Among the maize, yam and groundnut fields of Savelugu-Nanton, a remote region in northern Ghana, inheritance of Jimmy Carter is more difficult than it is in the former US President's home country.
Thanks to his philanthropic work, The Carter Center, local people today have survived the crisis Guinea worm disease – a parasite that breeds in the human stomach and emerges from the skin before depositing its larvae in stagnant pools to await its victim.
Carter's mission to fight the virus is to target votes in poor countries won him over Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Followed a leadership that achieved a peace agreement in the Middle East, but was hampered by economic and social problems in Iran.
He died Sunday, aged 100, the Carter Center announced. He had entered patient care in February 2023, and decided to stay at home after a short hospital stay. The former president was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 but received treatment. At 100 years old, he became the longest serving president of the United States.
During his six decades of political, humanitarian and advocacy work, Carter was “dedicated to causes such as human rights, peace, and improving people's lives,” Steven Hochman, director of research at The Carter Center, told Al Jazeera.
“He didn't just want to talk, he wanted to do something,” Hochman said. “Whether it was monitoring elections in Latin America or seeing the terrible suffering of Guinea worm disease in Asia and Africa, I am working to end it.”
A southern nut
Carter grew up on the red clay soil of rural Georgia during the Great Depression. He sold boiled peanuts on the streets of his hometown of Plains, and farmed with his family. His father, James “Earl” Carter, was a peanut farmer and warehouseman; his mother, Lillian, was a nurse.
He married Rosalynn Smith, a family friend, in 1946. The couple celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary in July 2022, one year before the first lady's death in November 2023.
After seven years of military service in the United States, Carter returned to his home state of Georgia, where he attracted national attention as a Democrat governor due to his strategic management, gaining a place on the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of the “New South” . “.
In running for the presidency, Carter cast himself as an outsider to Washington politics, which had been marred by the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War. His “Peanut Brigade”, a group of friends from Georgia, toured the US trumpeting as a straight talker.
“Carter's election in 1976 promised to redeem the country from the sins of Vietnam and Watergate,” Randall Balmer, historian and author, told Al Jazeera. “He wanted to restore faith in government, but the disloyalty of the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon years had already begun to cynicize.”
In the White House, Carter's brand recognition did not mean political success. Many of his progressive economic and social policies met with objections in Congress; failure to translate ideas into legal reality reduced his popularity.
The United States was preoccupied with problems of economic growth, unemployment and inflation, caused by the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Carter's solution, to deal with US dependence on foreign oil through taxation green energyit was repealed in the Senate.
Good outside
Carter was successful overseas. He struck treaties that saw the Panama Canal operated under common control; established diplomatic relations with China; and agreed to reduce nuclear weapons with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
His professional mission was to bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on his presidential visit to Camp David, Maryland, in 1978, and forge a peace agreement between the enemies after 13 difficult days.
“He was reliable as a peace negotiator because he listened to both sides. He could think on his feet; and talk on his feet,” Hochman said. He took a chance, even if it meant he might fail. “
The Camp David Agreement led to legal and economic ties between the neighbors, provided Israel returns the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. They have not solved the Palestinian problem, but they have saved the region from repeating the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.
“When Carter was thinking about this meeting, and even when he announced it, almost every foreign policy teacher, Henry Kissinger included, gave advice,” Gerald Rafshoon, director of communications at the White House under Carter, told Al Jazeera.
“The sages warned that the leader of the country should not negotiate without knowing the outcome beforehand. Carter rejected that advice – and did more to advance Israel's security than any US president before or since. “
Chaos in the Middle East
The Middle East gave Carter a diplomatic victory, but it also brought about his downfall. In 1979, Iranian students destroyed it US Ambassador in Tehran and arresting 52 Americans – setting off a 444-day standoff that did not end until Carter was ousted from the White House.
Carter's efforts to secure the release of hostages through the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a political crisis that appeared nightly on US television. The failed US bailout in April 1980 highlighted Carter's difficulties.
Later that year, the American people gave the Republican leader, Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, a landslide victory over Carter. Carter's rhetoric about the US's “spiritual crisis” and the country's “malaise” may have been true, but they did not win the vote.
“People say they want honest leaders, but when you give it to them, they say that's not what a leader is supposed to do,” Gary Sick, a White House staffer under Carter and other presidents, told Al Jazeera. “They expect their leaders to be hypocritical and make things sound better than they really are.
“Jimmy Carter called for propaganda, and people weren't ready for that loyalty.”
Even after losing office, Carter's diplomatic skills were still in demand. He has mediated in Nicaragua, Panama, and Ethiopia, helped decentralize power in Haiti and dealt with North Korea's nuclear weapons program. He wrote several books, mainly about peace in the Middle East.
He also kept speaking the truth which caused political enemies when the President. He said the 2003 attack of Iraq he was “unrighteous”; and that the US was “in bed with Israel in the destruction” of Palestine. An evangelical Christian, he also objected abortion.
In 2006 Carter released the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He defended the use of the word apartheid in a 2007 interview with US radio station NPR, calling it “an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank”.
He added that he hoped the book would make Americans aware of “the terrible oppression and torture of the Palestinian people and will bring for the first time any debate on this issue”.
More than ten years later, major human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Internationalwould support his assessment, accusing Israel of discriminating against the Palestinian people.
Philanthropy: The Carter Center
Founded in 1982 by the former president and his wife, The Carter Center has overseen 113 elections in 39 countries and tackles diseases like river blindness, trachoma and malaria, often by bringing medicine to underpopulated, underserved areas.
There were 3.5 million cases of Guinea worm disease in 21 countries in Africa and Asia when Carter declared war on the virus in 1986. The Savelugu-Nanton region and the entire country of Ghana were declared free of the disease in 2015, and it was virtually eradicated elsewhere. .
Late in life, the former president continued to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, hosting an annual event that attracted thousands of volunteers in the US and abroad.
Carter's supporters say history will judge his leadership better than American voters did in 1980.
Outside the White House, a an inheritance the father of four and grandfather of 22 is confirmed.
In his own words: “I can't deny that I'm a former president than I was a president.”