When South Africa dances with Russian barbarism

South Africa occupies a unique position in the minds of many Africans. Some are old enough to have followed events as they happened under apartheid. Younger Africans read their history books and find the emotional resonance to relate to the South African experience.

From the 16th century, traders had been shipping Africans by their thousands to America to work as slaves.
Just as (in today’s context) African despots, their officials, labour exporters and human traffickers are not touched by the fate of millions of Africans who end up in near-slave circumstances in the Middle East, there were African chiefs and village hoodlums who facilitated and benefited from the cross-Atlantic slave trade.
If the traders, their agents and collaborators were of both European and African identity, all the victims were Africans. 

The Africans’ story of criminal subjugation, extreme physical abuse and humiliation strengthened the account of the African, the Black person, as a lower type of man. 
During the 19th and 20th centuries, European explorers, plunderers, missionaries and militaries harvested Africa’s pre-modern territorial entities and formally turned them into possessions of imperial European states.
Now, look at the globe, Earth. Russia was not as conveniently located to navigate Africa’s coastline as the more southerly European states that scrambled for Africa.
Africa’s collective memory therefore does not have Russia as a colonial power (in Africa).
Furthermore, when Africans were struggling for independence after World War II, Russia, its own (Soviet) empire notwithstanding, could masquerade as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist force helping Africans against capitalist Europe; thanks to Cold War rivalry for ideological influence and Africa’s resources.
South Africa’s invention of apartheid (White supremacist racial segregation) defined the humiliation of the Black man more sharply than anywhere else.  

South Africa thus concentrated and encapsulated the pain of other Africans.
The kind of moral arguments that (Soviet) Russia opportunistically tapped into during South Africa’s struggle do not disappear when Ukraine enters the frame, or when the theatre is Europe, or when the victims are not Black. Otherwise our anti-racism is also racist.
After suspicious shilly-shallying and outright hypocrisy, ANC-ruled South Africa is openly fraternising with Vladimir Putin’s Russia at a time when Russia is doing everything possible in Ukraine to qualify as a terrorist state.
The cynicism of the ANC government is astonishing, and frightening.
Widely ostracised, Putin wants to broaden his shrinking moral and diplomatic space with any ally who is willing to suspend their conscience and champion the patently ridiculous narrative that all the killing and destruction in Ukraine, handiwork of Russia’s imperialist insanity, are because of a Ukrainian Nazi threat and Nato provocation.

Russia’s economic interests in South Africa cannot be so compelling. And South Africa’s need for the planned joint naval exercises with Russia and China seems dubious.
But the rulers of a South Africa that is plagued by power shortages and economic difficulties; a South Africa whose stark inequality and simmering xenophobia cannot be fixed yesterday, but are set to remain tomorrow’s powder kegs; a South Africa whose ANC increasingly disappoints and may soon only be able to retain power by turning to the kind of primitive methods practiced elsewhere on the continent; the rulers of this South Africa probably feel a need for friends of Putin’s ilk.
Many of Africa’s despots probably quietly approve. But because South Africa is a big player on the continent, and because of her epitomic significance in Africa’s relationship with foreign oppressors, ordinary Africans should be horrified by her shift from false neutrality to naked alliance with Russian barbarism.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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