Patrick Gathara and the politics of news language

Patrick Gathara writes about western politics in the same way westerners write about African and Asian countries. His aim is to encourage reflection on the language we use and to highlight the offensive assumptions embedded within it. 

Following the televised debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, probably the defining political event of the presidential race, the internet was quickly flooded with hot takes about how it went. The Washington Post published an editorial which contrasted the “fictional United States” depicted by Trump with the “positive vision” of Harris. The Wall Street Journal said Harris “clearly won” the debate, not because she was stronger on policy but because “she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad” Trump, leading him “down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity” that deflected attention from her own record. The New York Times polled 14 writers on who won, 13 of whom said Harris was stronger. Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for the Times said Harris “demonstrated poise and intelligence in the face of a belligerent and basically incoherent Trump.”  

For anyone who watched the entire debate, there was an air of unreality about it, almost as if you were tuned into a show satirising US politics rather than the actual event. Not much of what I read reflected the fact that a potential US president was talking about migrants eating cats and dogs and claiming he’d heard it on television when asked for evidence. He was frequently fact-checked throughout the debate on quite elementary points—nothing particularly complex—and later claimed that there was a conspiracy by the hosts against him. This is why it was peculiar to see Trump’s performance compared to Harris’s blow for blow instead of a focus on what is obviously a deeper malaise infecting US politics. Only Patrick Gathara, a Nairobi-based political cartoonist and satirist, captured that. 

Writing for Al Jazeera, Gathara’s article headlined with: “Debate in nuclear-armed former colony fails to reassure global community” and in its summary, he wrote that there were “widespread concerns over the state of democracy in the troubled North American nation”.  

He wrote about the debate with the same vocabulary we’d use as journalists – with a bit of exaggeration – if we were talking about an event that happened in what some people call a “banana republic”, a “basket case” or to use Trump’s own language, a “shithole” country.  

Here is some more of Gathara’s analysis:  

“Efforts to restore democracy to the United States, a troubled, oil-rich former British colony with a history of political violence, may have suffered a serious setback this week after yet another chaotic presidential debate, some Americanists say.  

Held in the relatively stable northeastern state of Pennsylvania on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the country’s worst terrorist attack, the debate was a chance to showcase the democratic progress the country had made since the violent, shambolic elections and attempted coup nearly four years ago.” 

The article gets tantalising when this vocabulary is used to offer readers political context for the debate, actually doing a much better job than we typically receive from much of the press:  

“The three moderate candidates in the race – Jill Stein, Cornel West and Chase Oliver – were barred from participating. Instead, the contest pitted the two frontrunners: former President Donald Trump, the candidate of the far-white Republican Party, widely thought to be the political wing of white-Christianist militias, and Kamala Harris, the current vice president, who led a palace coup two months ago that forced the ageing, unpopular incumbent, President Joe Biden, to abandon his quest for re-election.” 

And then he places this in a global geopolitical context explaining why the US’s allies are so concerned about the disruptive potential of this election, which is where Gathara really has fun. “Propping up democracy in the US has long been a vital priority for safeguarding global peace, given its linchpin status in the Caucasian bloc,” he writes, adding: “Analysts say allowing autocracy to once again flourish in North America and in the ethnostates of sub-Scandinavian Europe could lead to yet another all-out Caucasian tribal conflict that would draw in the rest of the international community – a third world war.”  

Gathara began this style of commentary on European and North American affairs in September 2019 after the UK’s supreme court ruled that then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament was unlawful. Johnson struggled to get MPs to back his Brexit plan and effectively dismissed parliament. Gathara posted: “African envoys urge UK government to abide by court ruling; warn that the UK could be suspended from the Commonwealth should the government continue to subvert democracy.”  

In a string of follow up tweets he wrote that Kenya called on the UK to moderate rhetoric that could inflame ethnic tensions “in North Ireland, a historic flashpoint for secessionist violence”; that Kenya was considering visa bans against British officials deemed “spoilers” and that Nairobi was concerned about the UK becoming “a base for radical extremism.”  

He has since developed several whopping threads providing tongue-in-cheek analysis where he has described the US as a “racially-divided”, “gun-strewn” and highly-indebted nation. The UK is described as a “strategically located flavour-starved Mid-Northern kingdom” and France is a “corrupt, crisis-wracked sub-Scandinavian European nation” and “one of the top recipients of African aid.” The EU, he says, is a “regional grouping of… European ethnostates”, unusual of course in a world where ethnic diversity within a state is a norm.  

The UK is described as a “strategically located flavour-starved Mid-Northern kingdom” and France is a “corrupt, crisis-wracked sub-Scandinavian European nation” and “one of the top recipients of African aid.” 

Gathara told Geeska that his work in this regard is a criticism of the language used by foreign correspondents when describing countries in Africa and Asia. “We tend to stereotype countries when we use this kind of shorthand, offering one-dimensional views of a place. What these synonyms, like ‘war-torn nation’ for example, tell the reader is that the main thing they need to know about a place is what resource it has, its colonial history or recent conflicts.”  

