Africa’s leadership: Puppetry and art of speaking beautiful English

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OPINION

By Michael Kakooza, Ph.D (Wales)

"The problem is African heads of state who contribute nothing to these people who are fighting, but who sing the same song as the imperialists, calling us militias, calling us men who don’t respect human rights. Which human rights are we talking about? We take offence at this; it is shameful. We, the African heads of state, must stop behaving like puppets who dance every time the imperialists pull the strings" — Captain Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso.

The above quotation is a translated extract from a speech in French given by Captain Ibrahim Traore at the 2nd Russia-Africa Summit held in Moscow (July 27-28, 2023).   Since he became the leader of Burkina Faso in 2022, the radical words and actions of the young captain have continued to fascinate watchers of world events and trends. 

He has been likened to a 21^st century African version of the 20^th century iconic Argentinian revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara or a new embodiment of his celebrated predecessor in the Burkinabe presidency, Captain Thomas Sankara. 

Traore’s sentiments, as expressed in the extract above, are not original.  Decades earlier, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, had observed: “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”

Steering clear of the ephemerality of near-cultic status that Traore currently enjoys, it is important, however, to articulate one critical concern that can be constructed from his statements and initiatives, namely: Why has Africa’s leadership failed, to date, to actively bring about the realization of the African century, as was envisioned so evocatively by former South African president, Thabo Mbeki, in 2006?

This is the critical concern that the discussion below engages with. The recent visits of six African heads of state to Washington D.C. this year will provide an illustrative case study.

In recent months, the Oval Office, the official US presidential sanctum in the White House, has been aggressively leveraged as the world’s most publicised and celebrated state reception space.

From the start of his 2^nd presidential term in January 2025 to date, President Donald Trump has played host to a steady stream of world leaders. Numbered among these state visitors have been six African heads of state. Against the backdrop of the Western media technology infrastructure, and in the relentless glare of its cameras, the ideologised rituals of US power politics to which the African heads of state were subjected were openly played out in the Oval Office.

In May 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa led a large delegation, including representatives from Government, business and industry, and sports, to, as he expressed it, “establish a basis for greater economic cooperation and to address some of the challenges that have recently arisen in relations between our two countries”.  

These worthy intentions were never to receive due publicity, as they were crowded out by the media-headline-grabbing allegation made by President Trump about the murders of white farmers in South Africa.

Despite President Ramaphosa’s commendable display of emotional intelligence and his sanguine expressions about a successful visit, the dominant media narrative was not about the prospective trade partnerships of a proud South Africa, a beacon of economic transformation for Africa, and one of the founder nations of BRICS.  

Rather, the mediatised narrative cast South Africa as a political state in which law and order had collapsed, within a misgovernance framework of reverse apartheid. 

In media terms, the Ramaphosa visit was a public relations disaster. The irrationality of psychological manipulation had trumped the sobriety of fact and a balanced perspective. Further, despite the high level of competence in the South African delegation, it was unable to pull its weight in negotiating the ensuing media narrative, thus exposing the vulnerability of Africa’s leaders within the power dynamics of the Oval Office.

On July 9, 2025, President Trump wined and dined five African Heads of State. The African presidential quintet comprised the presidents of Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal, nations that are all located along Africa’s Atlantic Ocean coastline.  According to the Instagram page of the US Secretariat of State, the proclaimed purpose of the visit was “to discuss ways we can benefit both the United States and benefit the peoples of Africa”. 

In his opening remarks, President Trump, at best sub-consciously, nuanced that proclaimed purpose by positioning the priorities of the US Government: “… and your continent is represented by Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal, all very vibrant places with the very valuable land, great minerals, great oil deposits and wonderful people”.

The visit of the five African presidents, just like the earlier South African presidential visit, also captured the interest of the legacy media, but for reasons that were similarly tangential to the proclaimed purpose of the visit. Two instances will be cited to illustrate this.

The first instance was President Trump’s response to the address given by the Liberian president, Joseph Nyuma Boakai. Trump exclaimed:

“Well, thank you, and such good English, such beautiful -- where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where were you educated, where? In Liberia?”

Much as Trump’s response may have expressed a sincere compliment, it manifested an exclusive civilizational and cultural discourse, ideologically framed within the linguistic scope of the English language as spoken in the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world. 

A good command of spoken English became the discursive indicator of Boakai’s acceptability and respectability, making him and all he stood for a safe, conformist and non-threatening reality.  

Further, Boakai’s good command of English affirmed linguistically and ideologically the claims of American hegemony.  Above all, the ancient wealth of African philosophies of life, cultures, traditions and value systems was rendered non-existent.

The second instance was when a female Angolan media practitioner and White House correspondent, Hariana Veras Victoria, put the visiting five African presidents on the spot by asking:

“And for the African leaders, my question is, as you can see, President Trump is working to bring peace not only in Africa but also in the world. Are you all considering nominating President Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize?”

Modifying the English idiomatic expression, it takes a thief to catch a thief, it could be argued in this second instance that it takes an African to catch an African.  In what appeared to have been a pre-rehearsed and choreographed act between President Trump and the African journalist, the former prevailed upon his five state visitors to overcome any trace of hesitation on their part by stating: Would you like to give a fast answer, please?

