I have a confession: Jimmy Carter was the only US president I have ever seen in person. The rest I have seen only from afar.
I was 18 when he made his trip to Nigeria in 1978. Like most young and curious Nigerians of those days, I was fascinated by everything about the US.
There I was at the Ikeja Airport, a few feet away from the world’s most important person – the 39th president of the United States of America. The slim, tall, elegant white man with a white mane stood beside the rotund figure of General Olusegun Obasanjo as they observed protocols demanded by such state visits.
That was then. The security surrounding world leaders today does not allow such close encounters.
Jimmy Carter died last week on December 29, 2024. He was born exactly a century earlier.
As always, many Africans have poured oily encomiums on Jimmy Carter. The man who was responsible for the death of thousands of Africans has not been intercede, but we already have many of us landing him with smarmy eulogies.
I have read some stomach-churning laudatories of Jimmy Carter, with some hailing him as the greatest thing since Akpeteshi was invented in the Gold Coast.
As usual, as they reflect (I assumed that they are capable of anything beyond emotional ejaculations) on the former US president’s life and passing, many Africans refuse to balance their laudatory tributes with a sober assessment of his legacy.
Once again, brainwashed Africa sees only the polished facade and remains blind to man’s duplicity and rank hypocrisy!
Jimmy Carter was undoubtedly a man of brilliant intellect (I read his books; his “Why not the Best” was enchanting to my impressionable young mind when I read it) and good intentions in many areas, but the question Africans must ask is why American leaders became better human beings ONLY after they left office.
Carter’s post-presidential humanitarian work through the Carter Center, which he ran with his wife Rosalyn, was laudable, particularly for eradicating Guinea worm disease and other diseases. They earned him well-deserved global acclaim, including a Nobel Prize, which he won in 2002 with the Prize motivation reading: “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
However, when examined through the lens of African liberation struggles and the fight against apartheid and racial oppression, Carter’s record is far more contentious than the oleaginous narratives would suggest. Jimmy Carter was not better than any other American leader. He was, in many respects, far worse. Behind his polished facade was another American leader who ruthlessly pursued American geopolitical interests while he masked his hubris behind wretched smiles.
Let us try to put things into some perspective. We cannot run away from the fact that Jimmy Carter was a product of the American political system – a system that, for much of its history, has been rife with institutional racism and racial bigotry. Carter’s presidency (1977–1981) was no exception, as his administration presided over and even facilitated policies that undermined Black liberation struggles, both domestically and globally.
The real tragedy here is that the US, which never had a colony in Africa and should have been a natural ally to the continent, allowed its historic racial bigotry to hijack its moral compass, and it ended up supporting its cousins in Europe in violently opposing and suppressing the aspirations of Africans.
In the local American political scene, our tag of hypocrisy against Carter is supported by the fact that while he projected the image of a progressive Southerner committed to racial equality, his administration failed to address systemic racism in any transformative way. Under his watch, many of the discriminatory practices in the US continued unabated. They include:
1. Criminal Justice: The late 1970s saw an explosion in mass incarceration rates, disproportionately affecting Black Americans. The Carter Administration, while mouthing sanctimonious and pious denunciations, did little to challenge the structures leading to the over-policing and criminalization of Black communities.
2. Discriminatory Housing Policies: Despite his promises to address housing discrimination, Mr Carter did little to reverse redlining or enforce anti-discrimination laws in housing. His government failed to meaningfully invest in programs that could have addressed the persistent racial wealth gap engendered by decades of discriminatory housing policies.
3. Employment Discrimination: Throughout his presidency, Black unemployment rates remained double those of white Americans.
We cited these examples to show that Carter, like many of his predecessors, operated within and upheld a system deeply entrenched in racial inequities.
Not even “Brother” Obama could do much about it.
However, history will rightly judge Jimmy Carter harshly for his foreign policy, especially his African policy.
Although American media and his PR machines ensured that he was often praised for his rhetoric against apartheid, with speeches condemning the racial segregation and oppression in South Africa, Carter’s actions – or lack thereof – tell a very different story. While he might have a personal moral opposition to apartheid, his administration’s policies actively enabled the apartheid regime in ways that undermined Black liberation movements in Southern Africa.
The Carter administration pursued what it termed constructive engagement with South Africa’s apartheid government. While this approach ostensibly sought to use dialogue and economic incentives to encourage the nutcases in Pretoria to reform, what it did in practice was to provide cover for the apartheid regime to continue its brutal oppression of Black South Africans while maintaining strong economic and military ties with Western powers.
Are those Africans who today shed copious tears over Carter’s death not aware of the millions of African lives that were wasted by his callous and inhumane solidarity with the apartheid regime? While Jimmy Carter professed Christian love, his administration repeatedly used its veto power at the United Nations to block resolutions to impose sanctions on South Africa.
Ironically, the same Africans who mourned the demise of this apartheid regime supporter will denounce Russia, which, as part of the Soviet Union, actively fought to isolate the apartheid regime diplomatically and economically.
While Carter’s administration supported the apartheid government under the guise of Cold War geopolitics, the Soviet Union – a nation often demonized in the West – stood firmly on the side of African liberation. The USSR provided military, financial, and logistical support to liberation movements across Southern Africa, including the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, SWAPO in Namibia, and MPLA in Angola.
