Trump has been on the way for 20 years. Let’s welcome him

As President Barack Obama said ahead of the US November 8 election, whatever the outcome, the sun would rise the next morning.

He probably wasn’t thinking that the amoral and unhinged Republican candidate Donald Trump would land an “unthinkable” win. Some commentators are arguing that even Trump himself didn’t expect to win.

But even as his victory’s roils the world, there are actually many good things about it.

I understand the idea of a “young” and “evolving” democracy, but was always disturbed by the concept of a “mature” democracy.

The US, after more than 200 years, was considered one of the oldest and most mature republican democracies in the world. It was one of the things that made a Trump victory unthinkable. A second grade fascist like him was not supposed to win in a grown up liberal democracy.

When the US lectured African countries about democracy, the retort from our strongmen and their henchmen and women was almost standard. “It took the US more than 200 years to get where it is, it should not expect us to be at the same stage after ‘just’ 50 years of independence”, they would say.

This notion of a mature democracy was reactionary in two ways. It denied human progress, because it suggested political development had reached a point beyond which it couldn’t progress.

In addition, by presenting liberal democracy as the omega, because it is essentially Western, it denied the possibility that non-Western civilisations could improve upon it. In that regard, it was also racist.

Secondly, it defied the laws of nature and history. To conceive of democracy as mature, and the apex, denied the reality that all human constructions that rise (empires and everything else) must also fall.

The Trumpian fall of American democracy, therefore affirms a truth about human society, more than a Hillary Clinton victory would have. Hopefully we will now have greater clarity in the scholarship on nations and the nature of power.

The other key issue is that along with nearly 30 years of modern globalisation, we had also seen a classic Marxist counter “glocalisation” movement.

In other words, as the world became one through a common pop culture, a neo-liberal intellectual orthodoxy, international finance, and so, blurring national borders, there has also been a resistance not to get to get lost in it. Local identities reasserted themselves, and in Uganda we saw that variously through things like “Ebyaffe” (the demand for and restoration of traditional kingdoms).

The glocalisation forces can be good and bad, but have unleashed creativity. They produced the Nigerian film industry Nollywood, and the unique brand of Uganda hip hop and its stars like Chameleone.

And because they happened during the “second wave” of democracy in Africa, when economies and media were being liberalised, it got to a point that in early 2000s, even without a law requiring it, FM radio stations in countries like Sierra Leone were playing nearly 100 per cent local music!

Politically, these anti-globalisation forces expressed themselves in the rise of secessionist and separatist movements (Eritrea and South Sudan), or return-to-the-motherland campaigns (the Rwanda Patriotic Front war).

The anti-immigrant and nativist forces, the international capital rejectionist movements, that led to the equally shock result in Finland a few days in which the anti-establishment Pirate Party came within a whisker of winning power, confirm the existence of similar currents in the west.

Our common humanity is asserted, not denied, by these developments.

After nearly 75 years of the post-World War global order, Trump and all tell us that it has run its course.

Therefore, I don’t read it as banal isolationism. Rather, a signal to build a more inclusive world order in which all those who have been sidelined by the 20th Century Elite Consensus, get a seat at the table.

World organisations like the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN Security Council cannot remain dominated by fading Western and oriental powers.

If you look at national political innovation and global governance, in common they have both been shaped by upheavals – economic recessions or collapse, wars, migrations caused by crises (famines), plagues and epidemics (it is this historical fact that is expressed as religious myth in Sodom and Gomorrah).

Human beings are never moved to do great when their stomachs are full, the weather is pleasant, their offspring are flourishing, their fields rich, and tomorrow certain.

Most times, they need to be threatened by some peril, spooked by the prospect of subjugation by other nations, the seizure of their riches, expulsion from their homes, or the capture and enslavement of their children, before they can be roused to innovate to secure themselves.

That can take the form of enlightened reform, or bribing excluded groups through inclusion, or making peace with the enemy.
This Trump moment should not be allowed to go to waste.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3