When, nearly 25 years ago, I took my first intercontinental flight on a journey from Niger to the US, a thought struck me somewhere in the firmament, above the Atlantic. “Do you realise” – I often spoke to myself in the second person in those days – “that you are going from the poorest country in the world to the richest?” This idea amused me for the remainder of the flight, and was only put out by the snappish reception of the immigration officials in Atlanta.

This was also the first time I was leaving sub-Saharan Africa; the first time I was going to a Western country. In 2001, all of these facts had a clear meaning. I was moving into a ‘superior universe’, a ‘higher plane’, a ‘better world’.

It was only 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, a shock whose ‘Eastern wind’ cleared out the dead wood in many an African nation. In 1991, Niger was ruled by a broke, praetorian regime that finally came to the end of its rope. It collapsed under pressure from a democracy movement that took inspiration from two countries: France, for its Enlightenment philosophies; and the US, as a beacon to the future.

Just a few years before, the shelves of the reading public had been groaning with books from the Éditions du Progrès (Progress Publishers), the literary propaganda arm of the Soviet Union. Now the books of Nouveaux Horizons were circulating briskly among those same readers – that is, among the people who mattered for the country’s political orientation.

Nouveaux Horizons was an imprint of the US State Department that published American bestsellers and political works about democracy and free markets, in translation, for the edification of Haitians and Francophone Africans. By the mid-1990s, Francis Fukuyama had become a household name. The Soviet products became useless paper, sold by the kilo to meat and beignet sellers as wrapping material, and Marx’s Capital, the erstwhile Bible of the intelligentsia, was consigned to the same dusty niche as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

These changing orientations were not limited to the intelligentsia. Many others were affected too, in their own ways, and migrating to the US suddenly seemed the thing to do. Those were the days when, inquiring about someone you had not seen for a while, the likely response was, “Oh, they’ve gone to the States.” I noticed there were long queues outside the US consulate, where there had been none before. “The Nigeriens have discovered America,” one of my fellow students quipped. He called it “Statemania”.

I was not quite taken by Statemania. In the diary I kept back then, I called it a “federal error”. The adjective “federal” was meant to stress that it affected all sorts of people, that it transcended differences of age, sex, education levels and so on. And I called it an “error” for reasons I will come to shortly. But within a few years, I was headed to the US myself.

The rise of Statemania is only three decades old, and yet it has begun to feel ancient. A historical change is anthropological: it turns the era just passed into something like an alien culture; it demands the cold analysis of the scientific observer, not the passionate views of those who were once caught up in its excitement. But Statemania is not yet gone; we are still in the midst of its passing.

I remember very well the passing of the world that preceded Statemania: I distinctly heard its death knell as a teenager, while walking down a sandy footpath, in the town of Maradi, in eastern Niger.

Anyone who had their intellectual coming of age in Africa in the late 1980s was probably living in some kind of Sovietmania. Perhaps there was a time when that idea had the vibrant, manic unmanageability I saw in Statemania in the early 1990s. In the 1950s when independence activists in the colonies were exhilarated by the cosmic flight of Sputnik – a harbinger, they thought, of the fall of the West and the rise of the Rest.

But by the time I was growing up, it was the mania of an idée fixe. The continent’s ‘committed intellectuals’ – a narrow but fevered subsection of the elite population – were gripped by a zealot’s dedication to the cause. Committed intellectuals blended pan-African nationalism and revolutionary socialism into a movement that claimed to struggle against neocolonialism and toward a new United States of Africa. This new USA, when it finally arose, would be a federation of people’s democracies akin to the USSR – nothing like its transatlantic namesake.

The committed intellectuals mattered because they were part of the class of people who governed African countries, those trained in the modern schools planted by colonialism. They hijacked the Western civilising mission and made it a Soviet one, or at least they tried to. In most countries, they controlled the national students’ union and used it to induct young minds into the movement. Some countries started independent life under its helm. It gave Tanzania a definite visage still present today; it seems to have left no such traces in Ghana; and it inoculated Mali with an enduring, though long unobtrusive, Russophilia.