For those Africans without knowledge of their history and who prefer to gather their facts from that Pedophile Headquarters called the BBC, it was the defeat inflicted by Soviet-supported Cuban troops on the South African Defense Force at Cuito Cuanavale that broke the back of the evil regime and led to the collapse of apartheid, and eventually the independence of South Africa.
Under the presidency of the man who is now promoted to humanitarian extraordinaire and won a Nobel Prize, the US vetoed no fewer than four key UN resolutions, including measures that would have imposed arms embargoes and economic sanctions on South Africa. Mr. Jimmy Carter effectively shielded the apartheid government from international pressure.
The same people who today showered sanctions like confetti on Russia and Iran told us then that sanctions do not work. The same sanctimonious hypocrites even said to us that we should not mix sports with politics. Today, we see how they shamelessly use sports to prosecute their geopolitical battles with Russia and Belarus.
When will we learn in Africa?
Lest you think that Mr. Carter only provided a diplomatic shield for the evil apartheid regime, we should point out that the U.S. and its allies provided substantial military support to bolster the apartheid government’s military capabilities. The U.S. and its allies, including Israel, supplied South Africa with advanced military technology.
Under Mr Nice Guy Carter, intelligence sharing and covert collaborations between the CIA and South African security forces were intensified. As revealed by testimonies given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this collaboration included assistance in the development of South Africa’s chemical and biological weapons program, which specifically targeted Black Africans.
The Russians alleged that they uncovered American labs in Ukraine producing bio-weapons that specifically targeted Slavs.
The Carter administration failed to impose any meaningful restrictions on American corporations that invested in South Africa, helping the racists in Pretoria to fuel their regime’s economy and ensure its survival.
Perhaps most egregiously, South Africa – with the tacit support of the U.S. and Western nations – developed nuclear weapons during this period. By the time apartheid ended, South Africa had built six atomic bombs, a chilling testament to the West’s complicity in maintaining the regime’s strategic military dominance.
Aside from actively supporting the racist regime, the Carter administration also turned a blind eye to South Africa’s destabilization campaigns in the region. Apartheid South Africa provided military support to insurgent groups like RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, contributing to prolonged conflicts that killed millions of Africans.
If only Africans would study their history.
Mr. Carter pursued ruinous geopolitical policies not only in Africa. His choice of advisors, particularly Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, two of the most rigidly ideological and controversial figures in 20th-century geopolitics, shaped his foreign policy into a Cold War chessboard that sacrificed justice and humanity for ideological gains. Both of these two unfathomably evil men were influenced by Sir Halford Mackinder, whose book, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” reduced international relations to a zero-sum game.
The genesis of the conflict in Ukraine and West Asia was rooted in these two men, for whom human lives count for nothing in pursuit of American exceptionalism and hegemony.
1. Russia and Ukraine: Hailed by his admirers as a Brilliant Geopolitical Strategist, it was Brzezinski’s aggressive anti-Soviet strategies, which included unrestraint support for anti-communist insurgencies, that set the stage for ongoing tensions in Eastern Europe. He was instrumental in provoking the Russian intervention in Afghanistan when he decided to arm mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan. The policy exacerbated the Cold War and sowed the seeds of instability that persist today. We can trace the root of the current Russia-Ukraine war, a tragic culmination of decades of Western encroachment and Russian resistance, to the Carter administration’s confrontational Cold War posture.
2. The Middle East: The much-touted Camp David Accords, often remembered as a brilliant Carter’s diplomatic success in Middle East diplomacy, largely excluded Palestinian interests and failed to address the root causes of the region’s conflicts. A lapse he later tried to correct in a book and public speeches.
Jimmy Carter fully endorsed Kissinger’s realpolitik, which sees the pursuit of American hegemony as the only worthwhile foreign policy goal. His enthusiastic support for oppressive regimes in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, which are willing to play lackeys to the American Overlord, laid the groundwork for decades of violent unrest that continue today
By appointing such uncompromising ideologues, Jimmy Carter is responsible for the tragic events unfolding in Eastern Europe and East Asia.
While Western media might single out Carter for his humanitarian legacy, we in the Global South must set the records straight. It is essential to view Carter’s actions within the broader context of Western complicity in propping up apartheid and other repressive regimes across the world.
We in Africa should continue to raise our voices at how the United States, Britain, and other Western nations consistently prioritized their strategic and economic interests over the lives of Africans.
African culture, like most cultures, demands that we do not speak ill of the dead. While we wish Jimmy Carter eternal rest and acknowledge his contributions to specific humanitarian causes, it is an insult to the intelligence of Africans to paint him as a friend of Africa.
He was not.
His administration’s policies were no different from those we condemn. They were emblematic of the broader Western approach to our continent: one of exploitation, hypocrisy, and indifference to African lives.
However moved we are by the desire to praise him, Carter’s achievements were overshadowed by the systemic injustices and the global violence he perpetuated.
Africans must resist the temptation to romanticize Jimmy Carter’s legacy and those like him. We ought to focus on the broader lessons of history. The struggle for total African liberation and equality is an ongoing project, and it demands that we remain vigilant against the forces of neocolonialism and racial oppression, no matter how benevolent their figureheads may appear.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, and Social Commentator.)
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