Essay On The Recently Concluded American Election

Why do some Africans keep on cheering for two sides of the same genocidal empire?

Like some badly scripted Ghanawood film, every other November, in Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra, Africans take to their phones and argue about the USA and the pantomime marketed as the ultimate in democratic elections.

With the diligence of betting addicts, these Africans tally the Senate and Congress seats and cheer for candidates who will never learn our names, or even point to their countries on the map. Many American officials cannot point to Africa on the world map, even if their lives depend on it. Yet, Africans, especially the educated class, continue to treat American elections as one huge cause that would somehow be beneficial to our continent, even when the history of the two parties argues against it.

While one can try to understand the habit of wasting time on things that can’t be changed, one should not build hope on it.

I do not share the quiet (misguided) belief that somewhere in the arithmetic of a foreign election lies something owed to us by the empire that has historically oppressed us.

This time the pundits predicted a dramatic arithmetic. Network projections give the Democrats both the House and the Senate. There were cheers as it appears that the latest ogre from the American Empire, Donald Trump, has taken a beating over prices, over the stench of corruption around his court, and over a war with Iran that the American public claimed they never asked for.

I will not pretend this is nothing, as unlike in the rickety democracy we have in Africa, the American Congress can subpoena, investigate, and obstruct the Executive. Our parliaments in Africa only salute Mr. President.

But our pundits in Africa failed to look at what the American voters were actually saying. They were angry about groceries and rent. American voters were not repudiating the American right to bomb whomever it pleases. They were angry because their gas and grocery prices have skyrocketed and are hurting their pockets. They do not give a damn about the 185 Iranians schoolchildren killed in Minab, with a second-tapped Tomahawk ensuring that parents and first responders were also massacred.

Americans like to treat their parties as moral characters, one saintly from birth and the other damned. But as any student of American political history knows, the record is less flattering to everyone.

A short rendition of history: The Democrats grew out of Andrew Jackson's movement, the party of vicious Indian removal and, for the best part of a century, of the slaveholding Southern states. The Republicans were born in the 1850s against the spread of slavery, and Lincoln carried them through a Civil War. Then the coalitions turned over. The civil-rights revolution pushed the Southern whites out of one house and into the other, and the labels stayed while the furniture was carried across the street.

Grant that parties changed, what did not change were the things the two parties competed to control.

Presidents come and go, but the machine they inherit keeps its appetite. Tomasi di Lampedusa put the whole of establishment politics into one line in The Leopard: everything must change so that everything can stay the same.

The US has been living by that line for a century.

Start with the Democrats, the party that fancies itself the conscience of the republic. Woodrow Wilson, the apostle of self-determination, sent the Marines into Haiti in 1915 and held the country for nearly twenty years. Kennedy hounded Cuba and kept Congo inside the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson burned Vietnam with orange agent and landed troops in the Dominican Republic. Bill Clinton starved Iraq with sanctions, bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in 1998, and in 1994 watched Rwanda bleed while his officials haggled over whether the word "genocide" might oblige them to do something. Our own “bother” Barack Obama, the apostle of the Change we can believe in, a Nobel laureate to boot, ran a drone war across several countries, helped smash Libya in 2011, and spread American military outposts across the Sahel.

The decision to invade Iraq in 2002 was bipartisan, with many Democratic senators, Biden and Clinton among them, voting in its favor.

Republicans don't need a defense lawyer; they need a prosecutor. McKinley took the Philippines and fought a colonial war there in which, by most estimates, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died. Eisenhower's government overthrew Mossadegh in Iran and Árbenz in Guatemala, and authorized the plots against Lumumba. Nixon carried the Vietnam War into Cambodia and backed the generals who killed Allende's Chile. Reagan embraced "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa, armed Savimbi's UNITA in Angola, and vetoed sanctions on Pretoria, which Congress had to override. George W. Bush lied the country into Iraq on the strength of weapons that did not exist. Trump, now, has added Iran to the list, along with an open contempt for African states that did not bother to hide themselves.

No, we have not forgotten that these are not the same wars, and that each deserves its own judgment. But set the two columns side by side and the pattern is hard to deny. Democrats bomb in the name of human rights, and Republicans bomb in the name of strength.

The victims in Baghdad or Benghazi are rarely able to tell which vocabulary was used.

A very good book to read on these insane wars America fought/fights is General Smedley Butler's " War Is a Racket.” https://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket/

I do not object to Africans paying attention to global events, especially in an important country like the United States. Washington sets terms on trade, aid, debt, sanctions, and military cooperation; any African who ignores these facts is a fool.

We object that Africans tend to confuse attention with agency.

Consider our own history in Africa. In 1960, the American government decided that the first Prime Minister of an independent Congo was a problem to be solved. Plans were discussed in Washington to be rid of Patrice Lumumba, and Congolese hands finally killed him, dissolving his body in acid, with Belgian involvement, in January 1961.

Then came the insanely kleptomaniac Mobutu Sese Seko, installed and curated with Washington's blessing and kept in place for thirty-two years of plunder. Democrats and Republicans both signed his cheques.

Libya is the more recent lesson in American perfidy. Abusing a UN resolution in 2011, NATO, with American power at its core, helped destroy Gaddafi. While we may have our disagreement with Gaddafi, we all have watched what followed, and it is not pretty: a fractured state, rival militias, and by 2017, reports of open-air auctions in which African migrants were sold. Obama himself later admitted that failing to plan for the aftermath was the worst mistake of his presidency.

That is a strange sort of confession from a man whose party’s victory some Africans are celebrating.

Behind the foreign policy sits a domestic order in which wealth speaks and the poor are expected to listen and applaud. Money was already buying access long before the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, but that ruling opened the door to unlimited independent spending by corporations and wealthy interests. While it did not turn every member of Congress into a hired hand, it did make the democratic marketplace much less democratic, thus affirming the saying that Western democracy is a competition between oligarchs.

Democrats and Republicans do, of course, disagree sharply on taxes, labor, abortion, climate, and the reach of public services, and, also of course, those disagreements decide whether a family eats or a clinic stays open. But neither party has shown the slightest appetite for dismantling the arrangement that gives donors, defense contractors and corporations their vast say over what American power does abroad. And neither has shown the slightest interest in dismantling the American Empire.

While elections in the US can shift the rules at the margins, they don’t shift ownership.

So what exactly are we celebrating in Africa? If it is relief that a dangerous Hegemon has been checked, fine. If the election results will change American foreign policy in a way that saves lives and stops the violent disregard for international laws and norms, say so. But let nobody inflate the results of a congressional election into a turning point for a continent.

A Republican defeat does not hand back our sovereignty, and a Democratic victory would not repay what was taken from us.

Kwame Nkrumah warned us in 1965 that neo-colonialism is empire without the flag.

It does not care what color the White House is painted.

We can closely watch the Americans have their quarrel because it will reach our ports and our budgets sooner or later. But Africa's business is not to dance each time the color of the White House changes. Our business is to understand what power does, to bargain hard, to build our own continental strength, and to make our own decisions.

The elephant and the donkey may fight all they like over who holds the reins. Neither of them is carrying us home.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com