Gladstone’s “Bulgarian Horrors” and Trump’s “Nigerian Genocide”: The manufacture of imperialist interventions, by Usman Sarki

“The major function of modern imperialism is to rationalise exploitation under the guise of bringing civilisation”— Walter Rodney

The embers of conflict in the Middle East are still glowing menacingly. The dust in the ruined neighbourhoods of Gaza has not settled. Countless Palestinian bodies remain under the rubble, uncounted and unmourned. Yet even as the world grapples with the aftermath of one tragedy, another dangerous and incendiary script is being prepared. This time aimed at Nigeria, a largely peaceful and self-contained nation whose challenges are structural rather than ideological, and whose remedies lie in competent governance, not manufactured outrage or sensationalised paroxysms.

The reckless invocation of “genocide” and the veiled threat of foreign intervention represent the first steps in a troubling pattern: the external construction of moral hysteria to justify political and strategic pressure on a sovereign African state of 230 million people. Such adventurism demands sober reflection by sensible and discerning minds, not the overheated imagination of opportunists or the simplistic conclusions of armchair crusaders. History shows how easily nations can be torn apart when religion is weaponised by outsiders. The secessions of East Timor from Indonesia and South Sudan from Sudan remain contemporary reminders of how moral panic, amplified by selective outrage and religious activism, often aligns with imperial ambition to disastrous effect.

A historical antecedent is instructive. In 1876, William Ewart Gladstone, a Prime Minister of Great Britain, published his incendiary pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, denouncing alleged Ottoman atrocities against Bulgarian Christians. The pamphlet electrified Victorian Britain, transforming religious sentiment into political mobilisation and positioning Britain as the self-appointed moral guardian of Christian Europe. Yet Gladstone’s intervention, however passionately couched in humanitarian language, was also a calculated political manoeuvre and a carefully constructed narrative used to galvanise public opinion and influence British foreign policy. It set a template for moralised interventionism that global actors have since refined and modernised.

Nearly a century and a half later, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to draw from this very script. By redesignating Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” over alleged persecution of Christians, he revives a familiar formula: the fusion of sentimental outrage, religious identity and political opportunism. What Gladstone accomplished with pamphlets, pulpits and the Victorian press, Trump seeks to achieve with proclamations, evangelical rhetoric and digital megaphones. In Gladstone’s case, the target was the Ottoman Empire; in Trump’s, it is Nigeria—a complex, multi-religious and multi-ethnic nation reduced to caricature by a distant power for political gain.

Both crusades were, and are, less about compassion than about politics. Gladstone’s moral fury conveniently ignored Britain’s own global atrocities and the ransacking of Africa and India, and traumatisation of the Caribbean and Ireland. Similarly, America’s contemporary narrative on Nigeria often disregards the reality that both Christians and Muslims suffer violence, and that local conflicts are driven by historical, economic and environmental factors far more than by religion. To powerful evangelical blocs in the United States, however, Nigeria is imagined as the frontline of a cosmic struggle between Christianity and Islam, which is an overly simplistic view that is politically useful but intellectually dumb.

This selective moral outrage finds ready amplification. U.S.-based advocacy organisations such as the Gatestone Institute, Open Doors and Christian Solidarity International circulate sensational figures—“50,000 Christians killed”, “one Christian murdered every two hours” etc, that collapse complex realities into emotive one-liners and amorphous claims. These cheaply bandied numbers blur distinctions between terrorism, rural banditry, farmer-herder conflicts, criminality and communal reprisals. Yet in the normally shallow American political discourse, nuance is often the first casualty. The result is a moral panic that becomes the perfect pretext for diplomatic pressure, sanctions or calls for international action.

Victorian Britain used lurid newspaper dispatches from the Balkans to demonise the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Today, modern Western advocacy networks recycle dramatic statistics to paint Nigeria as a failing state engaged in systematic persecution. In both cases, religion becomes a tool of geopolitical storytelling and of mobilising domestic constituencies, shaping foreign agendas, and recasting complex socio-political realities into simplistic moral binaries: Christian versus Muslim, victim versus oppressor, civilisation versus barbarism.

But Nigeria’s challenges are neither religious nor civilisational. They are the accumulated burdens of colonial overhung, mindless post-colonial exploitation, poverty, rural underdevelopment, climate-induced resource pressures, weak policing, slow justice, porous borders and the longstanding tensions between “indigenes” and “settlers”. These structural issues intersect with terrorism and banditry in ways that Western observers often fail to see or refuse to understand. By reducing Nigeria to a morality chess game about religious persecution, external actors erase nuance and risk deepening internal fractures.

Selective compassion is another enduring feature of this imperial tradition. Victorian Britain ignored its own bloody footprints across the world. 

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Today’s American activists overlook the thousands of Muslim victims of Boko Haram, banditry and communal violence in northern Nigeria, even as they moralise endlessly about Christian casualties. The hierarchy of empathy remains unmistakably colonial: some lives count more than others, depending on political usefulness. It is telling that many of those who rage about alleged Christian persecution in Nigeria have been conspicuously silent on the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

Nigeria’s response must be anchored in clarity and confidence, not denial or faint hearted protestations. Weak judicial processes, insufficient policing, delays in prosecution and pockets of impunity are realities that require urgent and sustained institutional reform. Every attack—whether on a church, a mosque, a shrine, a farm or a village, must attract equal investigation and impartial justice. Only through a transparent and consistent commitment to protecting all lives can Nigeria reclaim the moral high ground and disarm those who weaponise humanitarian language for political ends.

Diplomatically, Nigeria must adopt engagement rather than confrontation. Nigeria still has friends and well wishers all over the world, including among powerful Western countries. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs must be empowered to present accurate data, articulate government efforts and challenge misinformation. A pragmatic initiative might include proposing a U.S.–Nigeria Working Group on Religious Freedom and Justice; not as capitulation, but as a platform for transparency, confidence-building and narrative correction.

At the continental level, Africa must resist the subtle re-colonisation of its moral discourse. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Agenda 2063 and the security mechanisms of ECOWAS provide legitimate frameworks for addressing internal challenges without surrendering sovereignty to external arbiters of morality. From Gladstone’s pulpit to Trump’s Twitter feed, the pattern of moralised intervention has endured for nearly 150 years. The vocabulary has shifted from the “White Man’s Burden” to “freedom of religion”, but the underlying logic remains unchanged: humanitarianism as a cloak for geopolitical ambition.

In 1876, Gladstone’s outcry helped Britain manipulate the Ottoman crisis to its advantage. In 2025, Trump’s declarations threaten to justify renewed Western pressure on Nigeria, with implications for its sovereignty and internal stability. Both episodes remind us that moral rhetoric, however passionately delivered, is often a strategic instrument of power. Nigeria must therefore; earn its own moral authority through justice, equality, and good governance. The sanctity of life whether Christian, Muslim or traditionalist, must be upheld without distinction.

Hate speech, ethnic militias and impunity and all other tendencies that fuel sectarian violence in Nigeria and secessionist drives must be tackled decisively. And Nigeria’s diplomats must reclaim the international narrative with confidence, accuracy and moral consistency. Gladstone once wrote that “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Bulgaria is as inviolable as in the drawing-rooms of London.” True indeed. But so too is the sanctity of life in the plains of Plateau, the forests of Zamfara and the villages of Borno. It is Nigeria’s sovereign duty, and Nigeria’s alone, to uphold that truth, and not of America or its politicians.

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