Other countries fell to the movement’s revolutions in the 1960s, 1970s, and even as late as the early 1980s, always through a military coup. This happened in Dahomey in 1972, which turned the country into Benin; in 1983 in Upper Volta, which became Burkina Faso. In Ethiopia, the starkly-named Student Movement inexorably undermined the imperial regime, softening it up for the coup that came in 1974. The resulting junta – the Derg – enlisted members of the movement in its revolutionary projects. But there were also less auspicious coups: in neighbouring Sudan, the junta that took power in 1969 was initially sympathetic to the movement, before turning against it and murdering the leader of the Sudanese Communist Party, Abdel Khalek Mahjoub.

When a junta seized power in Niger in 1974, the movement was hopeful the new rulers would heed their revolutionary message. The junta did more than ignore them: it deemed them unworthy of suppressing. So when I reached the end of middle school, in the late 1980s, the movement-controlled student union was firmly in place, railing against the reigning ‘lacquey of imperialism’ and tutoring as many students as possible in its dogmas. I was a highly desirable recruit, although for reasons that made it hard to recruit me.

One qualified as an intellectual by reading books of some standing – the highbrow stuff worth quoting from. One qualified as a committed intellectual by discriminating between books read privately and books read politically. The latter mattered more, and were part of a well-known canon, which ranged from Marx to Cheikh Anta Diop through Fanon, Sartre and Nkrumah.

I read ravenously but indiscriminately, mixing private and political texts, and thus tended to raise untoward questions. For this I was dismissed as a ‘quibbler’ and lambasted with slurs: ‘black-skin-white-mask’ (because I read an enormous quantity of ‘French literature’), ‘alienated’ (‘French literature’ beyond Germinal, Les Misérables and a few canonical authors, was alienating), ‘bourgeois comprador’ (‘French literature’ made me a Francophile, and thus pro-imperialist), and ‘renegade’ (an archaic communist insult, used by Lenin against Kautsky). ‘French literature,’ by the way, was a synecdoche for Western literature: Homer and Shakespeare were as much part of it as Flaubert and Voltaire.

The idea was not to cast me out, but to intimidate me into toeing the line. This tactic did not work, but it did make me try to fathom the movement’s ideology. My schoolmates who regarded themselves as ‘committed intellectuals’ could not answer most of my questions – but things changed when I reached terminale, the final year of school in the Francophone system, and encountered a Marxist philosophy teacher named Mohamed Bazoum.

Today, Bazoum is better known as the president of Niger – the last elected president, who was abruptly removed in 2023 by military conspirators amid a wave of coups in the Sahel. He refused to resign and has been languishing under house arrest since then. The leftist supporters of Niger’s new junta – which embodies a revival of the movement, now best labelled as ‘decolonial pan-Africanism’ – see Bazoum as a lacquey of imperialism deserving of his fate.

But when I met him in 1990, he was still a Marxist teacher in Maradi and a pillar of the movement. As such, he cared little for the official syllabus and primarily taught us Marxism rather than philosophy. His Marxism was far more sophisticated than that of the committed intellectuals I encountered in school, though in truth, he shared something of that cold cultism that alarmed me in my younger friends: he too could drone on and on about the creed, dispensing quotations and jargon.

But he was a teacher, so he had to take questions; and he was trained in philosophy, which allowed him to venture outside the Marxist fane, if only to tread a bit on the paths – Hegel, Ricardo, Proudhon – that led to it. He certainly made a Marxist of sorts out of me, mostly because he presented the man and his work with such thoroughness that something of the humanism of Marx struck my delighted mind.

And yet Bazoum’s influence meant I had been drawn to Marx at the oddest moment, when everyone else was leaving him behind. I realised this on that Saturday afternoon in 1991, when I was walking down the street in Maradi, past the local chapter of the Nigerien Teachers’ Union, and I caught the trenchant, didactic timbre of Bazoum’s voice. I lingered a bit to listen, recognising a political oration. This was the first one I had ever paid attention to.