Each of the five presidents clearly endorsed the nomination of President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Puppetry could not have been more theatrical. It is no wonder that the Al Jazeera columnist, Tafi Mhaka, wrote an opinion piece entitled: Trump’s African summit was a masterclass in modern colonial theatre (July 11, 2025).

The translated nomination statement of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye of Senegal was revealing:

“The jury will decide. It's not a matter of voting amongst our countries, but what is for sure is that the results and the work have been done in such a short amount of time -- shows that you would be a good recipient. And I'm sure that the jury sees that, and the rest of the world sees it as well and understands it. When the time comes, I think everyone will see that it is a deserved prize.

Congratulations on what you've done so far. If we took a poll, I think you would be very far ahead in those polls.”

As the current Senegalese president, Faye is the heir to the legacy of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Senghor was Senegal’s political founding father, a renowned intellectual and major proponent of Negritude, a literary movement that sought, among others, to rehabilitate Black identity in the face of Western colonialism. 

Despite this formidable inheritance, Faye had no qualms in arrogating to himself the triple roles of latter-day oracle extraordinaire for Africa, foreman of the world jury, and global polls pundit-in-chief, in order to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

By nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, the five African presidents not only gave their personal seal of approval to the idiosyncrasies of the Trump Administration, but also signalled their full membership in the club of ‘Nobel Peace Prize for Trump’ advocates, most recently graced by Benjamin Netanyahu, the long-serving Israeli Prime Minister and for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in November 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A number of sobering lessons can be drawn from the above case illustrations.

It is evident that within the dominant ideological sphere sustaining Western hegemonic claims, Africa’s leadership remains vulnerable and the weaker party. Africa’s leaders are yet to come up with a persuasive and unifying Continental ideology as a counterweight.

Bolstering the Western hegemony is the Western Media Technology Infrastructure, in which authentic African voices and influence are marginalised. The function of strategic communications should be mainstreamed within Africa’s leadership if Africa is to articulate and disseminate its own narratives. 

Innovative and credible home-grown initiatives should be designed and developed, rather than simply adopting and/ or adapting Western-generated communication and PR paradigms.

The five African presidents largely represented their own personal interests and those from circles of their close associates. A much more honest and transparent citizen engagement, as well as consultation within Africa’s regional blocs and the African Union, would have minimised the consequences of the puppet show that unfolded in the Oval Office.

Expertise in international and cross-cultural negotiation remains a critical competence deficit of Africa’s leaders. The continued failure to create a critical mass of competent negotiators leaves Africa’s leaders in a vulnerable situation, where they yield more easily to the psychological manipulations of the smarter Western parties.

Proficiency in English (or any of the formerly imperial European languages) should not simply be reduced by Africa’s leaders to a medal of honour to win respectability from a Western audience, but rather this linguistic competence should be used creatively and innovatively to further the genuine interests of Africa’s citizens.   

Two Liberian reactions to Trump’s exclamation on President Boakai’s command of spoken English expose a distressing strand of inferiority complex within the populace.  Mitchell McCluskey and Larry Madowo of CNN, in their article ‘Trump praises‘good English’ of Liberian president, prompting criticism across Africa’ (July 9, 2025), capture the following reaction:

“I felt insulted because our country is an English-speaking country,” Archie Tamel Harris, a Liberian youth advocate, told CNN. “For him to ask that question, I don’t see it as a compliment. I feel that the US president and people in the West still see Africans as people in villages who are not educated.”

In his Meidas Touch Network Podcast (July 14, 2025), Ben Meisalas captured the following reaction on Facebook by Sam Yates, a Liberian living in Nigeria:

“Does Trump think we only speak ‘jungle’ languages? English is taught in schools across Africa, often to a very high standard.”

For all his radicalism, Captain Ibrahim Traore has not discontinued the use of French in Burkina Faso, but it has now become the linguistic agency for the socio-economic transformation of his country. 

In other words, French in Burkina Faso has been ideologically decoupled from France as the erstwhile imperial metropolis. An older historical example of how a previously imperial language successfully became a socio-economic transformational tool in a Global South country is Brazil. Brazil was a former colony of Portugal, but is now a recognised world leader among nations, a founder nation of BRICS, and the most influential shaper of Lusophone culture.

Concluding this discussion, the illustrated case of the visits of the six African heads of state to Washington and the lessons emerging highlight the continuing topicality of the critical concern raised in the introduction above. Nearly 70 years ago, a period that constitutes the biblical generation has passed since March 6, 1957, when Kwame Nkrumah, on the occasion of Ghana’s political independence from Great Britain, declared:

“And, as I pointed out… from now on, today, we must change our attitudes and our minds. We must realise that from now on we are no longer a colonial but a free and independent people.

But also, as I pointed out, that also entails hard work. That new Africa is ready to fight its own battles and show that, after all, the black man is capable of managing his own affairs.

We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, that we are prepared to lay our foundation – our own African personality”.

The process of reclaiming the dignity and global role of the Black person remains a work in progress. Though the leadership example of Captain Ibrahim Traore has contributed to re-galvanising pan-African sentiments across the continent, the illustrated case discussed above demonstrates that Continental unity of purpose and ideological coherence are yet to be realised by Africa’s leadership.

The writer is an academician