That many Nigerians love Trump is no longer news. It is a given, sadly so. A few days ago, I was compelled to respond to some Nigerians commenting on a post whose woman-hating riffs were attributed to Trump. The post was indeed fake: the overload of ‘Nigerian English’ and register leapt out at me from the first sentence. But of course, my gentle reproof meant absolutely nothing to the Trump rapture-heads who continued to chorus their ‘Heil Trump’ hymn. They were already far-gone on the high of Trump worship.
In 2016, when Nigerians gravitated towards Trump, I wasn’t surprised. A population who had been ruled and ridden roughshod over by robber-politicos, piratical dictators and patriarchal rogues like Abacha, Babangida and Obasanjo would undoubtedly find something worthy of worship in a morally challenged, fake-ass, unprincipled, convicted criminal like Trump.
In 2024, Nigerians who love Trump upped the ante. They moved the adoration of their putatively God-avenging magus from the secular to the ridiculous – that is, faux-religious. After all, Trump does not even pretend to be religious; he only stoops to indulge the cognitive blindness and tone-deafness of his flock. When I asked someone who lives in Nigeria why they loved Trump, they replied: ‘Because he is going to ban gay-ism, trans-ism and woke-ism in America.’
Well, Trump indeed attracts strange bedfellows, and not only within the curious mix of stateside Magadiots but also a global ragtag of ultras: racists and racial supremacists, culture warriors, stiff-necked evangelicals, counterintuitive Muslims, wilful anti-wokes, hypocritical homophobes, strongman-loving Africans and many others. Indeed, two Nigerian ‘pastors’ made an Inauguration pilgrimage to Washington to contribute to the consecration of their infallible popish idol.
I ignored the pitiful answer the Trump-loving person gave me and moved on to something else. My general attitude to Trump’s second coming has been shoulder-shrugging boredom. The day after Trump was elected, someone I know in the US called and tried to gloat about the victory of his hero. I told them I did not care whether or not Trump won, nor did I ever labour under the assumption that he would lose.
If America, or half of America, decided to choose a vain, vacuous and crass chancer, why should that be of any concern to me? I am only intrigued by the psychopathology of human folly, by the phenomenon of human unreason and herd instinct. Here is a man who wishes to turn America into a neo-imperial leviathan of yes-men and women, fear and loathing, and racistocracy. For all the curated hype about the wonders of his first term, there are ample signs now that Trump will plumb new depths in his second term. More so now that he has belly-flashing Jumping-Jack Elon Musk and other kowtowing oligarchs and millions of Maga running dogs to lick his spittle – well, to put it mildly.
It is also not a surprise that Musk is popular among Nigerians – Musk, who could very well have been a cross between a supremacist character from The Turner Diaries and a pompous jackass from any of Ayn Rand’s sub-literary rants. Of course, Musk, who was raised in apartheid South Africa, is the richest man in the world. Quite a good few Nigerians are worshippers of the golden calf, and while Musk is a global golden manchild, Trump is a real-life, if unregenerate, Mr Goldfinger.
The point a lot of Nigerians miss is that Trump as cartoon Superman might be the perfect religio-political messiah for them, but Trump as Nietzsche’s ubermensch (overman/superman) would consider them human trash, not worthy of notice. Well, even though Trump is only a caricature of Nietzsche’s Superman, he no doubt still considers Nigerians who love him unuseful idiots.
In 2016, when a fair number of the world’s population still thought we were living in a rational world where propriety mattered, many people believed that Donald Trump was an aberration that would soon be chucked into the dustbin of history. Well, simply put, the rest is history. Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020 and instigated a violent insurgency, was convicted in a civil court for sexual assault in 2023, and convicted in a criminal court for cooking the books in 2024, but yet he won the presidential election in 2024 and has, like a rough beast from the marshes of Mar-a-Lago, slouched his way back into the White House. Surely, we are not living in as sane a world as we would like to believe.
In 2016, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, declared that if Trump became president, he would destroy his ‘green card’ - in other words, give up his American residency. Even at the time, Nigerian Trump lovers ‘threw shade’ at Wole Soyinka; they questioned the man’s motive in making a profoundly personal, if not moral, decision.
After Trump was re-elected, I found myself returning to Soyinka’s Green Cards, Green Gods, the seventh instalment of his Intervention chain, published in 2017. In the book, Soyinka gives Trump short shrift, but he savagely lights into Nigerian trump-bots who doubt his bona fides. Soyinka does not suffer fools at all, to say nothing of gladly. I would say that he is the most combative and combustible writer of significant stature in the last sixty years, and his thirteen Intervention chapbooks are one weighty corpus of socio-political diatribe. Of all the books, Green Cards is the most acidic. I will conclude with a quote from the book:
‘I was in New York during the run-up to (2016) elections. I watched this face, its body language, listened to his uncouth, racist language, his imbecilic harangues, the insults to other peoples, other races, especially the Hispanics, Africans and Afro-Americans, even citing once…Nigeria as an instance of the burdensome occupation of global space.’
Well, Baba Wole Soyinka, some of our fellow Nigerians would not care even if Donald Trump took a dump on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment