By Gillian Schutte | The Counterhegemon

Kim Heller’s “Trump’s America First Strategy Undermining Africa’s Sovereignty” landed on my screen the way a clueless first-year politics student’s essay lands in a pile of scripts waiting to be marked: overconfident, undercooked, swollen with big words, and held together by the desperate hope that moral certainty will somehow pass for thought.

I braced myself. Anyone familiar with her prose knows the routine. At any moment the usual weather bulletin can break into the article: gloomy clouds, gathering storms, some exhausted dawn dragging itself over the horizon to rescue an idea too frail to survive without special effects.

On this occasion she seems to have eased up on the disconnected Western trope literary quotations and the meteorological flourishes she usually uses to disguise a wholly inadequate grasp of theory. In that limited sense, she showed restraint. She did not, however, disappoint in her deeper tendency to write down to Africa as though the continent were a yard full of colonial subjects waiting for her sage instruction from above.

The trouble clocked in almost immediately.

Rather than argument, this was the kind of undergraduate writing that discovers the words “sovereignty,” “imperialism” and “geopolitics,” throws them into the air like confetti, and waits for intellectual substance to magically assemble itself on the page. It never does.

As I read, I could almost see the student behind it. Eager. Earnest. Politically excited. Slightly intoxicated by her own vocabulary. Certain that naming America, Trump and Africa in the same article already constitutes critique. Certain that indignation itself is evidence. Certain that a few references to minerals, infrastructure corridors and foreign interests can carry the weight of an argument.

It cannot.

What lands on the page instead is a familiar overwrought academic mess: grand claims without conceptual discipline, pious declarations without structure, and a breathless parade of political clichés masquerading as insight. I have marked this essay many times before. It always arrives wearing a slightly different shirt, but the pattern never changes. It says a great deal about what the writer feels. It says very little about what the writer actually understands.

The article announces that America sees Africa as a commercial opportunity. Thank you. So did empire yesterday. So does capital every morning before breakfast. That is not a revelation. Rather it is the entry-level premise from which a case should begin. Yet Heller presents it with the air of someone unveiling forbidden knowledge to the masses.

Next come the familiar ornamental terms. Critical minerals. Economic sovereignty. Partnerships. Conflict management. Strategic corridors. Africa-first. America-first. The prose keeps reaching for significance, but the ideas remain scant. She points at the scenery of imperial power without once entering the engine room. She never shows the machinery. She never names the full architecture. She never drills into the legal, financial and logistical mechanisms through which extraction gets organised and protected. She simply keeps gesturing in the general direction of empire and trusting that the reader will mistake pointing for thinking.

Soon enough, she gives us the line that sovereignty is respected only when it aligns with America’s interests. No, Kim. America does not respect sovereignty. It fabricates a stage-set version for compliant states, funds the charade, and crushes the real thing when it refuses to kneel. Heller delivers this as though she has unearthed a hard truth, but it lands like half-chewed theory dropped onto the page in a hurry.

Here she reaches the edge of the argument, peers over, and retreats into intellectual fog. She may dimly register that something fraudulent sits inside the American script of democracy and sovereignty, but she lacks the theoretical grip to name the machinery. So she gives us the kindergarten version. America likes sovereignty when it suits America. Thank you, Kim. Next she will inform us that rain is wet and Iran is at war. The issue is not whether Washington “respects” sovereignty when it finds it convenient. The issue is how it stages the illusion of sovereignty while locking states into resource extraction, donor discipline, media laundering, elite brokerage and policy obedience. That is where thought begins. Heller, as usual, stops at the slogan, pats it on the head, and lets it loose in the world as though it were thought.

That may work in a first-year tutorial. It does not work in political writing, especially from someone who presents herself as a specialist in African politics. One is left wondering where exactly that qualification was acquired. At a pop-up political evangelism institute, perhaps. Or some sorrowful correspondence college where geopolitics gets taught through scented paragraphs and the occasional shiver of ethical concern.

A weak student essay often suffers from what I call vocabulary inflation. The bigger the words, the smaller the thought. That disease runs through this piece like a handmade Bill Gates virus. Sovereignty appears as a sacred chant rather than a material condition. Development arrives as a pious wish rather than an industrial programme. Africa is treated as a wounded abstraction in need of better leaders, stronger agency and more favourable terms. This is exactly how students write before they have learned that politics is not a sermon and the continent is not a metaphor.

By the time Heller tells us African leaders must be “astute,” I am deep in the familiar irritation of a lecturer who knows the writer has dodged the assignment. Which leaders. Which class interests. Which networks. Which states. Which sectors. Which domestic bourgeoisies. Which foreign contracts. Which military arrangements. Which institutions. Which trade-offs. Which factions inside the state. Which African elites have already sold away the future while speaking the language of decolonisation into a microphone. None of this appears. We are handed “African leaders” in the abstract, that old refuge of the analytically lazy.

