FROM MANDELA TO MEGALOMANIAC’s MINION
South Africa was once known as the country of Nelson Mandela. Then we picked up the corruption crown. Then a reputation for xenophobia. Now we’re headed for infamy as toady to Vladimir Putin
Last week I wrote about being in Dakar, using contrasts I saw there to meditate on the role and status of South Africa in Africa. I don’t want to risk turning this column into a travelogue or, worse, a superannuated version of What I Did on my Holiday, but something similar happened to me a week later in Kenya.
Lamu town, on Lamu island in Kenya, is a Unesco World Heritage Site and Kenya’s oldest inhabited town.
It’s suggested that it was established in 1370, which makes it one of the first Swahili settlements along East Africa’s coast.
It’s a fun place to travel to, especially as the last leg of the journey is by small boat from the airport, across a sea channel to the island. And for added spice, it’s only a short, one-hour dhow ride to Somalia, known as Africa’s most culturally homogeneous country, and the source of the 30,000 or so officially registered Somalian refugees who are used as useful scapegoats by populist South African rabble rousers. It’s also known as the home of pirates, though that seems to be a dying art now.
I spent some time in Lamu town, buying supplies and the inevitable and ubiquitous kikois. While I was waiting outside a shop for my companions to finish haggling over some questionable jewellery, one of the local, self-proclaimed guides struck up a conversation with me. He started with the customary: “So, where are you from?”
Experienced travellers will know this ploy. The guide asks where you’re from and when you tell him, he either knows a few words in your home language, or a fact about your country that is intended to strike up a bond.
Given that much of the world shock! has never heard of South Africa, this can stretch their repertoire
sometimes. I remember post-1994, in countries such as Egypt and Ghana, telling people I met in the street that I was from South Africa, and they’d say: “Ah! Nelson Mandela!” This was pretty invariable, except for Pakistan. There, when I was stopped in a police roadblock and they asked where I was from and checked my passport, they said “South Africa! Ah. Hansie Cronje! That was terrible, what you did to him.”
Nelson Mandela isn’t a bad South African reference point. Hansie Cronje, well, not great, but we can deal with it. Ironically, Hansie is probably a more accurate reference point for South Africa than Mandela nowadays, given that he was such a fantastic ambassador for our national sport. Not cricket, obviously, but taking bribes. I’m not sure we still represent the ideals of our founding president. Today, Desmond Tutu’s rainbow would only have six colours; we sold the gold bit to the Guptas, but luckily we’ve added in black thanks to Eskom.
Both of those are preferable to our new calling card. When I told the guide in Lamu that I was from South Africa, he said “Ah. There’s a lot of xenophobia there, isn’t there?”
“So, not a cricket fan then?” I replied. No, just kidding. What I said was, yes. And then turned down a visit to the slave market square.
It’s an uncomfortable truth.
Brand South Africa, with a lower case ‘b’, is now all about violence.
What’s the organisation’s new slogan? Inspiring new ways?
New ways to insult our fellow
Africans, maybe.
We’re in some good company with our rebranding, though. I was in Lamu on a work trip, so everyone kept their communication devices on, even while quietly sitting outside in the evening. The mobile of one of my colleagues would beep insistently every now and then, and he’d check it and say, flatly, “another dead Russian”.
Strange behaviour indeed, and we soon demanded an explanation. It turns out that there is a Telegram group that has made it its business to try to document how many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine. A robot trawls the social media of Russians, such as VK and Telegram, and looks for announcements of someone’s death.
Apparently there’s a particular formula that has to be used by adherents to the Russian Orthodox Church, which makes this easier. When the robot finds these announcements, it republishes them as part of a count. The updates roll in all day, to the extent that there’s an option to only get cumulative totals at more interspersed intervals.
It’s a sobering, awful thing, to see the numbers rack up into the thousands.
Each scraped social media update includes a picture of the dead soldier, and many of them look like they’re barely out of childhood. In the foreseeable future, this will be all the world identifies Russia with. The pointless deaths of its soldiers.
South Africa and Russia are now in the same WhatsApp group. Or Telegram group, I suppose.
This will be starkly highlighted if, as forecast, Russia’s President Vladimir
Putin does indeed visit South Africa this August as part of a scheduled summit of the Brics bloc of nations.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin, for the crime of overseeing the abduction of Ukrainian children.
“In granting the request for warrants by the ICC prosecutor, a panel of judges agreed that there were ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, bore responsibility for the ‘unlawful deportation’ of Ukrainian children,” says The Guardian.
As I’m sure you remember, the last time a war criminal visited South Africa was in 2015, when Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir arrived to attend an AU summit here.
Time Magazine described him: “The 71-year-old, who has ruled Sudan with an iron first for two and a half decades, stands accused by the ICC of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to the 2003 conflict in Darfur, which claimed more than 300,000 lives in a gruesome orgy of decapitation, rape and torture committed by government militias.”
Our minister of international relations & co-operation at the time, the extraordinarily incompetent Maite NkoanaMashabane, signed an agreement granting diplomatic immunity to delegates participating in the summit, a direct flouting of South Africa’s legal and selfchosen responsibilities to the ICC. This was intended to give Al-Bashir immunity from South Africa’s legal responsibility to arrest him and deport him to the Netherlands. To our everlasting shame, we didn’t do that. Instead, he was allowed to flee the country, despite a judicial order calling for him to remain.
As Time put it, “Al-Bashir’s willingness to travel to Johannesburg in spite of two international arrest warrants is an indication that not only has the ICC lost credibility, but that South Africa, once a beacon for justice and human rights on the continent, has bowed to political expediency”.
And here we are again, with Putin and our pro-dictatorship government. Except rather than bow, it tends to go all the way down onto all fours.
According to The Guardian: “It is unclear how many children have been taken from Ukraine by Russian forces. Last month, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab published a report alleging that at least 6,000 children from Ukraine had been sent to Russian ‘re-education’ camps in the past year ... The ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, said: ‘Incidents identified by my office include the deportation of at least hundreds of children taken from orphanages and children’s care homes.’”
Of course, Putin’s crimes are many more than this. But this is a particularly cruel one.
There’s no guarantee he will actually turn up for the Brics meeting, but South Africa is getting its vacillation in early. The BBC notes that “South Africa is aware of its legal obligation, a spokesperson for President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Sunday”.
The broadcaster quotes government spokesperson Vincent Magwenya as saying: “We are, as the government, cognisant of our legal obligation. However, between now and the summit we will remain engaged with various relevant stakeholders.”
“However.” That’s a word that carries a lot of weight. What’s there to engage about? The government has clear responsibilities to arrest Putin. And if it doesn’t want to do that, it should not be allowing him to visit South Africa. But he probably will visit, and South Africa will be an idiotic pawn in his crude propaganda game.
And the next time someone in a foreign country asks me where I’m from, and I tell them, they’ll look at me with disdain. And they’ll say, ah. The country of Putin’s puppets. The country that sold its international reputation for a few roubles in a brown bag and the chance to grandstand.
We’ve made the unhappy journey from the country of Mandela, via the country of accelerating corruption, to xenophobes and supporters of war criminals. Not a pleasant thought.