Some years before, Sékou Touré, Guinea’s revolutionary dictator, had come to Maradi. Then a child, I had not gone to the meeting where he embarked upon one of his hours-long harangues. But the loudspeakers were powerful enough to carry his rumbling monotone all the way to where I was, creating a background noise for a whole part of the day. I remember thinking how awfully bored the audience must be.

I didn’t find Bazoum boring. He was speaking earnestly of democratic change, political rights and freedoms – he was being what the French would call républicain, i.e., a liberal with a strong sense of the rights of a citizen. That was new. But what struck me most was that Marx was conspicuously absent.

I soon realised that Bazoum’s transformation was part of a wider pattern: people were suddenly taking up all sorts of stances that hadn’t even seemed to exist the year before. Like him, some committed intellectuals evolved from ‘comrades’ to ‘citizens.’ Many young people my age suddenly got very religious, and some turned into ‘dear brothers in Islam,’ i.e., Islamists. Women’s rights activists and campaigners for the dignity of slaves and their descendants began to make themselves heard. At one point there was, briefly, a neopagan politician (he died before proving his case to the public).

This effervescence was not unique to Niger. Much of Africa was rife with it, no doubt as a natural effect of the fall of so many autocrats, civilian and military, self-proclaimed revolutionaries and allegedly pro-imperialists. In one stroke – it felt like – all manner of voices were unleashed, as demonstrated, a contrario, by the case of the rare country, as in speechless Eritrea, where nothing seemed to change.

These new orientations unfolded in a landscape dominated by America’s huge gravitational pull, which suddenly appeared like a black hole at the centre of our universe. No matter which stance people now adopted, it was impossible to escape the American event horizon, which framed the meaning of these changes and bent behaviour to its imperatives.

French-English schools were suddenly everywhere, catering to a hungry new custom. In most wealthy families, people sent their offspring to the US for education, when France had been the only option before. The pull reached deeper into society, as even migrants of humble backgrounds, whose ambitions had until then gone no further than the towns of the Gulf of Guinea, began to picture themselves in any number of American cities, whose names circulated like talismans, spread by the first explorers who had flown there at the start of the decade.

Statemania eventually swept up even those who felt an ideological disdain for the US as the symbol of whatever their nemesis was. The pan-Africans, orphaned of revolutionary socialism after losing their Soviet parent, were not immune. I often heard their voices tremble with excitement when they alluded to the place-to-be. I was only half-surprised when the editor of Niger’s leading Islamist newspaper, a man who had spent years fighting for an Islamic Republic, turned up in New York in the 2000s, in hot pursuit of the American Dream.

That moment of universal American allure almost begged for a prophet like Fukuyama and his gospel of The End of History – first proclaimed in the summer of 1989, and expanded into a bestselling book a few years later. It came and, as we know, it hypostasised America’s massive pull into the idea of the final ideology, the climax of mankind’s career in a liberal post-history.

In interviews and op-eds, Fukuyama often summed up his ideas less grandly as ‘the West has won’ – a line closer to the truth than the lofty Hegelian constructions he used to give his account its quasi-liturgical weight. Saying ‘the West has won’ cuts through the haze of metaphysics and puts us face to face with the reality of brute force.

Statemania, the clearest proof of the West’s triumph – America’s, more exactly – was not an ideology, and so couldn’t be countered on ideological grounds. It was the pull of a utopia, which is why I had called it an ‘error.’ As such, the error of those who rushed toward it like moths to the light was natural. I was not so free from it myself.

But Fukuyama and his many admirers made a more deliberate error in regarding the allure of America as a sign that liberal capitalism was the idea truest to human nature.

It was not liberalism that bestowed upon America a utopian aura; it was the country’s sheer power, the sense of boundless strength it projected after its geopolitical win in the early 1990s and the sudden vacuum left by the disappearance of what had seemed half the world’s structure. In that heady moment of equal confusion and clarity – marking what one might call the Yankee hour – ‘America the Beautiful’ stood out as the obvious presence in the emptiness around it, with its gleaming alabaster cities undimmed by human tears – and packed with shopping malls.

