I wasn’t expecting any warmth toward South Africa before I arrived at a conference held in my new hometown in Texas, and I couldn’t have left more surprised.
There, one of Donald Trump’s favourite economists, Stephen Moore, a former advisor to George W. Bush, Scott Walter, and the former Attorney General of Virginia, Justin Miyares, among others, spoke to a room of about 40 people representing non-profits charged with advancing limited government and personal responsibility. Aligned to the concept of state-proofing, the discussions explored pragmatic administration of institutions.
In the morning I got picked up by a robotaxi or cybercab. I was trying to figure out how to push back, should some of the neurotic statements uttered by the Washington circle jerk of Redi Tlhabi and Phillip van Niekerk be put to me, when I got distracted into reading a story about an incident in Arizona in 2018.
There, a young chubby man called Paul Anthony Menchaca had been fined $15,000 for pretending to have Down’s Syndrome. He had posted a fake ad pretending to be a woman seeking female nurses to bathe her adult son. But the nurses became suspicious after a while: “Every time he got his nappy changed,” one complained, “he had an erection.” It took 30 or so baths for Paul to be rumbled. It struck me in that driverless vehicle that ANC voters, upon hearing Nomvula Mokonyane demand forgiveness from the ancestors for the party’s ruin may feel a bit like those poor nurses.
“I am obsessed with South Africa.” “It is an extraordinary place.” These sentences were expressed to me by people sitting at my table before even the first break of the morning: by the kind of people slammed on South African legacy platforms throughout the last week, or lied about, or used by the ANC to buffer itself from what promises to be the party’s sternest shellacking to date in November.
Some vulnerabilities
I had acknowledged some vulnerabilities. Ronald Lamola’s arrogance and appalling judgement, strutted about as some kind of heroic defiance. The processions of useful idiots, mostly white, triggered by the state to defend its indefensible habits. The scenes of Cape Town last weekend.
There, one of the biggest shysters in the history of British politics, George Galloway, rocked up to stir trouble, as is his way: from Big Brother, where he pretended to be a cat, to Congress, where he was widely thought to have perjured himself. In contrast to the poisonous coverage of Lex Libertas in Washington, South African media appeared to love the fact that hundreds of flags (not the country’s own) were waved around Sea Point, where Galloway was paraded by an eager but simple band of local volunteers, like a crap brogue pope.
Whenever white, left-wing politicians arrive in South Africa, they can’t resist stolen valour. Following Joe Biden’s dishonest remarks about his activism, Galloway claimed that he’d been held in Gugulethu Police station, which nobody can verify. But it does beg the question: if all of these thousands of white, left, international politicians or activists were, as they claim, thrown into our prisons…was there even any space for actual victims of apartheid?
In contrast to the unexpected affection, there was little enthusiasm for the United Kingdom. Even before Prime Minister Andy Burnham signaled the return to the squalor of the late 1970s as a strategic imperative at the recent Labour conference, the conviction that the country has capitulated was widely adopted.
Managed decline
The fact is that Gulf States have decided not to send their children to England, (England!) to be educated for fear of Islamist radicalization. The co-pilot of last week’s flyDubai hijacking attempt learned to fly in England: something that surprised nobody. And what about the fortunes of the country’s second city, Birmingham, laid out as a case study for managed decline: a bankrupt place without majority control, administered by a minority coalition featuring Lib Dems and Greens.
Not easy to hear stuff like this, but who can blame the Americans? They’ve now had to withdraw their military aircraft inventory from RAF Fairford because UK law-enforcement can’t police a fence from petrol thieves properly. Or Iranian operatives. Despite no history of domestic oppression, the country seems intent on pursuing race-based classifications, and the right, or what passes for it, is too easily dissuaded to address it.
So why the fondness for South Africa? Ground zero of DEI: just like England, our media, commandeered by involuntary celibates, chooses to call people it doesn’t know ‘racist’, or believes it’s much better to die on the hill of contentious claims than put food on the table.
Our politicians are equally feckless, our business leaders equally cowardly.
Why is America interested in a country encouraged to detest it?
Longs to work with
Because I don’t think it actually does. I think America sees something in South Africa it longs to work with. Perhaps it comes down to our common spiritual parameters, or just the fact that, like Americans, the vast majority of South Africans are profoundly decent people, averse to division, who want to make a success of their lives and be cool with their neighbours.
For all Adriaan Basson or Pieter du Toit’s unhinged conspiracies in the last week, for all the paranoid bluster of resource extraction and warnings about a repeat of the events that ended the narco-terrorist Nicholas Maduro, the interest and intrigue endures among the right kind of people. Long may it last.
[Image: by kwestdigital]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend