Cameroon priest says rhetoric in US election is symbol of apartheid

YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – A leading Cameroonian priest and scholar said the campaign speeches of some candidates in the U.S. presidential election suggest that “apartheid and racial discrimination are still widespread.”

Father Humphrey Tatah Mbuy spoke on Sunday in his weekly radio sermon titled “Faith Seeking Understanding”.

The priest did not name any names, but there is little doubt he was referring to Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has used extremely derogatory terms to describe immigrants.

The former president has called immigrants “rapists” and “bloodthirsty criminals” as well as “the most violent people in the world,” saying they are “poisoning the blood of Americans.”

“Kamala [Harris] “She has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and criminal migrants from Third World dungeons… from jails and prisons and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has beautifully relocated them to your community to prey on innocent American citizens,” Trump said recently in Aurora, Colorado.

Trump also described people entering the U.S. illegally as “animals,” “stone-cold killers,” the “worst people” and the “enemy from within.”

The former president even went so far as to attack 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 “accidentally turned black.”

“She has always been of Indian descent. And she only promoted Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until she happened to be black a few years ago. 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 heinous crime against humanity is apartheid or institutionalized racial discrimination,” the priest said.

“If you listen to the campaign speeches of some of the US presidential candidates, there is little doubt that apartheid and racial discrimination are still widespread,” he said.

The priest, who is also a researcher, author and anthropologist, went down memory lane and explained how the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa tried to justify apartheid on the grounds that “it was an intention and a will of God”.

It was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and Southwest Africa – today’s Namibia – from 1948 to the early 1990s.

Mbuy said such a system was fundamentally flawed because it completely violated God’s intention for humanity.

“The Bible makes it clear that God created us, men and women, all in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, we all have equal dignity as human beings created in the image and likeness of God, none more so than the other. “There is no person more human than others,” said the priest.

It is a biblical reference that also ties in with the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which promotes the equality of all people, regardless of race, color, religion and political opinion.

He said the case of South Africa may have been particularly aggravated because of its constitutional strength and scale, but “instances of racial discrimination, racial supremacy and mental colonialism in Africa persist even today.”

Such discrimination can still be observed in the relations between the postcolonial state in Africa and its European colonizers and American imperialists.

Mbuy cited Pope Francis’ call for America and Europe to stop Africa’s explosion as a perfect example of how the continent continues to suffer under the yoke of neo-colonialism.

“That is why the West has succeeded in turning Africa and Africans into shameless beggars of the world, pushed to the margins of world politics and economics, even though Africa is the cradle of human civilization.” And yet many Africans have no eyes to see See,” said the priest.