Donald Trump has deployed his personal brand of Christian diplomacy, for the first time, to Africa. The face of this initiative was the American president’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, who on Tuesday, November 4, officiated in a church before several hundred worshipers on the outskirts of Libreville, Gabon, in the first stop of her tour of the continent. Dressed in a red jacket, a black skirt and sporting her signature blonde bob haircut, she declared that she had a message from God: that African would become “the biggest hub of Christianity in the world.”

White-Cain is Trump’s personal pastor, with a friendship that goes back more than 20 years, and she heads the “White House Faith Office,” which has been newly established in the West Wing. Her journey through Africa’s Great Lakes region was set to continue in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and then Uganda, as reported by the specialist news website Africa Intelligence on October 21. Despite her close ties to Trump, the American televangelist pastor clarified, during her sermon in Libreville, that she was traveling to Africa in a personal capacity.

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