Trump’s Banquet For Africa’s Lilliputians

 By Adekeye Adebajo

The presidents of five West and Central African states – Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye, Liberia’s Joseph Boakai, Guinea-Bissau’s Umaro Cissoko Embaló, Mauritania’s Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, and Gabon’s Brice Oligui Nguema – recently visited United States (U.S.) president Donald Trump for a bizarre banquet in the White House.

*Trump with the five African leaders who he treated with disrespect ...

These five countries have limited trade with America and represent just 2.3 per cent of Africa’s population, with only Senegal having a population of more than six million people in a continent of 1.5 billion people and 55 nations. Though the presidents of Mauritania, Senegal, and Liberia were democratically elected, the Gabonese leader is a former military putschist who recently won  a controversial 90 per cent electoral victory, while the Bissau-Guinean leader has suspended his Parliament, clamped down harshly on dissent, and postponed elections.

What Trump was, however, most interested in was the natural riches of these countries: oil, diamonds, gas, gold, manganese, uranium, phosphates, iron ore, bauxite, copper, zircon, and rare earth minerals. His pitch to his African visitors was as crude as that of a used car salesman. After calling for “trade not aid,”  Trump praised  these countries as “very vibrant places with very valuable land, great minerals, and great oil deposits and wonderful people.”

Significantly the country’s riches came first, with the people almost seeming like an after-thought. The geo-strategic context of this lunch clearly revolved around the global struggle between the US and  China in which Washington is seeking to slow Beijing’s cornering of raw materials which will be vital for the technologies of the future. China though, for 16 years, has remained Africa’s largest trading partner at $295 billion, with its African commerce four times larger than America’s.

At the start of this banquet, Trump wheeled out the stereotype of war-torn Africa that he had used during his recent  diplomatic ambush of South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, noting: “There is a lot of anger on your continent. We’ve been able to solve a lot of it.” The U.S. president thus depicted the entire

African continent as being wracked by conflicts which benevolent White Saviours were ending.

As in Ukraine and Gaza, however, Trump’s optimism about the durability of the Washington-brokered Rwanda-Congo peace deal  (involving promises of Congolese minerals to American business interests) seems misplaced in an intractable regional conflict that has endured for three decades. Contradicting his self-styled Peacemaker image, Trump then urged African leaders to buy American arms, boasting that his recent illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities proved their efficacy.

In response to these musings and Trump’s rude request for the five African leaders to keep their remarks brief, the Lilliputian leaders fell over each other to endorse America’s Mad Monarch for the Nobel Peace Prize. The African presidents also played up to their host’s obsession with their mineral resources. Liberia’s president displayed the instincts of a “House Negro” in referring to Trump as “Sir.”

Only Gabon’s president sensibly pushed for American help in beneficiating his nation’s manganese (with the country holding a quarter of the world’s reserves), which currently accounts for 22 per cent of China’s annual imports of the precious metal.

Nguema also raised the spectre of Chinese companies benefitting at the expense of American ones. Underlining its huge lead over Washington in Africa, Beijing had built the only major highway in Guinea-Bissau, whose leader was among the African delegates. The most surprising of the five African leaders was the previously staunchly anti-imperialist Senegalese president, Bassirou Faye, who recently ended France’s military presence in his country, while  seeking to close the chapter on 65 years of  neo-colonial exploitation. He lavished praise on Trump, lauding his golfing skills and urging him to build a golf course in Senegal, before encouraging American investors to help build a “tech city” in Dakar.

Trump felt exhilarated by all this flattery, noting: “I didn’t know I’d be treated this nicely.” Emboldened by his guests’ sycophancy, he unwittingly made another patronising turn, telling the Liberian president: “Such good English. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” The American president, whose country had supported the repatriation of freed American slaves to found Liberia in 1847 – with its capital of Monrovia named after U.S. president, James Monroe, and its flag modelled on America’s – shockingly did not know that Liberia was an English-speaking country with deep American roots.

This dialogue of the deaf reflected Trump’s trademark theatre of the absurd, and was totally detached from reality: four of these five nations (excluding Guinea-Bissau) were part of a list of countries that Washington is considering imposing travel bans on, while U.S. aid cuts have  devastated Liberia’s economy, with Monrovia having previously depended on Washington for 48 per cent of its budget.

Trump’s quixotic charm offensive was also contradicted by his gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development which has badly affected the generous HIV/AIDS funding provided to Africa since the time of his otherwise warmongering Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

America’s economic diplomacy was further undermined by Trump’s slashing of international humanitarian and peacekeeping funding and his proposed global tariffs of 10-30 per cent: all devastating blows to heavily indebted African countries which typically spend 45 per cent of their income on servicing unpayable debts.

What was even more extraordinary about Trump’s White House lunch with five African leaders  is that this outreach was being undertaken by a profoundly prejudiced president who notoriously dismissed Africa in 2018 as full of  “shithole countries,” described Lesotho in his 2025 State of the Union address as a country “no one has heard of,” falsely accused African-descended Haitian immigrants of eating the cats and dogs of residents in Ohio during his 2024 presidential campaign, and appointed just one African-American to an almost lily-white cabinet.

This White House engagement itself thus unsurprisingly saw Trump display the same characteristic disrespect towards his African guests. The five obsequious African presidents resembled some of the colonial era African chiefs who were lured into handing over their countries’ wealth to European colonialists with the exchange of worthless trinkets, kettles, pineapples, and mirrors.

Trump’s grotesque banquet represented an inversion of the notorious 1884/1885 Conference of Berlin where 14 largely European imperialists had met – without any Africans present – to set the rules for an orderly partition of Africa. This time, it was African leaders who were voluntarily offering up their nations’ wealth to a white supremacist U.S. president who clearly regarded his guests as belonging to a lower category of humanity.

Aside from signing lucrative deals for American big business, Trump was particularly interested in getting these countries to keep their citizens and drugs out of America, take back nationals who had overstayed their visas, and agree to become dumping grounds for Latin American criminals in U.S. jails. His performance was as patronising as it was prejudiced, as insulting as it was ignorant.

The five African leaders appeared awed and intimidated to be in the salubrious surroundings of the White House. They acted like servile supplicants, displaying an embarrassing obsequiousness towards their domineering host, without a single hint of displeasure at Trump’s unhinged nativism and destructive policies such as backing Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza which the African Union has consistently condemned. Africa’s five grovelling Lilliputians may, however, soon painfully discover the true meaning of the American Gulliver’s adage: there is no such thing as a free lunch.

*Professor Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa.