The spectacle of President Clinton's visit to Nigeria masterfully fuses his two principal modes of expression: paranoia and narcissism. Together, they frame his presidential style and inform his public language, even as they reveal his most private pathology.
The Sunday New York Times reports: "Nigerians watched with a mix of fascination and delight as the leader of the Western world rocked and swayed to the u2018juju' music of their very own Sunny Ade, a rhythmic blend of traditional and foreign influences."
There is nothing particularly charming here. We have watched with a similar mix of incredulousness and horror for the past eight years as Clinton has rocked and swayed his way through the vagaries of Washington politics with a rhythmic precision that transmutes Nigerian "juju" into Arkansas jukin'. Clinton is a sensualist and a cosmic roué, seducing African bump with Western grind. He correctly perceives that the most communicative gestures in the sub-Saharan milieu are not discussions of complex issues; indeed any discussion at all would be too complex for sensibilities hopelessly lost in the archaic immensity of that primordial continent. Thus, Clinton's dance weaves a sinister skein of deception around an uncomprehending African nation. And, like many Americans, they celebrate him as uncritically as a bon vivant in the languid salons of late nineteenth-century France.
Certainly, Clinton's puzzling remarks about Nigeria's important role in world affairs and the courage of its fragile democracy are redolent of the PC nonsense and Civil Rights doggerel of his own political experience. But there exists in his African rhetoric an astonishing cynicism quite different from the sanctimonious posturing of his domestic pronouncements. In America, a clever special interest group may formulate its argument through entitlements and quotas and, of course, specious claims of White villainy. However, the Nigerians have neither a leftist bureaucracy to support them nor an evil White Other to blame. The Clinton maneuver, then, is calculated to address the Nigerian condition in the American register of hope and promise. And if anything is more predictable than Nigerians squandering $28 billion in American taxpayer-funded debt relief, it is the concomitant sound of Nigerians (at home and abroad) traducing everyone else for their failures, among which will surely be their new "democratic" government.
Clinton's ghastly performance last weekend opens the vast vistas of his imagination to the primitive terror of African mystery, its ritual, its inscrutability. Africa, like the Clinton ego, is an instrument of desire, of darkness, turbulence, and excess; its is finally unknowable and untouched. The Nigerians pretend to be Western as Clinton pretends to be African. The polyrhythmic surge of Clinton's self-righteous heartbeat subsumes the primal echo of naive drums, his feet tracing spiral glyphs in the sand, his silver hair shimmering in dazzled black eyes.
The perverse splendor of the Clinton legacy will be that he understood at all moments in time when to speak the truth and when to shut up and dance.
August 28, 2000
Scott Wilkerson is a graduate student in philosophy.
