and the anthems of the two countries.

Mbeki, who has been nominated by the ruling African National Congress to succeed President Nelson Mandela when he retires next year, in an interview reported Thursday attacked Clinton's intention to phase out aid and bolster trade.

But the two said after their talks that their differences were not significant.

"What I believe is that countries and individual citizens in the developing nations of the world will never be able to rise to level of middle-class natios... unless they do it through the energies of private economic interchange, through trade and investment," Clinton said.

He added: "To get countries to the take-off point... we have to continue the aid program."

In an interview with a French newsletter, quoted by South Africa's Business Day newspaper, Mbeki had said Africa, the world's poorest continent, still needed both aid and trade.

On Friday, Mandela will show Clinton around the Robben Island prison off Cape Town, where the South African president was imprisoned for 18 years during the apartheid days.

Clinton will spend a day in the commercial hub of Johannesburg Saturday, where he is expected to talk trade with business leaders, before heading to Botswana and Senegal.

©1998 CBS Worldwide Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report