One of the images doing the rounds on South African social media is of a crisp white wall in Blaauwberg, Cape Town, on which is triumphantly, and professionally, painted the word “Trump” in bright red, and “#47 #45” in smug blue.
This is as pathetic as it is enraging. What is it about the Donald Trump narrative that arouses the flaccid political members of our middle class? And yes, the puns are intended. Because these people really are dicks.
I’m sure you’ve been puzzled at how many red Make America Great Again hats you’ve seen worn by some of our own podcasting class, which is the budget version of what Guardian writer Caroline Haskins calls the manosphere. Boy, they must be so happy that the president of their fantasy world is back in the saddle. Finally, it means something to be an alpha male in this country again! And in many instances, that would be white and an alpha male.
A study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “found that a leading predictor of support for Trump — over party affiliation, gender, race and education level — was belief in ‘hegemonic masculinity’, defined as believing that men should be in positions of power, be ‘mentally, physically, and emotionally tough’, and reject anything considered feminine or gay. Some heterodox influencers gained a following by embodying or promoting precisely this brand of masculinity, and giving their followers a script for blaming dissatisfaction on women.”
CNN and other US media, presumably regretting the business threat caused by some alienating things they’ve said in the past, are hastily trying to forge a narrative that US citizens are not racist misogynists who voted for daddy, but in fact complex characters who were really influenced by Kamala Harris and Trump’s takes on the economy. Perhaps that’s correct (narrator: it is not), but I guarantee that race is behind a large chunk of our homegrown Trump worship. One way or the other. To put it in an elliptical way, it’s not just masculinity that is feeling threatened in South Africa, it’s a certain type of historical masculinity.
Elon Musk, the South African manosphere’s Jesus to Trump’s God, has also now been freed up to properly enjoy his title of being the richest dick in the world. After Trump’s victory was seen as inevitable, he posted a picture on X showing him holding a sink in the Oval Office, captioned “Let that sink in”. He posted a similar picture when he took over Twitter in 2022, and I’m sure he’s gleeful about the prospect of rebranding the US of A as the US of X. Not to mention all the policy influence he’s about to wield. If nothing else, this is starting to make moving to Mars seem an attractive prospect.
But back to the local Trumpists. It’s not really that they think it’s cool that Trump is, for example, anti-immigration. Though that is kind of funny when you think of how irate they get when the EFF tells them to go back to Europe. It’s that they don’t seem to realise how pathetic it is that they need to adopt the propaganda of another country to make sense of their own.
The late great Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, who is the subject of an excellent essay by Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books (LRB) of a couple of weeks ago, must be turning in his grave. In a 2005 satirical essay “How to write about Africa”, Wainaina wrote bitingly about the way the West imposes a stereotypical narrative when writing about Africa. It includes all the greatest hits such as poverty, colourful natives, anthropomorphised animals and the like.
A sample: “In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900-million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.
“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.”
And now we have an equally ridiculous version of this: Africans, or in this case South Africans, using the narrative of a US strong man to talk about, and even understand, their own country. It’s shameful. At least make up your own BS.
And now we have an equally ridiculous version of this: Africans, or in this case South Africans, using the narrative of a US strong man to talk about, and even understand, their own country. It’s shameful. At least make up your own BS
In his LRB piece, Harding quotes from an essay by another Kenyan writer, Nanjala Nyabola, titled “Why do Western media get Africa wrong?” Nyabola argues that the first Western journalist to arrive on the scene and file a story (often a disaster story) is treated as a more reliable voice than local bloggers or reporters. The result, she writes, is often an unwitting description of “what the West is not — a chaotic world, riven by ethnic tension, poverty and conflict — even though a foreign correspondent from an African country would have no trouble picking out the same faultlines in Europe or the US”.
How true that rings. We shouldn’t be uncritically lapping up the master narrative of Trumpists, we should be turning the tables and writing about how chaotic the faultlines of US democracy are. And, after all, they could learn from us.
In a 2008 essay written for the Mail & Guardian, “The aspiring dictator’s guide”, Wainaina laid out some rules for how to be a successful African dictator. The rules could also usefully be adopted by president-elect Trump.
Rule 1: “Be the richest man in your country.” Wainaina lists some examples: “If you are a second-generation dictator, this is not hard; just blackmail the guy who came before you … If you come from an oil-producing country, this is even easier (many Nigerians and Angolans, Chad) … If you are a South African, then anything with the word ‘black empowerment’ works fine.”
Trump has pulled an even cleverer move here. He won’t be the richest man in the US, but he has cosied up to the richest man in the world. That’s the sophistication of the First World for you.
Does Rule 3 apply, in some twisted way? “Make America or China happy. Make Israel and Saudi Arabia very happy.” Weirdly enough, it does. Trump will just add Russia to the mix. Rule 10 is unfortunately all too applicable (see CNN’s volte-face above): “A free press is important. But have shares in all major media and make sure that you allow them to be very critical of everything, except you.” And Rule 12 is going to be the real kicker for Trump: “Be nice to your fellow world dictators; you may need them to give you a home some day.”
All of which is not to say we should be ignoring what is happening in the democracy formerly known as free. I’m reading Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa, which gives the alternative view to the Western narratives of colonialism and slavery that have dominated the subject. I was struck by a passage about reinterpretations of the history of Dido, the founder and first queen of the Phoenician city-state of Carthage in 814 BCE.
Badawi writes about meeting a Tunisian archaeologist, Leïla Ladjimi-Sebaï, at the ruins of Carthage to discuss Dido. Ladjimi-Sebaï related with “great enthusiasm … how Dido was for her an extraordinary and pioneering woman, and how Virgil in her view had completely misrepresented her story … Leïla said that Dido had actually killed herself because she did not want to marry a Berber leader.” And this is the comment by Badawi that stood out: “The details of Dido’s story do not matter as much as the fact that Leïla and many other academics on the African continent are challenging well-established Western perceptions of a history that has overlooked their perspectives.”
Badawi isn’t pulling a JD Vance here, who you’ll remember said that he was OK with making up facts as long as it got the story out. She means that contested facts aren’t the important bit, it’s the fact that an African is taking the time to contest those facts, pushing back against the assumptions of Western discourse. Can’t our local Trumpists be more like this? I mean, come on. Take ownership of your own shithole country. Trump don’t care.
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