It’s been a rough few years for Cyril Ramaphosa and Bheki Cele, but as our rumoured president heads for peace talks in Russia and Ukraine, and the country’s most impotently belligerent fedora returns from China having caught up on the latest advances in suppressing democracy, both will feel the glow of being surrounded by people who don’t know them and so still treat them with a modicum of respect.
To be fair, Ramaphosa’s trip has obvious geopolitical repercussions as he and five African heads of state get tough with Vladimir Putin over whether Putin will keep all of his territorial gains in Ukraine or merely 98% of them as long as Ukraine stops provocatively referring to itself as an independent country with a right to exist.
Ordinarily, the potential for awkwardness in such a get-together would be immense: imagine trying to ask Putin when he plans to withdraw Wagner mercenaries from Ukraine without asking him when he plans to withdraw them from Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya.
This time, however, the African delegation has planned ahead, bringing along a magnificent social lubricant in the form of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.
A big fan of Putin, Museveni recently reiterated his determination to fight Western imperialists by passing homophobic laws straight out of Victorian Britain. Should a hush ever fall over the room, he can always mutter, “So, how about those gay fellas, am I right?” triggering a half-hour lecture from Putin about how the only appropriate way for naked men to lie on top of each other is in a shallow grave near Bakhmut.
For his part, Ramaphosa will probably do what he does best: nothing. Of course, there’ll be worthy words about the necessity for a peaceful and lasting solution, but apart from offering to host a panel tasked with developing the framework for a feasibility study of the viability of an international commission of inquiry into the definition of “peace”, Ramaphosa’s presence in Moscow and Kyiv will be much like his presence in Pretoria and Cape Town: more or less pointless.
Then again, perhaps blending in with the wallpaper is the best approach for a man caught between the rock of trade with the West and the hard place of being cemented into the Brics wall. In the end, it might be best for Ramaphosa to simply smile, nod and admire the wall-sized painting of a shirtless Putin wrestling a screaming LGBTQ+ atheist demon, trundle down to Kyiv to get the stamp in his passport, and come home.
After all, at some point the war will end, and when it does history will record that Ramaphosa was present, at least in body, when peace was discussed, if not actually brokered. Of course, history will record it as a footnote to an addendum in an appendix, but for the modern ANC that’s a pretty big win.
For Cele, returning from a five-day policing show-and-tell in China, the stakes were much lower. For starters, he’s already sealed his place in history, in the chapter called “Meritocracy and the People Who Refuted It”.
Second, given the power dynamics within the Brics club, a trip to China by an SA cabinet minister is less a diplomatic mission by an international envoy than the CEO’s surly, slack-jawed nephew having to slouch out of his cubicle on the third floor to go and applaud his uncle at the AGM.
For all the routine flesh-pressing though, I suspect Cele might have enjoyed a certain meeting of minds, or at least of appetites, as he gazed in wonder at the latest Chinese breakthroughs in breaking down dissent.
In Shanghai, for example, he would have been introduced to the delights of “predictive policing”, such as a new AI system that triggers an alarm the moment a camera spots someone unfurling a banner, before capturing the banner-holder’s face and matching it to their identity faster than you can say “George Orwell”.
According to Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch, “target populations” in Shanghai are under constant surveillance, most notably “people who are petitioners, people who have a prior criminal record, people who have psychosocial disabilities and so on”.
“And so on”, in this case, is quite substantial: the organisation reports that there are no fewer than 26 categories of “target population”. I have to wonder why the authorities went to so much effort to categorise their targets. After all, a totalitarian state can — and often does — define almost anything as a “psychosocial disability”, from psychological disorders such as believing democracy should be made legal in China to antisocial behaviour like working for the free press.
Last week, I joked in this column that good old analogue dysfunction would save us from digital dystopias. Cele might have liked what he saw in China, but until he has figured out a way of preventing people from sawing down lampposts in broad daylight, mass surveillance is a totalitarian pipe dream.
But vandalism will not save us from the insatiable lusts of the modern state. For that we will have to rely on our constitution, a small but ferocious document shining even more brightly as its so-called defenders placate and court tyrants abroad.
This is still a country in which the individual is protected from the state. Long may it remain so, no matter what our new, rich, violent friends have to say.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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