Worse, she reaches for the sermon again and tells us that what Africa needs is patriotic leaders wedded to decolonisation and industrial transformation. At this point I am convinced I have wandered into a geopolitical soap opera conducted in the tone of plantation Fanagalo, where a strung-out ageing bottle blonde stands on the veranda, G&T in one hand, Ativan dissolving beneath her tongue, and instructs the gardener on how to water her orchid as though the fate of Africa depends on her vowels. Lo msebenzi. Lo manzi. Lapa lo lips. Lo lecture. That is what this piece has become. A top-down melodrama of posture, command and hand-me-down gravitas, with the continent reduced to backdrop and Heller cast as the disappointed madam of managed sovereignty. And now, apparently, besieged African leaders must simply be told to be patriotic, as though patriotism were some revolutionary muti she can sprinkle from the stoep to cure donor capture, imperial coercion and the whole rotten machinery of extraction.

Students do this when they want the tone of authority without the burden of detail. They hide their vagueness inside moral instruction. They issue commands to history. They tell whole continents what they ought to do. They do not examine the forces that prevent it.

There is also the balancing act with China, inserted in the dutiful way liberal and soft-nationalist writing now likes to do. America is predatory. China has built infrastructure. China has also left Africa dependent. Fine. These are broad positions. Where is the discrimination. Where is the comparative rigour. Where is the account of unevenness across countries, financing models, ownership structures and bargaining capacities. Where is the distinction between a state that enters an agreement from weakness and one that negotiates from strategic leverage. Gone. All compressed into a paragraph that performs balance rather than producing knowledge.

Again, textbook first-year error. Mention both superpowers. Gesture at complexity. Skip the hard labour.

What makes the piece especially irritating is that it keeps brushing against real questions and then hurrying away before they become demanding. The Lobito Corridor appears. FORGE appears. Domestic processing appears. Beneficiation appears. Each of these could have anchored a serious essay. Each could have forced Heller to move from rhetoric into material explanation. Each could have required actual work. Instead they appear as props. Their job is decorative. They certify geopolitical weight and then exit before they ask too much of the writer.

This is how weak essays perform false intelligence. They name things they have no intention of unpacking.

The style compounds the problem. The article keeps reaching for solemnity, but solemnity is not depth. A sentence does not become profound because it announces that Africa remains “a site of extraction rather than an epicentre of production.” That line sounds weighty because it leans on familiar anti-colonial cadence. It still says nothing new. I would underline it and write in the margin: yes, and? What exactly have you demonstrated here other than your familiarity with the sound of political disappointment?

The deeper problem lies in the structure of thought. Heller wants the reader to feel that she alone has exposed American hypocrisy. Fine. Hypocrisy exists. Empire lies. Washington talks partnership while organising hierarchy. None of this excuses lazy argument. A competent writer would move from premise to evidence to structure to contradiction. Heller moves from premise to posture to repetition. By the end, the article has the outer shell of critique without anything solid inside it.

It reads like a student who has absorbed the gestures of radical commentary from panel discussions, NGO reports and newspaper columns, but has not yet learned how to build a case sturdy enough to survive contact with a sharp marker.

So yes, if this essay landed in my pile, I would mark it harshly.

I would write: your instincts are better than your method. I would write: define your terms. I would write: where is your evidence. I would write: this paragraph repeats the previous one in louder language. I would write: naming imperialism does not absolve you of explaining it. I would write: Africa is not a rhetorical backdrop for your performance. I would write: stop telling leaders to be astute and start telling readers how power actually works.

And then I would fail it.

Not because the politics offend me. The opposite. The politics deserve better than this. Africa deserves better than this. IOL readers deserve better than this. Anti-imperial critique deserves better than this. What Heller has produced here is the kind of airy, self-satisfied, under-argued copy that makes serious political writing look like an exercise in slogan management.

This is not a dangerous article. It is worse. It is a complacent one. It flatters the reader into thinking they have encountered genuine insight when they have only been handed the polished remains of a first-year essay still begging for conceptual discipline.

At best, this is a draft written by a student with potential and too little rigour. At worst, it is a public column that mistakes its own vocabulary for intelligence, powders its nose, and sends it out into public life as geopolitical analysis.

Grade: 38 percent.

See me after class.

About the author.

Gillian Schutte majored in African Politics at UKZN in 1991 under Bill Freund. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, with a focus on postmodernism and semiotics. She is the author of After Just Now, a cult novella that explores the eighteenth-century intersections between her Dutch settler lineage and her husband’s Xhosa history in the Eastern Cape. Schutte is also an award-winning filmmaker and journalist.She is currently completing a trio of books drawn from three decades of work in political writing and critical race theory: Empire and the Boogeyman, White Skin, Dark Heart, and Merchants of Consent.