YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – A leading Cameroonian priest and scholar has said the campaign speeches of some candidates in the U.S. presidential election suggests that “apartheid and racial discrimination are still lurking very much around.”
Father Humphrey Tatah Mbuy was speaking Sunday in his weekly radio preaching titled “Faith Seeking Understanding.”
The priest didn’t mention any names, but there is little doubt he was referring to Republican candidate Donald Trump who has used extremely derogatory language to describe immigrants.
The former president has described immigrants as “rapists’ ” and “blood thirsty criminals,” and “most violent people on earth,” saying that they are “poisoning the blood” of Americans.
“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” Trump said recently in Aurora, Colorado.
Trump also described people who enter the U.S. illegally as “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”
The former president has gone as far as attacking the racial identity of his opponent, Kamala Harris – a woman of both Indian and African descent.
In July, Trump told a crowd at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention that Harris “happened to turn Black.”
“She was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said.
Mbuy teaches at the Catholic University of Bamenda, and says such rhetoric smacks of racial discrimination.
“Another hideous crime against humanity involves apartheid or institutionalized racial discrimination,” the priest said.
“When one listens to campaign speeches of some candidates in the U.S. presidential election, there is little doubt that apartheid and racial discrimination are still lurking very much around,” he said.
The priest who is also a researcher, writer and anthropologist went down memory lane, explaining how the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa tried to justify apartheid saying that “it was a design and will of God.”
It was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa – now Namibia – from 1948 to the early 1990s.
Mbuy said such a system is fundamentally flawed, because it completely violates God’s purpose for humanity.
“The Bible is clear that God created us, male and female, each in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, we all share equality in dignity as persons created in the image and likeness of God, none more than the other. There is no human being who is more human than others,” the priest said.
It’s a Biblical reference that also ties in with the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which talks about the equality of all men, irrespective of race, color, religion, and political beliefs.
He said the case of South Africa might have been particularly heightened because of its constitutional strength and extent, but “instances of racial discrimination, racist supremacy, and mental colonialism of Africa persist even today.”
Such discrimination can still be seen in relations between the post-colonial state in Africa and their European colonizers and American imperialists.
Mbuy cited Pope Francis’s call on America and Europe to stop exploding Africa as a perfect example of how the continent continues to reel from the yoke of neo-colonialism.
“That is why, although Africa is the cradle of human civilization, the West has succeeded in making Africa and Africans the shameless beggars of the world, those who are pushed to the periphery of world politics and economics. And yet, many Africans have no eyes to see,” the priest said.
