[Q&A] Will Donald Trump’s Election Win Push Africa Further Into China’s Influence?

Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden are the duo behind the China Africa Project and hosts of the popular China in Africa Podcast. They’re here to answer your most pressing, puzzling, even politically incorrect questions about all things related to the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China. If you want to know something, anything at all… just hit them up online and they’ll give it to you straight:

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Dear Eric & Cobus, I’m an American contractor working in Senegal. I’m not particularly an expert in either China or Africa, but for the few months I have lived in Dakar, I have seen many examples that the relationship between the two is developing extremely fast. I am sometimes worried about that because i feel that the United States presents a better model for Africa human rights-wise than China does. But the recent election result in the US puts that in doubt. Am I right to feel despondent? Will the Trump victory push Africa further into China’s influence?

- John G. In Senegal via Facebook

John, you ask an important question. However, before I get to it I need to unpack some of your logic.

You mention that the US presents a more human rights-focused model to Africa than China. I would agree with you, but only up to a point. The US does indeed have a strong focus on human rights in its official dialogues with Africa. The Obama administration has generally followed its predecessors in linking development with human rights, and linking certain human rights benchmarks to development and financing payouts. As you probably know, this has not always been positively received in Africa - for example, the Obama administration’s commitment to fight for gay rights have been decried by many African governments dedicated to uphold Africa’s bleak reputation as a hate-scorched gay rights hellscape.

I agree with you that the US carries connotations of democracy and human rights in Africa, and is frequently admired for it. However, when the US government talks about itself as a human rights champion in Africa, it only seems to take into account this layer of official diplomatic messaging. It doesn’t consider the impact the rapid increase in US military activities on the continent, or the general securitization of the US presence here.

US diplomats also don’t seem to realize that Africans have access to the internet. When presenting itself as a human rights paragon to Africa, the US doesn’t completely grasp how perceptions that black Americans are unduly targeted by the police play in Africa. Remember, Africans are keen consumers of African-American media, and they are well aware of debates about racism, and what it means to be black in America. I recently asked my students (all young black women) where they would take an all-expenses paid vacation, and not one out of a group of ten said the United States. When I asked them why none of them want to go to New York or Los Angeles, they all said the last thing they need to to face down racist American cops.

So one shouldn’t be simplistic about the image of the US in Africa: it does represent democracy and human rights, especially in comparison to China. However, human rights is not all it represents.

China is increasingly playing a powerful role as a counterexample to the US. Many African governments have seen China as an example of a country that managed to develop without adopting Western systems. Remember, until China came along, the dominant development models were Western, and African countries were (and still are) encouraged to adopt Western ideas of democracy and civil society development as a gateway to modernity and development. Chinese development presents a powerful counter-narrative, one that some African governments interested in maintaining their centralized power, eagerly embraced.

This entire dual system (with its echoes of the cold war) might now be upended by the election of Donald J. Trump to the US presidency.

We obviously still don’t know what a Trump presidency will actually look like - especially as it relates to Africa. Trump doesn’t have a clear Africa policy as far as I have seen. However, it does seem to me that his outspoken antipathy to traditional human rights principles (including his threats to prosecute his opponent after the election, his plan to build a wall between the US and Mexico, and his gleeful promises to ‘bomb the sh— out of ISIS’ don’t play into the way US public diplomacy has so far liked to present itself in Africa.

In this sense, the Trump presidency might be heralding the end of the binary pull between the US and China we have seen in Africa over the last fifteen years. In other words, the traditional narrative about the US and China’s role in Africa presented by the US government has been a choice between US-style development via liberal human rights and China-style authoritarianism. There are a lot of holes one can pick in this narrative, but it was the one presented by the Obama administration, and the one that underlaid some of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s warnings about China’s growing role in Africa.

I think if President Trump follows through on some of the promises of Candidate Trump, Africans will find this story a lot harder to believe than they have so far. This could lead to a further muddying of the story that Africa has to choose between a democratic superpower and an authoritarian one. If all superpowers come to seen equally iffy on human rights, then it all comes down to development statistics.

China’s growth is slumping, but it still outstrips that of the US. In addition, China has been funding infrastructure left and right in Africa. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s Africa initiatives were few and far between, and how much the biggest projects, such as Power Africa, have actually been implemented still remains somewhat unclear. This means that China-fueled development is a more concrete presence on the ground in Africa than its US counterpart. All of the above argues that a Trump presidency might push Africa in the direction of China.

However, some of America’s global power is its grip on our imagination. This means that while President Trump might alienate Africans, American citizens’ reaction to his actions might draw them back in. Americans’ popular resistance against racism and mis-administration won’t go unnoticed in Africa. Remember, Africans know a thing or two about living under corrupt leaders. 

· Cobus

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