What we can learn from Trump and thinkers, leaders from Africa

Africa’s troubles are lessons to be learned from. They are meant to be experiences that will inform our future. Afrika’s future, Azania’s future, this continent’s future.

What will you be remembered for, what will your legacy be is the question I want to pose to the youth, each and every individual, male and female, poet and politician on the African continent?

I am beginning to understand the components of the promulgation of the Group Areas Act and the early role of the missionaries in South Africa, I am also beginning to understand the role of the mission schools in early education in South Africa, the role that it played in shaping the psyche and intellectual faculties of our leaders. Leaders who came out of Robben Island and the University of Fort Hare.

We must understand the past, in order to revise the history books, in order to write about the Black majority we must come to terms with the psychotic and brutal regime of apartheid, the heinous crimes and atrocities committed during that time. Colonialism is indigenous genocide, ignorance is intellectual genocide.

The ANC leaders have shown us that leaders are human. Donald Trump has also shown that he is only human. Leaders are also capable of making mistakes, of appearing arrogant and corrupt and flouting the law but it is leaders that must remember that it is the citizens that have the vote, and that it is the vote that puts them into power.

I have a Pan Africanist outlook now, Pan Africanist point of view, a Pan Africanist perspective. It was the father of the PAC and movement, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, who said that there is only one race, the human race. What can be learned in a contemporary South Africa from the political organisations that went underground during apartheid? Where are those leaders now? What is important for the boy child and girl child to remember, and here I am speaking about our future historians, is that we as the African continent, and as South Africa (see not a divided South Africa, but a united country), can no longer rely on the West.

Trump humiliated Cyril, and in effect he was also saying that he wasn’t going to acknowledge what took place to the Black majority of this country during apartheid, and neither was he going to acknowledge the Cradock Four, Vlakplaas, assassinations, and the imprisonment, detainment and torture of political activists and freedom fighters. I wondered to myself if Trump even knew of the existence of George Botha, Steve Biko and Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe as he sat across from Ramaphosa.

Trump had the attitude of a White Supremacist but I still admire him. I admire his work ethic. But I reiterate this, that the leaders that come to power when there are always tensions and geopolitical transitions taking place in a global scenario that have been left over from a previous administration are not perfect. Trump wasn’t in that moment operating like the leader of the free world, he was instead behaving like a school bully on the playground.

I look at Trump’s history. I look at his childhood. I look at his brother Fred Trump Junior. I look at the brother that Trump said in his own words in a speech that had a better personality than he did. Time and time again you will find that in the lives of remarkable men who change the course of history by sheer will, tenacity, determination and vision there has been some occurrence or incident of pain and suffering that has radically transformed their thinking and outlook on life. (I also abhor smoking and the drinking of alcohol just like the American President.)

It is time now for South Africa to stand on its own two feet and no longer can we rely on the West, or look to Europe. As I have said before, this is the time of the African Renaissance, for African leadership to revise the history books. The African continent needs South Africa, and organisations like NWASA (the National Writers Association of South Africa), we need to remember intellectuals and thinkers past and present like Lebogang Lancelot Nawa, Credo Mutwa, Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon, Ibrahim Traore

It is time for our future revolutionaries to pick up the pen and not the gun. Education for the nation starts with the imagination, the most important nation on earth.