Kuir ë Garang, PhD*
When the South Sudanese embassy officials in Washington, D.C. made an honest mistake in April and accepted a Congolese national, who was deported with South Sudanese deportees to Juba, officials in Juba corrected the mistake. They refused the Congolese entry to South Sudan after doing more background checks than was possible in Washington.
The Trump administration responded with threats. Bullying. Infantilization. Their argument was that Juba did not accept the deportees in a "timely manner."
The Trump administration, through Marco Rubio, did not care that South Sudanese officials were not rejecting South Sudanese deportees. They were only rejecting a Congolese who was masquerading as South Sudanese.
Even when South Sudan accepted its citizens, the Trump administration revoked visas and threatened to withhold pending visa applications for South Sudanese nationals.
It was bullying! No room for negotiations and reason.
Accept what we say we, the mighty US say, or we punish you. South Sudan had to cave in. What else could South Sudan do? Nothing! They accepted the Congolese, a non-national.
The Congolese is a fellow African so the issue was not really about rejecting a fellow African. It was about protocols, diplomatic protocols and respect, and the fact that Congo (Democratic Republic) exists.
But why negotiate with people you can easily bully into submission? As American lawyer, Leon Fresco, told Aljazeera on April 6, the Trump administration was using South Sudan as an example to send a message to the rest of the world. It is a colonial attitude.
Now, South Sudan seems to have become a dumping ground for American deportees for the Trump administration.
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Many western leaders seem horrified by what Trump is doing to United States institutions and society and to the global order. Trump's actions are not really unprecedented. Yes, they are devious, self-serving, at times immoral, and more so, destabilizing.
But should we be surprised. No. Not really! The rest, non-westerners, or those who know a bit of the history of the west, know that Trump is a western man (with a capital 'M') through and through. He is treating the west and his own fellow citizens in the same way the west has been treating the rest of the world for the last five centuries.
We are not surprised. Westerners have been feeling superior and entitled as, somehow, super-humans, whether overtly or covertly.
Before the collapse of the racist and eugenicist regime in the 1960s, westerners' opinion of the rest of the world was overt. It was taught openly and proudly in university lecture halls and auditoriums, preached at the pulpits, acted out on theatre stages, joked about at dinner tables...etc.
After the above regimes collapsed, the attitude did not disappear. It morphed into new forms through which it manifested without betraying the fact that these regimes only collapsed in forms only but not function.
Meaning western colonial bullying went underground. It became formal in monetary policies, fiscal policies, international trade laws, terms of borrowing through International Monetary Funds and the World Bank...etc. It was a clever obfuscation. I
In these new social forms, Africans were still considered inferior. But African inferiority was not spoken out loudly by the sane majority. It was whispered or joked about in racially exclusive country clubs or book clubs.
When Trump called African countries 'shitholes' and supported policies that appeared callous or behaving as if Africa is inhabited by beings no one should care about, he was not inventing a social consciousness. He was joining an established tradition.
To westerners, Africa is always that place where resources are exploited and the people forced to remain painfully silent.
What is different now in Trumpism is that Trump has become explicit and overt in his denigration regime. Denigration is now shamelessly aimed openly', not through inadvertent 'hot mics' moments or in recordings not meant for public consumption.
Meaning President Trump was joining the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who have insulted African.
Post-World War Two changes were forced on the west by geopolitical conditions. Westerners resented those changes. 'The good old days!' we hear regularly from the social and political right are part of that resentment.
But westerners seem surprised by Trump's actions? Why are westerners surprised?
We shouldn't be surprised that the west is surprised. The attitude Trump has turned against the west has never been historically aimed at the west in the way Trump is doing.
Hitler was considered an outlier when his gleefully genocidal attitude toward Jews was first considered a socio-political fad. It turned out Hitler meant business. The Hitler we now know was not considered a possibility for a westerner, a German. Yet there was World War One from which the west could learn. No learning.
So there was Hitler and World War Two from which the west could learn.
By the 1970s, the west had already forgotten the war and Hitler. (Laws against Neo-Nazis are either weak or Neo-Nazi hate is trivialized or moralized as free speech).
Franco Spain was local. Fascist Italy was also local. So Trump seems like a tragic novelty. But history shows he is not.
While some people in the west see Trumpism as something new, those who have borne the brunt of similar attitudes and actions over the years would tell the west, 'Welcome to feeling human!'
Europeans on the continent and in the diaspora have always ignored how the rest the world feel. They didn't feel inferiorized, infantilized, belittled or bullied. They considered genuine experiences moral panic, moral pedestal or a needless cry for attention when all we should do is to toughen it up in the real world.
Trump belittling of Americans and westerners, his dictatorial actions, and his solipsistic projections, are westerners looking themselves in the mirror. Trump is a western product. He is an embodiment of the western Man, the Nietzschean Übermensch, the westerns 'supermanism' the western male has considered himself to be or becoming.
It's time for Europeans, continental or diasporic, to be humble and ask those of us the question renown African-American sociologist and historian, W.E.B Du Bois, encountered in Jim Crow America as he related it in The Souls of Black Folk: 'How does it feel to be a problem?'
Today, Trump is asking everyone the same question: 'How does it feel to be a problem?' Europe now knows what it feels to be considered a ‘problem’ when one is not; how to feel belittled unnecessarily.
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*Kuir ë Garang is the editor of The Philosophical Refugee.