He’s showing that two can play that game. “This is offensive, and one of my goals is to make people aware of that by showing them how it feels and with a bit of humour to take out the sting,” he says. “But it is also a question of how we frame problems in these places. It divides the world into a zone where things work and a place of intractable conflict, dysfunction, and suffering.” 

Gathara’s tweets snatch back the power of definition from the west. He highlights how the language used to describe African countries often focuses on characteristics we perceive as defining them. For instance, describing Ethiopia as a poor, ethnically divided nation or Nigeria as a corrupt West African country pathologises these societies in a way we wouldn’t with European nations, whose faults are seen more as quirks than inherent flaws in their systems.  

Gathara’s tweets snatch back the power of definition from the west. He highlights how the language used to describe African countries often focuses on characteristics we perceive as defining them. 

“I want people to think about the world and its issues in a more nuanced way, to show that there are commonalities in the challenges we face and so we need to get away from this tendency to exoticise non-western countries,” he says.   

Gathara spoke lucidly about the way the Tory government in the UK dished out Covid contracts to friends of the party and legal attempts to block people from voting in the US. “If this happened in Kenya, we’d use the words corruption or there would be ‘concerns about the state of democracy’ and so on.”  

Gathara isn’t the first voice from the Global South to use satire to bite back. Shortly after Donald “Papa Don” Trump (as Gathara calls him) was shot, a video went viral on TikTok of Trump campaigning in 2020 in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he accused Ilhan Omar of attempting to bring the “anarchy” of Somalia to the US. In the clip Trump says: “Somalia. No government, no safety, no police, no nothing”. The clip then cuts to the shooting overlaid with a voice of a young Somali male saying: “USA, no government, no safety, no police… no nothing.”  

The Lebanese satirist Karl Sharro similarly highlights the peculiar nature of some European writers’ analyses of the Middle East by applying the same approach to the west. One example is his dissection of the word “compromise”. Sharro traces its roots to the Latin term compromissum, which he says meant “to break one’s vase” and is linked to a “sense of dishonour associated with compromise” which is why Europeans like fighting so much. Makes perfect sense right? In another post on X he writes: “The US should have an exotic name like the ‘Middle East’. I propose the 'Side North'”.  

Karen Attiah, former Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post, gave a glimpse of how the George Floyd protests might have been covered by the Western media had they taken place abroad. She wrote: “the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence,” and described how the country had “been rocked by several viral videos depicting extrajudicial executions of black ethnic minorities by state security forces.” 

In one of my favourite sketches, comedian Aamer Rahman theorised the conditions under which people of colour might be able to be racist, suggesting it would require a complete reversal of the global power dynamics. “I could be a reverse racist if I wanted to,” he quips, “all I would need is a time machine.” He argues that Europe would need to be colonised and occupied, its resources plundered, and a slave trade established where white people are exported to Chinese rice plantations. Systems of privilege would have to be built to favour black and brown people at the expense of white people. Their countries would be bombed under false pretences, reduced to the Stone Age, all while claiming it was for their own good. On top of that, they would be subjected to black and brown beauty standards, leading them to despise their own appearance. “If after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of that,” he concludes, “I got on stage at a comedy show and said, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with white people? Why can’t they dance?’ — that would be reverse racism.”  

Djiboutian author Abdourahman Waberi’s book, In the United States of Africa, tests Rahman’s world out, reversing the global order by imagining a prosperous Africa that is, nonetheless, ethnocentric and bigoted. In this reverse mirror image of our world, Europe is poor, with its people depicted in African newspapers as warlike, disease-ridden reactionaries whose escape from the horrors of their countries to the southern Mediterranean’s shores risks bringing their chaos to an otherwise serene and peaceful Africa. The continent’s dailies call this threat the “white peril”.  The continent’s daily’s call this spectre a “white peril”. This story is told through the eyes of a white French refugee who has been adopted by an African doctor. “I wanted to show that Europe could be written about in that way too,” Waberi told me.  

Gathara states that his aim is not to make this the standard approach for writing about Europe. Instead, he hopes to see more insightful, nuanced, and thoughtful prose from journalists, particularly those of African background. “You should see how some of the Kenyan press reports on Somalia,” he tells me. “At times, it is no different from the Western press at all.” 

Gathara states that his aim is not to make this the standard approach for writing about Europe. Instead, he hopes to see more insightful, nuanced, and thoughtful prose from journalists, particularly those of African background. “You should see how some of the Kenyan press reports on Somalia,” he tells me. “At times, it is no different from the Western press at all.” 

“We’re conditioned to view western journalism as the pinnacle and universal and adopt it as a standard,” he says. “But we need to question that universality,” he adds. “It was largely developed without us in mind and intended for a domestic audience.” Gathara argues that Africans have their own storytelling traditions, and their reporting should more accurately reflect their own experiences in the world.  

“We might find better ways of explaining these issues to each other.”