Trump’s recent White House meeting with Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, got little attention here. But from an African perspective it set human society back almost to the time of the Crusades.
“While Americans are busy dissecting the Michelle Wolf monologue at the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” a spurious summary of the meeting by NPR begins, Nigerians were arming militias and perhaps planning new civil wars as the government of Nigeria went onto a higher security alert. This because of Trump, because of America.
Trump didn’t threaten Nigeria per se. He had no idea, and probably doesn’t care that it’s soon to become the richest country on the continent, that it’s twice the size of the European Union and bigger than China, with a population more than half that of the U.S. and almost three times as big as Britain.
What he did care about was a couple sound bites he managed to retain from Fox & Friends:
(1) That “boka haram thing.”
(2) “And you do have some countries that are in very bad shape and very tough places to live in.”
(3) “Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster.”
(4) And most damaging of all: “”We’ve had serious problems with Christians who have been murdered, killed,” Trump said referring to a dangerous, complicated conflict in Nigeria’s drought areas. “We’re going to work on that problem and working on that problem very, very hard.”
Trump is the face of America. The “boka haram thing” is more serious to Nigerians than al-Qaeda or the Taliban ever were to Americans, because it’s active within the country’s borders, not just an outside threat.
I know some of the downline American diplomats who until recently were working with Nigeria on the Boko Haram conflict. The Trump administration disbanded that diplomatic group, separated the diplomats who had worked so closely together (and so well) for so long, and totally and completely walked away from the problem.
Buhari knows that Donald Trump, that America no longer has a clue what that “boko haram thing” is.
Trump is the mind of America. It was an embarrassment in my industry – until again recently – that many Americans thought “Africa” was a single country. Buhari doesn’t “have some countries,” he has one. He probably thinks of himself no more an African than Donald Trump thinks of himself as a North American.
Trump’s paranoia about immigration is America’s. Does he remember all the Nigerian taxi cab drivers in New York? Or was it simply that any topic that strays from his ego will be forgotten?
But the greatest damage is born of America’s, Trump’s deep-set, destructive racism.
I’ve been critical of religion all my adult life. What I book-know of Christianity, Trump is not. A Christian is not a misogynist, adulterer, thief or liar. He’s certainly not a traitor, someone who defies oath. Yet the Christians of America are Trump’s last great bastion of support and he knows that better than anything else.
The Christian/Muslim conflict is so ancient that in a truly modern world it would be an academic topic, not a political issue. But we’ve lost so much modernity in the last generation that it’s now once again, political. And not just in America.
Brexit revived the Northern Ireland conflict. Neo-fascists in Europe rallied against immigrant mostly Muslims. And in much of Africa, Nigeria in particular, Christians have been newly pitted against Muslims.
In all those cases and more the real underlying problem isn’t religion at all, but economic opportunity. Catholic Irish, Muslim immigrants and struggling Muslim herders in Nigeria represent the long-term poor.
Climate change has clobbered Africa in multiple different ways. In much of Nigeria’s east, drought has destroyed the ancestral pastures of traditional herders, most of them descended from the ancient desert Fulani people.
These poor ranchers just coincidentally in modern terms are Muslims. At the edges of the drought devastation are functioning communities of non-herder peoples, who just coincidentally in modern terms are Christians.
The less privileged Muslims of Nigeria are exactly like the less privileged non-Whites of America.
Muhammadu Buhari is a Fulani Muslim. He is pretty well loved by most of his diversely ethnic and religious country, and he’s trying his hardest to empower his own people within the context of the democratic and capitalistic norms he so deeply believes in.
The drought is an enormous challenge for him. Herders have murdered Christian leaders. Christian leaders have nearly called for a reverse jihad.
Fox & Friends picked it up. Trump, America, amplified it.
There is an evil tide much greater than Trump or Trumpism or America and it’s sweeping across the world. The tragedy is that there is no America anymore to keep it at bay.