Trump dispels ‘Africa only’ stereotype

IF THERE is one thing that the Donald Trump presidency is going to do for Africans, unintentionally so, is that it will make a dent in the centuries old racist tropes about bad leadership and poor governance being something intrinsic to so-called “third world” cultures.

I do not say this with a sense of schadenfreude, but I get the sense that part of the anti-Trump outrage in the United States is a sense of dismay and embarrassment that such a clownish, thin-skinned, blundering individual can ascend the highest ranks of power.

You see, barely four weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has very little grasp of the line he must draw between his personal life and his public duties. Just the other day he tweeted in anger against Nordstrom, a company that dropped his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line because of declining sales. True to his unfiltered public engagement style, Trump tweeted: “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person – always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”

That of course set off commentators in US mainstream media, they criticised him for using his public office to advance personal interest. Writing for the liberal leaning Huffington Post, journalist Paul Blumenthal stated that “the president is incapable of emotionally disconnecting himself from his family’s brand-driven financial interests – and that this incapacity has trickled down to his staff . . . members of the president’s staff appear to believe that it is their jobs, as paid representatives of the president, to defend his personal and his family’s private business interests, rather than the interests of the American people. There appears to be no conception in the White House that the family business is separate from the business of government.”

My goodness, I thought, was that a comment about the greatest democracy in the West or about some tin-pot African country as it were?

Just over 20-years ago, Africans were confronted with the horror of the Rwandan genocide. Who can forget the images of decaying bodies flowing down rivers as the full scale of the horror was reported.

The darkest part of ourselves was laid bare to the world, every colonial image of the dark, savage continent seemed had been proved it seemed. International media characterised the genocide as an inter-tribal conflict, as if there was a primordial, unchangeable antagonism between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda.

Even though South Africa was experiencing its historic 1994 elections, the 90s were also an era of Afropessimism, where it seemed that indeed the continent was cursed, it had failed spectacularly to realise the promises of its freedom struggles.

And yet 20-years later, the Economist was already portraying Africa as a continent “rising”.

Renewed popular struggles against dictators and the expansion of consumer markets made Africa seem like a worthwhile future investment destination.

Here we sit in 2017 and it is the US that appears like a retrogressive, cultural backwater led by an autocrat. Will US institutions hold up against Trump’s leadership?

The lesson here is that bad leadership happens everywhere, and nobody likes it. Autocratic leaders can be stunningly brazen and they strike fast, as Trump did with his Muslim ban. Shocked and angry citizens will always naturally push back as thousands of Americans have done. But if a country has a weakened economy, the foundation is laid for the autocrat to draw alliances from politically conservative groups to create a social bulwark against resistance.

The key is to understand that it is not Trump in and of himself that is the problem, but that there are a set of political and economic conditions that have allowed US capitalism to strip the stability of the working and middle classes.

Understanding history and economics matter to explaining modern autocrats – Africans have been saying this for 40 years.