ADEKEYE ADEBAJO: Trump’s banquet for Africa’s Lilliputians

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 US President Donald Trump for a bizarre banquet in the White House.

These five countries represent just 2.3% of Africa’s 1.5-billion-strong population of 55 nations. However, what Trump was interested in was their natural riches: 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, calling for “trade not aid”,  before praising 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 afterthought. The geostrategic 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 the raw materials that will be vital for the technologies of the future. However, China has been Africa’s largest trading partner for 16 years, reaching $295bn in 2024, with its African commerce four times larger than America’s.

Trump wheeled out the stereotype of war-torn Africa that he had used during his recent diplomatic ambush of 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 US president thus depicted the entire African continent as being racked by conflicts that benevolent White Saviours were ending. Contradicting his self-styled peacemaker image, he then urged African leaders to buy US arms, boasting that his recent illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities proved their efficacy.

In response to these musings Africa’s Lilliputian leaders fell over each other to endorse America’s Mad Monarch as a nominee for the Nobel peace prize. All the 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 US help in beneficiating his nation’s manganese (the country holds a quarter of the world’s reserves), which currently accounts for 22% of China’s annual imports of the precious metal.

Most surprisingly, the previously anti-imperialist Senegalese president, Bassirou Faye, who recently ended France’s 65-year military presence in his country, lavished praise on Trump, urging him to build a golf course in Senegal.

Now emboldened by his guests’ sycophancy, Trump told the Liberian president: “Such good English. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” The US president, whose country had supported the repatriation of freed American slaves to found Liberia in 1847 — with its capital, Monrovia, named after US president James Monroe — shockingly did not know that Liberia was an English-speaking country with deep American roots.

Trump’s theatre of the absurd was totally detached from reality: four of these five nations (excluding Guinea-Bissau) were part of a list of countries on which Washington is considering imposing travel bans, while US aid cuts have devastated Liberia’s economy, with Monrovia having previously depended on Washington for 48% of its budget.

This bizarre outreach was also being undertaken by a profoundly prejudiced president who notoriously dismissed Africa in 2018 as full of  “shithole countries”, and described Lesotho in his 2025 state of the union address as a country “no-one has heard of”.

Africa’s five Lilliputians may soon painfully discover the true meaning of the American Gulliver’s adage: there is no such thing as a free lunch.  

• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.