For more than two months now, I have been regularly posting quasi-satirical tweets on the US elections and their aftermath from my home in Kenya, in the style of foreign correspondents reporting on events in the “third world”.
My aim has been to puncture that widely accepted idea that the globe is divided between those who have achieved democratic nirvana and those of us still seeking enlightenment at the feet of western gurus, chanting their mantras of electoral reform and accountability. This week – for a moment – I worried whether the truth was now beyond satire.
It’s now clear those gurus were simply fellow travelers, whose wealth had more to do with iniquity than nirvana. In many cases, “third world” elections were run better than elections in the US, and as one correspondent in Colombia reminded a US host puffed up with ideas of superiority: “We haven’t had any mobs storming the congress here for several decades.”
While following the general thrust of this disastrous election, my Twitter thread has been taking some creative liberties, for example putting condemnatory words in the mouths of African diplomats and leaders in response to the latest outrage from Donald Trump.
gathara
(@gathara)
#BREAKING Enfeebled far-white US dictator, Donald «Papa Don» Trump, who faces demands for resignation or removal from office just days before official defenestration from barricaded presidential palace, condemns his extreme Christianist anti-math supporters for doing his bidding.
January 8, 2021
However, I would have had a hard time coming up with something to match the events and aftermath of 6 January, when a mob of what I have referred to as “Christianist, anti-math extremists” stormed the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress to certify the results of the US election.
Filled to the brim with explosive Trumpian denials of loss, false allegations of fraud, and fired up by the president himself, the rioters were unstoppable.
gathara
(@gathara)
#BREAKING With collapse of presidential Republican Guard after failed attack on parliament, Donald «Papa Don» Trump, who has ruled the crisis-torn, oil-rich republic, one of the world’s top banana exporters, with an iron fist for nearly half a decade, loses last vestige of power.
January 8, 2021
The carnage tragically cost five people, including a Capitol police officer, their lives. While it may have ended Trump’s – mainstream – political future, it poses a serious threat to my thread.
The breathtaking speed with which the election script was flipped made it almost impossible for me, more than 12,000km away, to keep up.
gathara
(@gathara)
pic.twitter.com/ObAgffTIIv
December 6, 2020
“Satire writes itself,” we are wont to say at times like this. It’s an easy thing to say when Trump sycophants like Senator Lindsey Graham are lining up to condemn the president in the hope that the blinding light from the regime’s supernova implosion will obscure their record. But it really doesn’t. We satirists still have to write it and we can become an endangered species when the news provides it for free. However, I need not have worried. Help was at hand. All that was called for was some perspective.
President of Zimbabwe
(@edmnangagwa)
Last year, President Trump extended painful economic sanctions placed on Zimbabwe, citing concerns about Zimbabwe’s democracy.
Yesterday’s events showed that the U.S. has no moral right to punish another nation under the guise of upholding democracy. These sanctions must end.
January 7, 2021
You see, the reactions to the events, in the US and around the world — shock, anger, outrage, fear and in some quarters, such as in the Zimbabwe state house, glee – were predicated on assumptions about what America was. And that idea did not stand up too well to scrutiny.
We had all been bamboozled over the course of decades to believe the US really was what it said it was – a shining city on a hill, a beacon for the nations – not what it did. It was a first-world country that at times behaved like the third-world “shithole countries” (Donald Trump) where the rest of us live. The charade continued even after this with Joe Biden proclaiming that “the scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect the true America, do not represent who we are”.
Not true. In the light of Trump’s self-immolation, I experienced an epiphany. America was not a first world country behaving like a third world “shithole country” –it was a first world shithole country.
gathara
(@gathara)
#BREAKING UNHCR chief, Filippo Grandi, warns of of fresh wave of American IDPs and refugees as the troubled oil-rich nation grapples with ethnically-tinged post-election violence that has claimed at least 4 lives, and a devastating pandemic which has killed over 370,000 people.
January 7, 2021
The fact is the US had long been such. Its election system was an anachronistic mess long before the storming of the Capitol. Its imperial presidency is still the stuff of third world nightmares and its sycophantic legislature is reminiscent of our daytime realities. It may have more stuff and bigger guns, but at heart the west is simply a richer version of the rest.
I came to see that my thread was not about reporting the US as an African country, as some have suggested. Rather it was about covering it as first world countries should be covered – whether diseased and ethnically divided, in North America or in sub-Scandinavian Europe, or beyond, whether nuclear-armed and oil-rich, with term limits or governed for decades on end by nonagenarian monarchs. We should forgo the propaganda and look at America as America truly is, with all its failures and hypocrisies.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them,” Maya Angelou told us. America had done just that. I just needed to believe it.
With that, the world was put to rights.
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Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan political cartoonist, satirist and writer. His Twitter handle is @gathara
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