And yet thinking of this outcome as simply the triumph of the strongest takes us away from the reassuring idea that history’s tracks are headed somewhere – that major world events have a well-defined meaning. It is hard to be comfortable with that.

When I embarked on that trip to the US in 2001, I was hoping to find, to put it bluntly, the meaning of American superiority, which was the one thing that seemed unquestionable amid all the confusion. I was open to the idea that America was better in some ways, that Americans were better.

Perhaps the instinctive response to great power is fascination, the enthusiastic admiration for a glamorous shell, which goads us to deduce that there must be, underneath it, a life-form whose substance matches the glamour.

It is an improving admiration, in that it allows us to hope that a better world – the best world, indeed – is possible in this vale of tears, and that there are here among us those who are better because they’ve figured out something that we have not.

Educated Africans in the early 1990s were peculiarly prone to that kind of awe because they were deflated by the sense that Africa had failed at ‘development’ – the grand, transformative project that was supposed to follow independence. Instead we were plunging headlong into dystopia – “the hopeless continent”, to quote an infamous cover of The Economist. With the Soviet Union gone, America looked now like what we should forever strive to become.

This had political and emotional significance. Deference is the great stabiliser: if we see our betters as trendsetters, living as we all should, we tend to accept our inferiority and their superiority. We aspire to be like them, while recognising we will never be quite like them, producing a drive that may bring change but not revolution.

Normally, this works within a society, but not across them. Most of the migrants who flocked to the US from places like Niger only worked to amass enough capital to return home and become an ‘alhaji’– the local moniker for the successful. They were not interested in playing golf or luxuriating in a marina.

But there are layers of social assimilation, and degrees of mimicry. In the early twentieth century, royalty in Ethiopia and some of the Pacific Islands adopted the etiquette and regalia of the British court. Whole ethnicities in Africa had been absorbed into those with more powerful elites, to the point of losing their names to it.

America was the heart of an international social system that operated more smoothly at elite levels – the ones into which I was catapulted courtesy of a Fulbright grant – than it did for working-class migrants. Its power was greased by the spread of fluent English – before applying for the Fulbright, I worked on the language for two years – and a cosmopolitan academia, where I befriended people from Guatemala, Thailand and Saudi Arabia, inter alia, not to mention the Americans.

For the elite, America was the nerve centre of international careers, and of the governing, educational and economic institutions that made the world spin. It did breed a modicum of anti-system radicalism in the universities, but this was toothless radicalism, more than outweighed by broader elite conformism. These new global networks formed an essentially conservative social system, in part because the dialectic relation between the propertied and the working class – the source of revolutionary sparks – is only made possible by the political intimacy within a nation state. At the global level – where, indeed, there is no such thing as society – revolution becomes impossible. The only radicalism that could actually rock the boat would have to come from inside the American hegemon itself.

In the late 1990s, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, called the US a “hyperpower”, because superpower no longer adequately described a country that could muster a greater range of power – “from the hardest to the softest” – than anyone else; his American counterpart, Madeleine Albright, spoke of the “indispensable nation”. But all this power and indispensability did not change the fact that America remained a nation state, just like the others: as such it defined its unity in opposition to, or exclusion of, non-nationals, not through the liberal dream and vocation of being the axis of the world.

The strongest nation of all time did not transcend the conditions of nationhood. In this regard, it was identical to the weakest of nations – in fact, to Niger, which I had left with the impression, illusory as it turned out, that I was moving to a higher plane of life.

Indeed, Niger and America can be said today to have embarked on the same adventure, and fundamentally for the same reason. In both countries, regimes that disregard elections and have no qualms about coups have seized power by exploiting powerful gusts of nationalism.

In both cases, the idea took hold that the country was very wealthy, was being plundered by others, and needed to be liberated to recover its ‘greatness’ (US) or its ‘sovereignty’ (Niger). Both regimes have a thoroughly discreditable figurehead prone to idiotic but popular ramblings. If Trump is heard around the world, Abdourahamane Tiani’s audience is local; the calibre of their orations is the same.

