Africans are letting themselves be used to settle Putin’s score with the West
Au vas Negrov linchuyut is an old Russian retort that gained popularity at the height of the Cold War as a means of dismissing any and all US criticism of the Soviet Union. Loosely translated, it means “And (yet) you are lynching Negroes.”
This classic example of the fallacious ad hominem argument has its origins in a joke about an American and a Russian standing on a railway platform in the USSR, debating the efficiencies of their countries’ economic systems.
“But we’ve been standing here for 20 minutes now,” the American complains, “and there hasn’t been a single train on either track.”
“Yes, but in America, you are lynching the Negroes!” the Russian replies.
Just a couple of white people, using a despicable act of violence and brutality against African-Americans in the Jim Crow South as a cute rhetorical device to settle an argument.
The modern term for this particular bit of Soviet propaganda is “Whataboutism”. And just as during the Cold War, it would seem that Africans are once again being used to settle scores between the former soviet capital and the West.
Over the past week a number of asinine arguments have emerged as justification for the decision by one-third of the countries in Africa— including ours — to sit out the global condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal military incursions into Ukraine. A favourite is along the lines: “America and the West have no right to condemn Putin’s actions in Ukraine given how much Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, Libyan blood the Western allies have on their hands.” This is usually accompanied by a self-satisfied jibe about how good it is that Putin is “sticking it” to the West.
After generations of experiencing systemic racism and violent disenfranchisement at the hands of North American and European countries and their people, is it any wonder that the instinctive response of many Africans is to side with the anti-Western aggressor?
None of this is helped by reports of black Africans being harassed by Ukrainian and Polish border guards in their efforts to flee the Russian invasion; or by the many accounts of how black African students were kicked off evacuation buses and made to wait for days in the freezing cold while white Ukranians cut in front of them in the endless queues for transport and accommodation amid the general scramble to get out of the country.
Nor too has the naked bias and racism of Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine done anything to cover the US and its allies in glory.
“They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations,” gushed the UK Telegraph, clearly uninformed about the two European wars that occupied much of the 20th century.
That’s the thing about the daily experience of anti-black racism; it is not unlike living with a wound that will not close because it continues to be reinfected. The experience can render us vulnerable and angry — a combination which often leads to impetuousness and the desire to punish, even if it means doing so at our own expense.
Putin and his disinformation machine are very well aware of this, and they have spent years working to inflame these wounds for the sake of gaining political and economic advantage.
Putin started laying the foundations for Wednesday’s UN General Assembly vote long before the more than 90 sponsoring member states
— including the US, Germany and the UK — had even begun drafting the resolution to “reaffirm the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine”.
The Russian president’s efforts to tilt the global axis of power by co-opting a phalanx of African states and turning them into clients of the Russian Federation have been many years in the making.
Who can forget the images of Eswatini’s King Mswati III at the inaugural Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, posing with rifles at the summit’s exhibit of Russian-made military equipment. Clad in his traditional emahiya, with the butt of a Kalashnikov pressed against his right shoulder, Mswati mimicked a hunter with prey in the crosshairs.
It’s a picture that hasn’t aged well.
I, for one, do not want my country to become one of the collection of African client states that Putin will likely parade in St Petersburg at the second Russia-Africa Summit later this year like a collection of trinkets that he purchased on holiday.
I haven’t forgotten the Zuma years, when the former president tried to hawk our country to Putin for an R800bn nuclear deal, a few subcontracts for his son and the Guptas, a piece of chewing gum and a loose cigarette.
This is not a man for whom the South African president need sit on the fence when it comes to this critical issue of geopolitical stability and international law. Nor do we want to see him trekking to St Petersburg in October like one of the Russian Federation’s collection of puppets, to kiss Putin’s ring.
What we need is to fall squarely behind the lucid, unambiguous leadership of international relations minister Naledi Pandor, when she declared that Russia should “immediately withdraw its forces from Ukraine in line with the UN Charter” and emphasised our country’s commitment to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Including our own.