UK is odious in its blatant lack of fairness towards SA

Let me state upfront that in the fight for social justice, I’m not suggesting that visa wars will be the newest front. Nor, even if they were to be, that my family’s experience in any way represents the sharp end of that injustice. But let me tell you that the novel experience of applying for travel visas to the UK has me fuelled with all the righteous fervour of a new convert to a cause.

I say novel because I hold dual citizenship but that is not the case for my young children, and so the extraordinarily tedious process of providing an exacting minute-by-minute account of our whereabouts during our planned 10-day UK stay, a sedulous showing of our multiyear financial records, and paying thousands of rand for the pleasure of doing so, is an endurance trial I’ve not previously encountered.

What really galls is that this requirement is an entirely unilateral imposition. No-one familiar with home affairs’ treatment of foreigners can reasonably suggest that we don’t do virtually everything in our power to make it almost impossible for foreigners to live and work here. But we do let UK tourists visit our country for up to 90 days without requiring of them that they obtain a visa.

Reciprocity is an important principle of international relations. It requires that the favours or benefits that are granted by one country to the citizens or legal entities of another should be reciprocally offered. Clearly, in our case, the UK chooses neither to observe nor honour this principle.

You can be from the US or from Canada or Australia or Barbados or Botswana and you will not be required by the UK to obtain a visa for a short-term stay. You just can’t be from SA.

It isn’t only the principle of reciprocity, or rather its absence, that makes the asymmetry so odious. As the

UK well knows, ties between the peoples of the two countries are exceptionally close. Many South Africans will have several family members living there.

And you might imagine that the UK would, given historical relations, want to foster goodwill rather than stoke resentment. There is the matter of historical debts. Those Cullinan diamonds, all nine of them, centrepieces of the UK’s crown jewels and meant to reflect the majesty and nobility of the British realm, are only the smallest mirrors of the enrichment these shores have bequeathed the UK. It’s a debt that can never be quantified only in financial terms. Three of my children’s great-grandfathers, in an example I don’t believe to be exceptional for many SA families, fought in World War 2 as part of the British war effort.

Those debts are ones the UK often has difficulty in acknowledging. As recently as 2019, Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the British House of Commons, insisted the mortality rate in the concentration camps established by the British during the Anglo-Boer War was exactly the same as in Glasgow at the time. As Fransjohan Pretorius wrote in The Conversation, that is just bunkum: “the death rate for Boer civilians in the concentration camps in SA exceeded this [the Glasgow rate] by a factor of 10. It’s well established that 28,000 white people and 20,000 black people died in the various camps in SA.”

Rees-Mogg also grotesquely insisted that those interned in the camps had been placed there for their own protection.

All to say that an appeal to considerations of fairness, to the “good sport” ethos said to underlie British character, may not get us very far.

Rather, the prevalent thinking for the entry restrictions seems to be of a kind with that which kept SA on the red list long after there was a plausible reason for doing so, and indeed the thinking that enabled the nomination of Matt Hancock, former UK health secretary who resigned in disgrace, as the UN Economic Commission’s envoy for Africa.

With friends like these ...