Trust Deficit

Trust Deficit — Baimba Yilla, Ed.D.

The question of whether an African person can trust another African person—or whether Africans and Americans can trust one another reflects deeper patterns of exchange, exploitation, cooperation, and misunderstanding that have shaped relations between Africa and America for generations.

On the taxi ride home from the airport earlier this month, I became convinced the driver was trying to overcharge us.

I wanted to insert my credit card into the reader. She insisted I tap it instead.

I did.

Moments later, she told me the payment hadn’t gone through.

I asked to insert the card. She told me to tap it again.

That was when my suspicion hardened into something more uncomfortable.

I found myself wondering whether she was trying to fleece us, and then, almost immediately, confronting a fact I did not want to admit: part of that suspicion had been shaped by the fact that she was Nigerian.

That realization stopped me.

Because what, exactly, had I been suspicious of? Was it the transaction or the person?

I sat with this for a long time after our trip home, contemplating conversations many of us avoid having in polite company about whom we trust, whom we distrust, and why we make those distinctions.

I thought about where our assumptions come from, how a trust deficit like the one I experienced is not unique to our community, and how it reflects deeper social structures that shape the bonds between individuals, communities, and nation-states.

The same instincts that shape whom we trust in our everyday lives also influence how societies imagine one another, informing, for instance, the perceptions Americans hold about Africa and those Africans, in turn, hold about America.

The history that gave rise to these perceptions is as revealing as the perceptions themselves.

Considering Africa

Africa's trust deficit runs deep, with roots in centuries of slave trading, colonialism, external interference, and struggles over state power.
Perhaps the most significant of these is the uncomfortable historical reality that some Africans participated in the capture and sale of fellow Africans into slavery.
Several West and Central African kingdoms, namely the Dahomey, Asante, Oyo, Kongo, and Benin kingdoms, participated in the transatlantic slave trade at different times by supplying captives obtained through warfare, raids, tribute systems, and political conflicts.

European merchants established coastal trading posts and exchanged firearms, textiles, and other goods for enslaved Africans, integrating these exchanges into a vast Atlantic economy built on forced labor in the Americas.

North African Arab and Muslim states were also involved in long-standing systems of enslavement across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, though these systems were distinct from the European-led transatlantic slave trade in their scale, geography, and historical development and predated it by many centuries.

The experience of slavery led not only to external exploitation, but internal struggles about loyalty, identity, and collective responsibility that have contributed to the conditions afflicting Africa today.

This legacy has included the erosion of social relationships and the ethical foundations that sustain them, severely hindering national development and transformation in the way William Easterly (2013) describes in The tyranny of experts: Economics, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor.

“A history of autocracy and oppression,” Easterly observes in dissecting the source of underdevelopment in the world, “breeds values like lack of trust and respect for others, fostering an insider/outsider distinction in which the insiders place little value on the rights or well-being of the outsiders” (p. 166).

Said another way, distrust and lack of respect between people and ethnic groups in places like Africa, where poverty is endemic and the rule of law is not always a given, has manifested in the politics and civic participation of the very same people so forcefully that it has rendered for them political stability and economic development a difficult, if not impossible national goal.

There is perhaps no greater indication of this for Africa than the sheer number of attempts, since the post-independence days of 1950, in the overthrowing of governments: 214 attempts, with 106 having succeeded and 108 having failed, according to researchers Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne (2011).
Yet another important manifestation of this distrust and lack of respect between people in Africa is the decline in civic participation and the decision of many Africans to seek educational, professional, and economic opportunities elsewhere in the world. Indeed, African migration has become a global phenomenon, with established diaspora communities across Europe, the Americas, Asia, the middle East, and Latin America.

In this sense, the most enduring legacy of distrust in Africa is not material impoverishment alone, but also the erosion of the social trust upon which individual relationships, stable institutions, civic participation, and lasting development ultimately depend.

The historical experiences of slavery, colonial domination, external intervention, and post-independence-struggles over state power did not merely produce temporary disruptions; they shaped patterns of social interaction and political organization that continue to influence how individuals, communities, and governments relate to one another.

Over generations, mistrust became embedded in institutions, identities, and political practices, making the reconstruction of social cohesion and accountable governance one of the continent’s most significant challenges.

Considering America

America's trust deficit emerged through a different historical process but leads to remarkably similar outcomes.

The Englishmen who colonized the territories that became the continental United States came from a society with centuries of experience in conquest and social hierarchy, exemplified by the treatment of the poor in England and the conquest and colonization of Ireland.

This legacy became evident in English Virginia after the founding of Jamestown in 1607.

As English settlement expanded and later gave rise to the thirteen colonies, the English dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their lands through warfare, coercion, and treaties made under unequal conditions, while increasingly relying on enslaved Africans to labor on those lands for agricultural production as dependence on English indentured servants declined and the large-scale enslavement of Indigenous peoples proved difficult to sustain.

This violence-induced social and economic order required ideological and legal reinforcement to endure. In response, the colonists constructed a racial caste system that placed people of English descent at the top of the social hierarchy while relegating Africans, Indigenous peoples, and other non-Europeans to subordinate legal and social statuses.

The premium that the colonies placed on their imposition of both slavery and the social hierarchy that reinforced it was never more evident than when the colonies barreled toward the decision to collectively sever ties with the British monarchy and, only decades later, when the newly formed United States broke apart and became embroiled in civil war, paving the way for nearly 100 years of segregation.

The through line of this history is not only the debates over morality, race, class, immigration, economic opportunity, and political representation that produced competing visions of the American project, but also the distrust those conflicts engendered among communities.

While many Americans today disagree over policy and whether institutions, elections, and the media deserve trust, the deeper continuity is the enduring distrust between fellow citizens—a legacy rooted in the nation's social and political development.

The consequence is a society in America in which political polarization reflects a deeper crisis of social trust, drawing a striking parallel to the trust deficits found in many African societies, where historical experiences of violence, exploitation, and state weakness have similarly eroded confidence between communities and people alike.

Reckoning with Trust

Seen through the lens of this parallel history, my anxiety about the Nigerian taxi driver insisting that I tap my credit card on her payment machine can be understood—but not justified. The history may explain my reaction, yet it does not make that reaction fair to her, even if Nigeria today is associated in many people's minds with online fraud and advance-fee scams. Those associations, however widespread, do not justify treating an individual as though they embody a national stereotype.

As it turned out, tapping my card did lead to me being charged twice for the $84 trip. One of the charges was eventually reversed, but the experience left me with a more complicated understanding of trust.

My anxiety had been shaped by real histories and widely circulated narratives about fraud, yet the incident itself was not evidence of personal dishonesty. Instead, it revealed how difficult trust can be when people approach one another carrying the weight of collective histories, unequal relationships, and inherited suspicions.
The question of whether an African person can trust another African person—or whether Africans and Americans can trust one another—extends far beyond a single taxi ride. It reflects deeper patterns of exchange, exploitation, cooperation, and misunderstanding that have shaped relations between Africa and America for generations.

Baimba Yilla, Ed.D