EGreen since Donald Trump returned to power, experts had trouble finding analogies appropriate for his style of governance. Some compare his requests for loyalty, his patronage networks and his intimidation tactics to the methods of a mafia don. Others threw him as a feudal suzerain, exploiting a personality cult rooted in charisma and linked by oaths, awards and threats rather than in laws and institutions. An increasing number of artists and creatives of AI represent him as a Viking warrior. And of course, ferocious debates continue to know if the time has arrived for serious comparisons with fascist regimes.
Although some of these analogies can offer a certain degree of insight, they are fundamentally limited by their Eurocentrism – as if the 21st century American policy should still be interpreted only through the objective of the history of the old world. If we really want to understand what is going on, we have to go beyond the Scandinavian sagas and Sicilian criminal traditions.
I found more and more difficult not to see striking parallels between recent events in the United States and the rise of dictatorships of the Cold War era in Africa. It started with the change of name of the Gulf of Mexico and Denali by Trump, who recalled how Mobutu Sese Seko, on a personal whim, changed the Congo to Zaire in 1971. The geographic rebate has been vast in Africa because of its history of colonialism, but now the United States has also started to change the names.
Trump’s deployment of national guard and navy troops in Los Angeles after demonstrations against immigration raids also echoed Mobutu’s favorite method to deal with civil disorders: presidential guards patrolling the streets to crush the demonstrations. The blunt use of the military force to suppress domestic opposition is a tactic associated with personalities such as Idi Amin in Uganda, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Paul Biya in Cameroon – although with more deadly consequences.
The aggressive deportation by Trump of undocumented Latin workers also resembles the expulsion of Amin in 1972 of the Ugandan Asian minority. Amin condemned it as a means of returning economic power to “ordinary Ugandans”, but it led to a financial ruin. The adoption of bizarre and theatrical economic measures which looks great on television but which wreaked havoc in practice is another striking parallel. Trump’s prices, announced with a patriotic brass band of the “Liberation Day”, evoke the grandiose terrestrial reforms of Mugabe from the 1980s, which accelerated the collapse of Zimbabwe.
Anti-intellectualism, son-in-law and delusions of magnitude were characteristics of dictatorships in Africa. Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire built a replica of the Basilica of St Peter in his hometown. Jean-Bédel Bokassa crowned “emperor” of the Central African Republic. The “marshal” Mobutu assured that Concorde could land in his native village. Similar extravagance of ambition Reached the United States, Trump accepting a Luxury Boeing 747 of Qatar and hoping that his face will be sculpted in Mount Rushmore next to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
The army parade in Washington the day the US military was 250 years old and Trump was 79 years old was another moment of self-acting narcissism. A populist person with personality and male pride often go hand in hand with deep paranoia and contempt. Trump’s incessant war against the academic world and the free press inscribes squarely in this tradition. In Equatorial Guinea, President Francisco Macías Nguema prohibited the word “intellectual” and the academics prosecuted. Amin terrorized universities to the point of the brain drain.
At first glance, considering Trump as a westernized version of one of the African dictators may seem shocking. After all, his interest in the continent seems to be limited to his natural resources, and not in his political models. Trade prices and travel prohibitions that he recently triggered have hit several African countries hard, and his cruel withdrawal of aid hardly suggests admiration for something African.
In addition, Trump has never set foot on African soil and would have rejected the continent as a group of “Shithole countries”. It is only when a raw material agreement is in sight that it comes to life, as last week when a “peace agreement” between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda was signed in the White House. “We obtain, for the United States, a lot of mineral rights from the Congo as part of it,” said Trump.
But once the comparison between Trump and a cold war dictator is made, it becomes difficult to see. And that shouldn’t surprise us. The postcolonial dictator was, to a large extent, an American creation. Sooner or later, he had to go home.
The United States has argued unconditionally repressive regimes during the Cold War, considering it volumes against communism – not only in Africa, but in Asia and Latin America. Dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Jorge Rafaél Videla in Argentina remained in power for decades thanks to the support of us. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States suddenly abandoned these allies and defended the Gospel of democratization. Although the 1990s were rich in rhetoric on human rights, good governance and the rule of law, on the ground, the specter of autocracy has never disappeared.
We are now witnessing a surprising reversal. With the disappearance of the USAID and its retirement from a role promoting global democracy, it is not only that the United States has turned their backs on the democratization of countries in Africa and elsewhere – but that it began to imitate some of the worst historical examples of authoritarian domination.
Seeing the Trump regime through the objective of the autocracies of the Cold War in the postcolonial states offers a framework that is both alarming and strangely reassuring.
If there is a lasting lesson in the history of autocracy in Africa, it is this: things can become ugly, quickly. The dictatorships of the Cold War were ruthless, bloody and often ended in chaos and the collapse of the state. However, their stories also show that when the courts are sterilized and the legislatures reduced to rubber stamps, civil society, the independent media and the moral force of religious and academic institutions can become the last formidable bastions against tyranny. After all, sooner or later, dictators die, while collective efforts remain.
