Donald Trump is what happens when a hyperbolic caricature of the worst human qualities manifests in a live body. Gasant Abarder writes in a new #SliceOfGasant column – that may see him never being allowed back in America – that Trump’s latest rant against Somalia must make the continent flex and stand up to the bigotry.
For a fellow who has never been as a president, Donald Trump certainly has some choice opinions of Africa. It, of course, doesn’t come as a surprise because he describes African nations as shitholes in his first term and South Africa is firmly in his sights. There is a genocide of white people here, remember, according to Trump and Washington.
But the latest attack on the Somali people in America is beyond the pale – excuse the pun – even for him. It’s extraordinary how much vitriol this so-called leader of the free world has for the black and brown people of this planet. More puzzling is his take on immigrants when America was built by immigrants. (Calm down, no city in the United States was built on rock ‘n roll.)
Why, he asked, can’t the nice people of Sweden, Denmark and Norway come to settle in America? Here’s a newsbreak for you, Mr President: their countries work. Why would they want to live in a country run by a bigot, racist and narcissist?
But back to the very short history of America because it was ‘founded’ by that wayward chap Christopher Columbus with the broken compass. That is the textbook version. The truth is that Native Americans had occupied mainland America for ages before the white settlers from Europe arrived and kicked them off their land. In States like Alaska, Alaska Natives were displaced from their lands too.
A whole civil war was fought over America using black people as slaves. When they were freed, new communities were built from African American, Latin American, and Caribbean American descent. Cities like New York have Chinese, Italian, Korean, Palestinian, Irish, Polish, Iraqi and many other communities. And indeed, a Somali diaspora has been ever present in America.
Trump went into a rant about Somalis at the end of a cabinet meeting. He said, among other hateful remarks, that Somali immigrants were garbage, that Somalia ‘stinks and we don’t what them in our country‘ and they contributed nothing to the US.
It was an attack on all black and brown people of the United States who built that country into what it is today. Millions of miles of road, rail, infrastructure, crop farms and industry were shaped and fashioned by immigrants.
But in Trump’s America, none of that matters. He only wants – in an almost eerie throwback to Nazi Germany – Caucasian folks to settle in America. A case in point are the poor South African refugees who had it so bad back home that they were given refuge in America. Some of them want to come back for Dezemba cos it’s lekker and actually wrote to ask if they could come back after the festives. Eish, the mind boggles!
In South Africa, we haven’t been great with immigrants either and the invective from people like our Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie, back when he was mayor of Beaufort West not too long ago, was to drive Bangladeshis from the small Karoo town.
Such comments make it really tough because we have seen how South Africans have turned on black foreign nationals. Not so much the ones from Europe who buy up large properties in places like Somerset West and the Atlantic Seaboard.
This nation too has had its fair share of massacres in the scramble for land, minerals and livestock. The original people of sub-Saharan Africa had their land stolen and their descendants largely live on the margins of society. Aspiring mayor of Joburg, Helen Zille, will have us believe that not all of colonialism was bad; it gave us tapped water and other amenities, she will tell you.
And other parties on the right, along with McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance, will continue to vilify members of the African diaspora as if they’re alien to their own continent. Maybe, just maybe, I would be writing this column for the Bangladesh Times, a paper in India or one from Malaysia. My features and family history suggest I am from that part of the world but we were brought against our will from faraway lands too – with whips and chains never far behind.
The colonial frontier was the forerunner for the world’s pariah state in apartheid South Africa and my kids are only now getting to grips with a playing field that is starting to level out. But they’re in the minority. Democratic South Africa is not without its problems. We may actually have 99. But apartheid, hatred and bigotry are dealt swift blows and we are not afraid to stand up for what is right against injustice in this world.
Don’t be fooled. Trump and his acolytes need our minerals, expertise and products. His play against Somalia is strategic because they need raw materials from countries who are at odds with that nation. It’s time the African Union and all the nations of our continent grow a backbone and stand up to Trump.
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Picture: Getty Images
