PA Images/AP Photo/Patrick Semansky. All rights reserved.With over one billion people, 54 countries and some of the fastest growing economies in the world, Africa should feature prominently in any foreign policy discussion. But in the 2016 US election season, African affairs have been deliberately marginalised. During the first two US presidential debates, the world’s second largest continent was barely mentioned, and filtered only through the racial and religious politics of ‘birther’ and Benghazi sound bites. The reason for this marginalisation is intimately linked to the legacy of the search terms “Obama and Kenya” and the clickbait of conspiracy theories which have proliferated about African affairs since 2008.
Africa has been historically marginalised in US foreign policy and dominated by American idioms of crisis. Obama’s political rise fueled a new nativist ‘crisis’, which reimagined racist tropes from the past through right-wing critiques and conspiracies about the first African American president. Since 2008, Obama’s paternal ties to Kenya have been transformed into a political commodity. Dismissed by the far left and embraced by the far right, revisionist debates about Kenyan heritage and history have plagued the Obama presidency and impacted crucial foreign policy initiatives.
Fueling Trump’s political rise at home, and impacting Obama’s legacy abroad, scholars and pundits will undoubtedly engage in lengthy debates about the intertwined histories of Trump-style nativism and the first African American presidency. We should not wait for these future books to be written. Africa is a crucial part of the world and the US cannot afford another presidential cycle where more than 15% of the world’s population remains on the periphery of foreign affairs.
