My Life With An African Dictator And The Rise Of Donald Trump - A Tale Of Consequence

I lived for five years with Alphonse M'bele, African Big Man and President for Life of a small African country on the banks of the Niger River known for its political stability, American favoritism, and vast resources of the rare earth materials necessary for cell phones and computers. 

The country was stable thanks to the iron hand of the President, his Praetorian guard, and his cadre of Sevak-, Stasi-, and Tonton Macoute-like secret police.  Stability, as any world traveler well knows, is a pleasant by-product of dictatorship.  Haiti under the Duvaliers was the watering hole for the rich and famous.  

The Olaffson, a marvelous Victorian gingerbread hotel made famous by Graham Greene in The Comedians, was all that the sophisticated visitor could want - atmosphere, intrigue, romance, and a touch of danger. Wealthy Americans came and went ease. Papa and Baby Doc cultivated an image of romantic uniqueness - the Pearl of the Antilles - and under their authoritarian rule, nothing untoward ever happened to disabuse the world of that notion. 

President M'bele admired the Duvaliers for their will, their longevity, and their absolute power; and he fashioned his regime accordingly.  He had visited other countries with a similar reputation for consolidated rule and centralized authority - Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu in Zaire, and a host of others in Southern Africa- but always returned to the lessons of Dr. Duvalier and his son who had the finesse to attract foreign investment and tourists while keeping his mountain gulags a secret.  

Haiti for Americans was an important geopolitical and historical necessity.  It offered an unbending support for American influence in the region, and as the first nation in the hemisphere to revolt against colonial rule and establish a black nation, it resonated with America’s African American population.  As such, American politicians looked away and ignored the seamier side of Duvalier rule, continued to pour millions in aid into the country while enjoying a sybaritic life at the Olaffson. 

 

During my sinecure with President M'bele - I was his Chief Economic Advisor and, thanks to a love for African women, a sharer of the delights of his harem, a true diverse assembly of light-skinned, Caucasian-looking Fulani; dark skinned, high-cheekboned, tall Nigerian beauties; and sloe-eyed Zanzibarians.  I was his 'white African', and over the years I became a confidant, privy to the machinery of autocratic rule and its application. 

I am a student of Tolstoy and Machiavelli, an amoral observer of history, and one to reserve judgement.  Unlike Fowler, the hero of Greene's The Quiet American who, despite his lifelong refusal to become engaged in anything, in the end takes sides, I have never wavered.  Regimes come and go, supremacy never lasts, popular rule is either revolutionary or discarded, and so I found my time with one of Africa's bloodiest and brutal dictators morally unencumbered. 

'I am an eye-painter', I once wrote, 'an observer, limner of oddities, a recorder; a marginal man allowed to see all', and that verse written when I was a young man captured a sentiment which has always been true.  Criticized roundly for even setting foot on M'bele's unholy ground, I could only reply with Conrad's 'the horror...the horror', Kurtz's last words of recognition of the universality of a horrific human nature. 

 

It was an excursion, like that of Kurtz, into an inner circle of hell, a test of my stoicism and will - a challenge to the very principle of remove and emotional and moral distance.  Either by stubborn conviction, or the enticements of the lovely ladies from the Sahel and the forest, I stayed on, offering whatever I could to keep M'bele's economy from collapsing ('Ah', said an American friend, 'you do have moral principles after all', but it was nothing of the sort, a job to be done and done well, that was all). 

I saw every weapon in the armory, every device used to control, manipulate, intimidate, and discredit the population at large.  I visited the hellholes of Kaligani, the notorious prisons upriver; the bamboo holding pens under the banks of the river where prisoners were eaten slowly and painfully by piranhas and eagle fish; the gibbets, racks, and bastinadoes deep under the palace. 

I touched up the President's speeches, sanded the rough edges of his greetings to foreign dignitaries, and gave him an eloquence that was envied by his fellow African rulers.  I helped him wax poetic in French and declamatory and precise in English. 

I was under no illusions, however, and knew that if I exposed any of the President’s secrets of his brutal, autocratic rule, I would be summarily executed – exile and persona non grata would not suffice for that level of treachery; so it is only now, far from the palace and country, and after the death of M’bele that I feel free to write.

When Donald Trump was running again and accused of dictatorial ambitions, President M'bele let out a loud guffaw, a hilarious outburst cheered by his lieutenants.  Compared to him and any of his African Big Man colleagues, Trump was a pussy, a pretty little violet in a well-kept garden, a man of little substance, a Hollywood prima donna, a marionette. 

 

M'bele followed the Trump campaign as though he was reading the Sunday funny papers - a hilarious fol-de-rol of phony accusations, innuendo, and frontal assaults on his character and motives.  Each day's scurrilous attacks were Comedy Central...and the infamous January 6th 'insurrection'?  A joke, an impossibly adolescent cavalcade, pure nonsense, a tempest in a teapot, of no more importance than water hyacinths floating down the Congo River. 

With the push of a button, his secret police would descend on any group larger than ten, and throw them all into floating bamboo pens.  Any word, any slight wrong intonation, and the speaker would disappear.  Any defiance or defiant intent would be dealt with summarily and harshly.

No, chuckled M'bele, Trump was no African, no Duvalier or Amin, and certainly without the will, command, and cojones of himself; and those that called him 'dictator' or 'autocrat' had never been to this country where those terms were signs of respect.  

Africa was still a primitive, Paleolithic place with no taste for 'democracy' but with a slave mentality untouched since the first Portuguese ships docked offshore.  He, M'bele, was not an ogre, some kind of political throwback, but a man for his times.  Popular rule? A chimera, a pipe dream for Europeans, but an impossibility here. 

His death by natural causes - or at least that was the official coroner's report - opened the door for me to return home.  I attended the state funeral, sparsely visited by foreign dignitaries although the United States sent an emissary as a sign of good will and continued intentions to be at the head of the line for lithium and oil. 

I returned to the triumphant inauguration of Donald J Trump and was amazed at how seamless and undisturbed it was.  In Africa, anything less than an all-powerful and all-encompassing regime like that of President M'bele would result in mayhem.

By American standards the Trump policies might be considered revolutionary.  They would upend years of progressive idealism and febrile intention, but to the African observer, they were only the tepid, gray business as usual of the West. 

I have to admit, I miss my time with M'bele and his beautiful women; but I have a new sinecure, a very calm and peaceful one in the Trump camp.  Washington women are nothing compared to my former life, but I am very, very happy.