Ever since Donald Trump returned to energy, pundits have struggled to search out apt analogies for his type of governance. Some liken his loyalty calls for, patronage networks and intimidation ways to the strategies of a mafia don. Others forged him as a feudal overlord, working a character cult rooted in charisma and sure by oaths, rewards and threats relatively than legal guidelines and establishments. A rising variety of artists and AI creatives are depicting him as a Viking warrior. And naturally, fierce debates proceed over whether or not the second has arrived for severe comparisons with fascist regimes.
Whereas a few of these analogies might provide a level of perception, they’re essentially restricted by their Eurocentrism – as if Twenty first-century US politics should nonetheless be interpreted solely via the lens of old-world historical past. If we actually need to perceive what’s unfolding, we should transfer past Scandinavian sagas and Sicilian crime lore.
I’ve discovered it more and more tough to not see placing parallels between current occasions within the US and the rise of chilly war-era dictatorships in Africa. It started with Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, which recalled how Mobutu Sese Seko, on a private whim, modified Congo into Zaire in 1971. Geographical renaming has been intensive in Africa due to its historical past of colonialism, however now the US has began altering names too.
Trump’s deployment of national guard troops and marines to Los Angeles after protests over immigration raids additionally echoed Mobutu’s most well-liked methodology for coping with civil unrest: presidential guards patrolling the streets to crush protests. The blunt use of army power to suppress home opposition is a tactic related to figures similar to Idi Amin in Uganda, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Paul Biya in Cameroon – albeit with deadlier penalties.
Trump’s aggressive deportation of undocumented Latino employees additionally resembles Amin’s 1972 expulsion of Uganda’s Asian minority. Amin framed it as a option to return financial energy to “the strange Ugandan”, however it led to monetary damage. The embrace of weird, theatrical financial measures that look nice on tv however wreak havoc in follow is one other placing parallel. Trump’s tariffs, introduced with patriotic fanfare on “liberation day”, evoke Mugabe’s grandiose land reforms of the Nineteen Eighties, which hastened Zimbabwe’s collapse.
Anti-intellectualism, egomania and delusions of grandeur have been hallmarks of dictatorships in Africa. Ivory Coast’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny constructed a duplicate of St Peter’s Basilica in his residence city. Jean-Bédel Bokassa topped himself “emperor” of Central African Republic. “Marshal” Mobutu ensured that Concorde could land in his native village. The same extravaganza of ambition has reached the US, with Trump accepting a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar and hoping his face can be carved into Mount Rushmore beside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
The military parade in Washington on the day the US army turned 250 and Trump turned 79 was one other second of self-aggrandising narcissism. A populist character cult and masculine pleasure typically go hand in hand with deep paranoia and contempt. Trump’s relentless struggle on academia and the free press matches squarely inside this custom. In Equatorial Guinea, President Francisco Macías Nguema outlawed the phrase “intellectual” and prosecuted lecturers. Amin terrorised universities to the purpose of brain-drain.
At first look, viewing Trump as a westernised model of one in every of Africa’s dictators could appear jarring. In any case, his curiosity within the continent seems restricted to its pure sources, not its political fashions. The commerce tariffs and journey bans he lately unleashed have hit a number of African international locations exhausting, and his merciless withdrawal of support hardly suggests admiration for something African.
What’s extra, Trump has never set foot on African soil and reportedly dismissed the continent as a cluster of “shithole countries”. Solely when a uncooked supplies deal is in sight does he spring into life, similar to final week when a “peace deal” between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda was signed on the White Home. “We’re getting, for the US, a variety of the mineral rights from the Congo as a part of it,” Trump stated.
However as soon as the comparability between Trump and a chilly struggle dictator is made, it turns into exhausting to unsee. And it shouldn’t shock us. The postcolonial dictator was, to a major diploma, an American creation. Eventually, it needed to come residence.
The US supported repressive regimes unconditionally in the course of the chilly struggle, viewing them as bulwarks towards communism – not simply in Africa, however in Asia and Latin America. Dictators similar to Ferdinand Marcos within the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Jorge Rafaél Videla in Argentina remained in energy for many years due to US backing. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the US abruptly deserted these allies and championed the gospel of democratisation. Although the Nineteen Nineties have been wealthy in rhetoric about human rights, good governance and the rule of legislation, on the bottom the spectre of autocracy by no means vanished solely.
We’re now witnessing a startling reversal. With the demise of USAID and its retreat from a task selling international democracy, it’s not solely that the US has turned its again on democratising international locations in Africa and elsewhere – however that it has begun to mimic among the worst historic examples of authoritarian rule.
Viewing Trump’s regime via the lens of chilly war-era autocracies in postcolonial states affords a framework that’s each alarming and oddly reassuring.
If there’s one enduring lesson from the historical past of autocracy in Africa, it’s this: issues can flip ugly, quick. Chilly struggle dictatorships have been ruthless, bloody and infrequently led to chaos and state collapse. But their histories additionally present that when courts are neutered and legislatures lowered to rubber stamps, civil society, impartial media and the ethical power of spiritual and educational establishments can emerge because the final formidable strongholds towards tyranny. In any case, eventually, dictators die, whereas collective efforts stay.
