American election: A new Atlantic doctrine

By Obi Nwakanma

Americans dodged a bullet. Four more years of Trump would have turned the US into another Banana republic, with the irretrievable destruction of its foundational democratic institutions. The defeat of Donald J. Trump in penultimate week’s poll gave the United States a new lease of life.

It offered Americans an opportunity once more to restore their compact with nation. I felt a deep sense of disappointment and outrage on seeing images of Nigerians marching for Trump. Christians in Aba and Onitsha marching for Trump! What terrifying irony. But it did confirm to me how deep the disease of ignorance is ingrained in the psyche of folks who misconstrue “literacy” for “education.”

The Igbo think of ignorance as a fatality. They say it is like one who was not present when the dead was buried. When such folk are tasked to exhume the corpse, they begin to disinter it from its limbs. Many Nigerians have all kinds of perverse ideas about America. Many who have never stepped inside an airplane pontificate about America from the very narrow spaces of their bedrooms just by watching TV. They tell you what is happening right now in Alaska! Some swear about America just from what they glean from this catch-all space called ‘social media.’

The social media, of course, is some kind of poltergeist. However you twist it, it gives you a shape. It is a ghost. All kinds of confused and confusing voices inhabit it. The worst are those Nigerians who think that spending a few weeks or months in the US, or any other place for that matter, gives them a sense of that world.

They become experts about America; American politics; American culture, and the deep undergirding frames of its social meanings. Truth is, many Nigerians who visit America stay in its fringes. They have very little ideas about this society. Nigerians come to visit, and they just stay inside their hotel rooms, or the basements of the homes of their friends and relations whom they visit. They go to the malls. Perhaps do a bit of the rounds around Disney.

They may drive around to see, and take pictures around familiar monuments, or go to the food halls in the shopping malls where they really mostly spend their time. They see the surfaces. They do not get into real American homes, see Americans at work in their most imperfect and vulnerable states.

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The issue is that Christianity of the kind especially practiced by right wing evangelical Christians in America, who are the key funders of contemporary missionary activities in Nigeria and much of Africa, continue to disgrace and repudiate the mission of care which the master, Jesus, through his Apostoloi, inaugurated. White evangelical Christians in America despise Africans and African-descended people. It did not start today.

There is a history behind it all. Evangelical Christians raped African women in the plantations during slavery; impregnated them, and proceeded to rape their own daughters from these women;  the so-called ‘tragic mullato.’ It all began there. There is guilt and there is anxiety mixed in a historical alchemy of the fear of Black insurrection.

American Pentecostalism rests on the fact that the African had no God; that it was ordained by a white God that Africans shall be slaves. Liberal white Americans, on the other hand, often side with Black folk, and fought slavery and the lies retailed through the American church alongside Black folk. But Black Christianity and White Christianity do not meet in America.

They do not sit on the same tables. And the Republican party is the home of the kind of toxic Christianity which has no respect for Africans, and which is at the bastion of the current Republican party; the party of the KKK. There is no place for the Black man in the Republican party.