Nwankwo Tony Nwaezeigwe, PhD
Formally Director, Centre for Igbo Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka
President, International Coalition against Christian Genocide in Nigeria
E-mail: [email protected] website: https://icac-gen.org
The average Nigerian-led Black African Diaspora in America who is often over-fed with sumptuous dishes of American freedom and democracy against the background of their historical Continental origins see themselves with the carriage of superior knowledge over their Continental compatriots. They feel that because they take tea or coffee and bread as their breakfast the same menu should be considered right for the Black Africans whose hot climatic condition and excessive manual engagements require heavy-duty carbohydrates. It does not occur to them that every society has its peculiar character on which are allied its peculiar ways of life and problems, including type of food.
This explains why the Black Africans in Continental Africa see the dynamics of American Presidency fundamentally through the spectacle of American foreign policy and how it affects the collective or specific progress of the Black African nations. In this case they do not care much about the internal political dynamics of the United States. Their major concern has been how America affects them either as individual nations or a group of nations. This explains why in their judgment of American core-political values what matters to them is the comparative impacts of the eight-year Barak Obama administration against the four-year Donald Trump administration. In other words, the question here is between Barak Obama and Donald Trump whose Presidency better impacted positivrly on Africa in general and Black Africa in particular? Remarkably one may add by asking, to what extent have the Black African Diaspora used the advantage of their American experience to contribute positively towards the positive development of Black Africa?
Nigerians March in Support of Donald Trump in 2020 USA Presidential Election
The Jewish-Americans in the midst of their overwhelming success within the realm of the American Dream are mostly concerned about how American foreign policy impacts on the State of Israel in political, economic, and security terms. The same spirit of ancestral patriotism is notable among the Indian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Arab-Americans, and other Asian-American Diaspora. What have the Black African Diaspora in America got to show as their positive impacts of American foreign policy in Black Africa?
It is worth stating the fact that we Continental Black Africans had prayed fervently for long for an African-American to emerge one day as the President of the United States of America as a testimony to the insurmountable labor under pains, sufferings and, all kinds of deprivations their ancestors underwent in the process of re-inventing the current American Dream.
We prayed for a true African-American whose ancestors experienced what it meant to be a segregated and deprived African-American under the tortuous experience of slavery; those whose ancestors invented for us the true meaning and essence of Pan Africanism and whose ideas and labors created the true spirit of African nationalism that eventually midwifed anti-colonial struggles; I mean those people with the unadulterated pedigree of John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King jnr., Elijah Mohammed, and Jesse Jackson. These were the people who understood what it meant to be an African-America founded on the ideals of true African identity with the nostalgic experience of an oppressed past. These were the people who looked towards Africa with unfaltering ancestral connecting spirit with the true meaning and essence of African identity. These were the people from whose descendants we expected to be granted the privilege of producing an American President.
But against our prayers we were given a Barack Hussein Obama–a first generation African-American who lacks the ancestral connectivity to the true African-American experience and spirit; one who has no nostalgic story to tell about his African-American root; and a man whose conception of Black identity is as whitewashed as his understanding of the Black African moral core-values. It is worth stating the fact that the tragedy of Black Africa’s alienation from her core values came with Obama’s era as the President of the United States of America. It is the worst that ever happened to Black Africa in her many decades of eventful relations with the United States of America.
Under Obama’s Presidency Black African nations were forced to accept against their core moral values, the deplorable culture of homo-sexuality, and those African leaders who audaciously questioned his impudent Sodom and Gomorrah policy like President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria were sentenced to his political gaol. Nigeria and Libya have never been themselves since the time of President Obama.
Under President Obama Black Africa was greeted with reckless Islamic insurgences through his subtle and covert alignment with Islamic Jihad; Christians all over the World were slaughtered everywhere by Muslim Jihadists without a single word of defence from President Obama, just as the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh are being massacred by Azerbaijan forces with the connivance of Turkey and her Islamist jihadists from Syria, notwithstanding the fact that the United States of America was founded on the ideals of Christian freedom as championed by the historic 1620 Pilgrims Landing at Plymouth. These were the dilemmas Black Africa and the World Christendom were facing when Donald Trump arrived at the political stage to remedy the fouled situation.
Donald Trump came with the spirit of John 8:32 and the boldness of Saint Paul the Tarsus. He did not say one thing and did another. He was a man of his words and his actions matched his words. We saw an America once turning towards Sodom and Gomorrah being returned back to God. We saw him threading where his predecessors feared to thread.
He stated that he would transfer American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and he did as he stated. He threatened to ban certain Muslims from entering the United States of America and he did as he stated and that stopped the once reckless killings and bombings in United States by Muslim extremists. He opened up the flood-gates of unexpected peace between the State of Israel and the Arab world in such way none of his predecessors was not able to do. He promised to end ISIS and today that monster of Islam is gone. He promised to make America great again and most of us believe that America gained more respect as a Global Power under him than any of his recent predecessors. What else does one need to define success in leadership?
Since being elected President of the United States of America in 2016 no past American President, not even Barack Obama received the kind of enthusiastic support by majority of Black Africans in the Black Continent in particular and the World Christendom in general. This is because Trump’s American core-values which are strongly founded on Christian moral core-values are in full agreement with traditional African moral core-values. No sane Black African will be proud of any American President who tells him it is right for a woman to marry a fellow woman, and a man to marry a fellow man, while at the same time criminalizing polygamy.
These are coming against the deplorable anti-Trump hate-filled utterances by majority of Black African Diaspora of America. These well-fed, well-clothed, gainfully employed and well-protected under the law nouveau Black African Diaspora especially the wide-mouthed Nigerians among them often cite the alleged but unfounded Trump’s racist inclinations as their only basis of their hatred of the man.
They forgot that there is more to the inherent political problems of Black Africa which only a Donald Trump has the liver to confront than the subjective word “racism”, and they expect the Black Africans of the homeland to believe in their hollow thesis of racism as a recipe to their intractable myriads of political and economic problems. They tend to forget that if given the option under the current state of failed States the average Black African would choose to go back to his European colonial stage than continue with his present self-inflicted political dungeon miscalled independence.
Thus as far as Black Africa is concerned the question of racism does not have a place in her political dictionary. We have ethnicity, Islamism and Xenophobia which are more deadly than racism and thus we must confront these divisive political monsters first before pointing accusing fingers at those who brought the light of modern civilization to us and focus on how we can best utilizes their mentorship to become politically and economically self-sustainable like the Asian countries.