Before insulting Trump, answer these questions

Donald Trump is an intellectual, psychological and moral tramp. PHOTO | JIM WATSON | AFP

What you need to know:

  • The AU has demanded an apology from him. Two African countries have summoned American ambassadors to voice their outrage.
  • Is it not possible, however, that Trump only gave voice to what the world thinks of Africa?
  • Out of all the continents in the world, Africa has the smallest manufacturing base, and its share of global trade accounts to a meagre two per cent.

Donald Trump is an intellectual, psychological and moral tramp. His worldview is informed by an extreme Christian right-wing ideology that sees evil in a multicultural America, and which advocates a mythical past of a single Christian and European ethic.

His attitude towards women recalls the Stone Age. His actions and pronouncements reveal an infantile temperament. He does not understand today’s complex geo-politics, and advocates a simplistic Pax-Americana.

Within a short period of time, Trump has managed to insult everyone. He has insulted his own compatriots. He has angered American allies. He has angered Muslims. By the end of his presidency — if it survives that long — he will have annoyed everyone and probably caused a war, a nuclear war even.

Trump’s recent characterisation of African countries and Haiti as shithole countries has sparked a lot of anger in many quarters, and especially in Africa.

DEMANDED APOLOGY

The AU has demanded an apology from him. Two African countries have summoned American ambassadors to voice their outrage.

Is it not possible, however, that Trump only gave voice to what the world thinks of Africa?

Out of all the continents in the world, Africa has the smallest manufacturing base, and its share of global trade accounts to a meagre two per cent. Several reports show that the worst place to grow up in, especially for girls, is Africa. The continent is way behind in scientific research and technological innovation. Every now and again, images of starving Africans are beamed across the globe. Ethnic wars plague many regions on the continent. Many African countries are classified as failed or potential failed states. Would we have felt better if Trump had called Africa the ‘sick man of the world’?

Bertolt Brecht, a German poet, in a poem titled, A Worker Reads History, poses a series of questions that expose the hypocrisy of written history. By doing so, he invites us to reconsider the way we record events, and more fundamentally, he invites us to re-examine our hierarchical ordering of society.

SIMILAR FASHION

In similar fashion, I pose a series of questions that expose the hypocrisy of our sense of hurt at Trump’s insult, and invite a re-examinations of actions and behaviour that have created the conditions that make us the laughing (and insulting) stock of the world.

How many African countries summoned the Rwandese ambassadors in their countries to express outrage over the profiling of the Tutsi by the government prior to the 1994 genocide? How many African countries carried out investigations — as some Western countries did — to establish the extent to which they might have aided in the subsequent slaughter of a million Rwandans?

The AU now self righteously calls for Trump to apologise, but why did its predecessor organisation — the OAU — not only tolerate Idi Amin’s bloodthirsty regime but also appoint the tyrant as its chairman? Why haven’t we recalled our ambassadors from South Sudan and The Central African Republic to protest the ethnic and religious slaughter going on in those countries?

Why is it that in Africa, the wealthiest people are politicians and those connected to them? In Kenya, as in other African countries, doctors, scientists, scholars, etc, will abandon their careers to scramble for a seat in Parliament.

In other parts of the world, people spend their lifetimes perfecting skills and increasing knowledge in their careers, trying to make discoveries or inventions that change the world. Any wonder why no African has ever won a Nobel Prize in physics or medicine. Why this pathological attraction to the lazy lifestyle and easy money of politics?

Why is it that African engineers and scientists perform to the highest standards in foreign countries, whereas at home their genius gets contaminated by the murky waters of chaotic mediocrity?

Why are our national honours rosters populated by glorified thieves and tribalists, and not by eminent scholars, doctors and scientists such as Calestous Juma, Thomas Odhiambo, Micere Mugo or the doctors who separated the conjoined twins at the Kenyatta National Hospital?

Why did African countries not summon ambassadors of Kenya in their countries over theft of millions meant for the youth and HIV programmes?

PROTESTS ACROSS AFRICA?

Why did we not see protests across Africa when security forces in Uganda prevented MPs from accessing parliament to vote against the removal of presidential term limits?

How many Africans at home and in the Diaspora gathered outside of Zimbabwe’s embassies to protest Robert Mugabe’s cynical machinations to have his wife succeed him?

When Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, Nelson Mandela loudly, publicly and angrily castigated the Sani Abacha regime. How many of his African colleagues joined him?

How many of the conferences we organise to debate Africa discuss the fact that millions of African women continue to be psychologically and physically maimed by FGM?

Should the AU and Africans not see it as a great insult to our dignity that thousands of Africans prefer to risk death in the seas rather than live hopeless lives in their countries? Should not our thinkers now abandon the perennial colonial discourse and instead urgently debate the conditions that have allowed  a modern slave trade to thrive in Libya?

Lastly, why do we not feel great humiliation that we now beg from countries with which we were at par at independence? Brecht ends his poem thus: “So many particulars, so many questions”.

The questions and particulars I posit above invite an honest conversation about the part Africans themselves have played in creating the conditions that inform the world’s low opinion of Africa. We can strategise on a new beginning. We can vow that henceforth, we will not keep quiet in the face of actions and behaviour that create conditions of Africa’s vulnerability. We must now abandon excuses and notions of victimhood that have formed the basis of our intellectual and ideological expression over the last fifty years. Accepting our mistakes and devising means of correcting them constitute true acts of taking charge of our destiny. Africa must seek the right people , cultivate the right attitudes, inculcate in its body-politic an enabling culture, insist on a robust work ethic in its workplaces, devise enabling systems in its institutions, etc., that  will, in the next 20 years, change Africa’s narrative. Then we will never have to worry about another insult. And should we still be insulted, then we will be self-righteously offended, and our demonstrations of hurt will be manifestly justifiable.

 

Tee Ngugi is the author of ‘Sea- sons of Love and Despair’. [email protected]