Both the US and Niger broke off petulantly with their neighbours and close allies: Trump’s regime taunted Canada and roughed up the European Union; Tiani taunted Nigeria and Benin and roughed up the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), from which he has abruptly withdrawn.

Though a semblance of institutional process still carries on in the US, the vaunted American constitutional system has not prevented essentially autocratic suspensions of the rule of law; in Niger, the institutions of regular political governance have been indefinitely suspended, despite odd patches of rule of law here and there. In both countries, masked men whisking people away on the street have become a common sight: in America, suspected migrants; in Niger, members of the political opposition, often dubbed ‘apatrides’, literally meaning stateless, but connoting here a traitor to the patrie, the fatherland.

A lot of what the US regime does is about ‘owning the libs’. Niger has no liberals, at least not in any critical mass that would make them relevant, but France plays that role, and it is accused of forcing on its former colony a ‘Western agenda’ that is really the ‘liberal agenda’ (‘woke’, ‘LGBTQ’, etc) as seen from the vantage of conservative Africans. To bizarre stories of liberals shipping Mexicans to America’s voting booths respond equally weird tales of France arming ‘terrorists’ to attack Niger (the country has been in the grips of a jihadist war for close to a decade, and its junta halted French help when it came to power). Just as liberals are believed to be anti-Americans, the French are thought to be anti-Nigeriens.

The regimes of both Trump and Tiani have drawn closer to Moscow while loosening ties with Beijing, even though both countries have deep economic dependencies on China that make a clean break impossible. Both men are committing economic self-sabotage: Trump has sowed chaos in American foreign trade with the hope of bringing back plants and factories that will not return; Tiani has wiped out Niger”s uranium revenue by refusing to deal with the hated French, even though no other investor would replace them in the terrible conditions he has created.

Both countries are unsanctionable, if for opposite reasons: the US because it is too central and significant, Niger, because it is too marginal and insignificant. This means nothing would prevent either country from following its present course indefinitely – save perhaps for voters in the US and another military putschist in Niger. Both countries are deeply divided: the radical nationalists exult and feel that they are taking their country back; their opponents, who only wanted a better democratic governance, are miserable and feel they have been taken hostage by maniacs. “We are fucked,” the latter say in the US; “On est foutus,” echo their Nigerien counterparts.

In both cases, contemporary derangements are rooted in deep history. Today’s nationalisms hark back to a harsher, more isolating period of the past, in the nineteenth century – actually, to the ancient regime, before colonisation in the case of Niger (though the tendency to relate any significant event in Africa to colonial and ‘neocolonial’ agency obfuscates this.)

Sadly for Niger, the population is sometimes hit by both regimes. For example, the vindictive elimination of USAID also destroyed P’tit Pouss, an educational programme for tens of thousands of Nigerien children whose ‘Western’ schools have been demolished by jihadists; Tiani has not lifted a finger to help.

Here, at least, we see the one difference between the US and Niger that their shared folly cannot overcome. The former is vastly more powerful than the latter. America can decide the fate of Niger’s children – of its very future – without so much as batting an eye.

Nationalism seeks the freedom of domination, not the entanglements of hegemony. The US and Niger were part of those tangles, at the polar ends of the system. They both want out, and if Niger’s mousy efforts at exit are little noticed – though Nigerien nationalists believe Western capitals, Paris especially, are scrutinising their every move – America’s feral crashing of the same system cannot be ignored, given the seismic consequences.

Hegemony differs from mere domination in that it involves the aspirations of the ‘hegemonised’. The US achieved a unison of such aspirations at the end of the Cold War, when even the powers that once challenged it suddenly looked up to it. Some years ago, a Chinese professor at whose faculty I was guest lecturing gave me a tour of Beijing’s universities. He told me the schools were first modelled on Soviet universities, and then overhauled in the 1990s into replicas of American ones. With the wistfulness of the frustrated Statemaniac (we are of the same generation), he said China wanted to become like the US at that point. In that same decade, Russia sopped up Washington’s shock therapy, hoping to be transformed into the America of Eurasia. There was a call for global hegemony, and America was in a position to respond to it, having worked towards that since the end of the Second World War.

