Who Dey Fear Donald Trump?

In his 1990 article, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Indian-American anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, called attention to a reconfiguration and reconditioning that was happening among various regions and peoples of the world in terms of their cultural, economic, social and political relationships. Appadurai highlighted that a new global cultural economy was emerging, noting that this emergence could not be fully understood through the usual binary models like centre-periphery, push-pull factors and consumers-producers.

Instead, this new global order was based on ‘nonisomorphic paths’; in other words, it was disjointed. These paths were not exactly new, but the ‘sheer speed, scale, and volume,’ with which they occurred, Appadurai argued, were central to ‘the politics of global culture’.

I begin this foreword by referring to this seminal article because it provides an illuminating basis through which we can engage the current global multipolar order, which itself is part of a longer history of multipolarity. It is also a postcolonial reality whose roots go back to the years of anticolonial campaigns across Africa and other regions of the global South and to the Cold War era. Against the backdrop of these moments, the emergence of China and Russia particularly fractured global power structures, bringing about the need to redraw the contours of sovereignty, resistance and state power, and a continuous shift in global alliances. The unprecedented magnitude of this disjuncture is shaping the emerging multipolar world order. More importantly, Africa’s role is becoming increasingly direct; it is, the authors in this issue highlight, no longer just a matter of decisions being made for the continent, but also about how African states, regional organizations, and initiatives respond to and influence these shifts in the interest of the continent.

But before we proceed, a quick note on the cover:

When history repeats, it rarely does so quietly. It shouts, it burns and sometimes—going by Edel Rodriguez’s striking cover—it streaks across the sky like a comet in the shape of an orange man with an appetite for chaos.

We have chosen to title this issue ‘Who Dey Fear Donald Trump?’ not merely to provoke, (though it may) and certainly not merely to entertain (though satire remains one of our continent’s sharpest tools of critique). We have chosen this title to assert a distinctly African disposition toward power: unimpressed, unafraid and un-fooled.

Not exactly the anomaly Western media portrays him to be, Donald Trump and his politics have mutated into a global grammar: a language of exclusion, denial and delusion, spoken from Israel to the UK. And yet, in many parts of Africa, this new disorder feels eerily familiar. We’ve seen this script before. Sometimes we’ve written it.

This edition explores what it means to live through global collapse when the world never quite held you in the first place. It considers the African position—geopolitical, psychological, ecological—at a time when the global order appears to be eating itself alive. From the climate crisis in the Sahel to the economic fallout of foreign wars, from diasporic resistance to the rise of digital disinformation, our writers ask: what happens when the fire reaches us? Or, perhaps more sharply, hasn’t it already been burning here for a while?

In these pages, you will find not despair, but something rarer: perspective. The clear-eyed awareness that power may shift, but the sites of struggle remain familiar. You will find voices that refuse to play the fool. And where you find laughter, it’ll be the good kind. The kind that deflates the self-importance of empires and reminds us that in our part of the world, survival is not new.

And now, the stories.