America indeed went on to preside over the sprawling web of global institutions and organisations that international relations academics portentously christened the ‘US-led, rules-based world order’. It was a pact. The hegemon ran the show, which was seen as a service; in return, it could break the rules with impunity, in concert with an appendage – Israel – with which it shared this singular privilege. The hinge of the pact was that no other sovereign may seek to match its deterrent power, or its level of economic control.

This was the hard ground upon which ambient hegemony settled – and others must invest in the hegemon’s power, not challenge it. The promotion of human rights provided an ethical superstructure, and the promise of the good life, the North star: these were what Fukuyama thought constituted the end of history. But in one of those ruses of history of which spoke his master, Hegel, this highest step in the rise of America proved to be also a peak from which a nation could only go down.

The hard ground, it turns out, was shifting sand. By the early 2000s, the old challengers – China above all – were returning to the stage, refusing to adopt the humble posture of investors in the hegemon’s power that the Europeans and Gulf states had adopted. The pact was fraying at home, too.

Hegemony had globalised opportunity, including, unwittingly, for the world’s most underprivileged, who would not accept being cast out of the good life. In most rich countries, America included, their migrations were met with umbrage and exploitation. For rising far-right xenophobes in the US and Europe, the unintended consequences of hegemony supplied the fuel for the tribalist politics they needed to burn their way to power – the ‘us-versus-them’ ideologies that were needed to oppose those they denounced as ‘globalists’.

In America, China and Mexicans became two poles of politics, the first obsessing the elites, the second the populace. Tribalism, our oldest political idea, regained leverage in the land and smarted for ‘final solutions’, though the tangles woven by hegemony made such hankering unrealistic.

Hence, inevitable though the wind-up of US hegemony would seem, one expected it to be a slow-going affair, a long-haul tumble that would leave time for adjustment. Tribalism and its rash instincts would be held in check. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama intended to muster conventional hegemonic power against China, thus preserving the image of rules-bound American leadership, while the swirl of social-justice movements that were painted with the ‘woke’ brush in the 2010s seemed able to hold back America’s white nationalism – until Trump emerged as the leader of the tribalists.

Trump sped up the US exit, claiming it would make America ‘great’ (dominant) again, and in the process smashing through the guardrails of constitutionalism at home, and hegemony abroad. Under his helm, the nation that once billed itself as the shining city on the hill is being rapidly turned, before our eyes, into the dark tower of Sauron, intent on beggaring its neighbours, provisioning genocide and reviving trolls from the land’s nefarious past.

The end of hegemony is rich in opportunity, but it is now unfolding in the worst possible way. America is drawing upon the resources of a hegemon – accountable to its dependents – to claim the freedom of a dominant power, accountable to none. There may be no going back from here, even if voters send the tribalists packing tomorrow.

It has become conventional for historians to refer to the “short” twentieth century: beginning with the First World War, which swept away what remained of the “long” nineteenth century, and ending abruptly with the fall of the Soviet Bloc. The story goes that totalitarian illusions, fascist and communist, were routed by the real deal, liberalism – a liberalism clad in the colours of America. At that point – the moment of Statemania – the twenty-first century began; or, in the view of some, history itself came to a close.

But now, perhaps, there is another story that can be told. Maybe the twentieth century quietly endured for another few decades, until Trump returned to the White House. On ‘Liberation Day’ – future historians may conclude – the hegemon himself tore through the mystique that shrouded his actions, even his transgressions, and broke the spell. American liberalism, it turns out, was the last illusion.

1. All of Viktor Koretsky’s paintings are drawn from Yevgeniy Fiks’s book The Wayland Rudd Collection. The original rights of the paintings are unknown. Equator would like to thank Fiks for kindly sharing these images.