It will be good to have Ebrahim Rasool back in Washington as SA’s ambassador. Of the many I’ve known, since the late Pik Botha’s time here in the 1970s, he was his country’s most effective interlocutor.
But I am biased. We became friends when I was US country manager for Brand SA. He was wonderful to work with (as was the great Barbara Masekela, the Dame Maggie Smith of SA envoys).
Obviously, the environment is quite different now from what it was during the Obama years, but that I assume is why President Cyril Ramaphosa asked Rasool to undertake a second tour.
He left his mark the first time around (2010-14), in one respect quite literally. It is thanks to him that a statue of Nelson Mandela stands outside the mission, facing down Winston Churchill across Massachusetts Avenue.
Churchill is flashing his famous V-sign, while Madiba is signalling amandla with his raised first. Rock, Rasool liked to say, beats scissors.
As vice-president, JD Vance will be driven past the statues to and from his office downtown. It would be nice if a little of Mandela’s grace could rub off on him over time, and via him perhaps even on his boss, causing them both to regret the hate-filled rhetoric they spewed on the campaign trail. Well, one can fantasise.
Part of Rasool’s game plan the first time around was to keep people associating SA with Mandela the saint, as opposed to Zuma the kleptocrat. That is to say with “inspiring new ways”, as Brand SA would have it, rather than stereotypical old ones.
Hollywood helped with a movie version of Long Walk to Freedom (based, awkwardly in retrospect, on rights to the book acquired by the sex offender Harvey Weinstein). When Mandela passed away Rasool organised the US memorial service at the National Cathedral, the sort of thing they do for American presidents. It was magnificent.
In today’s Washington SA as Mandela-land no longer works quite as well as a winning trope, the government of national unity notwithstanding. The bloom is long off the rose. We are told by fashionable authors that SA’s rising generation considers Mandela a sell-out.
Alexei Navalny
In any event, there’s a new Mandela, a man who stood up to a vile regime with boundless grace and courage, and who paid the ultimate price. Alexei Navalny.
Vladimir Putin and his creatures continue to lie every bit as venomously about Navalny as the apartheid regime lied about Mandela. But that regime let Mandela live even though he and his movement took up arms against it.
The only things Navalny and his movement ever pointed at the gangsters in the Kremlin were cameras and microphones to document corruption on a scale that would make Zuma and the whole state capture crew green with envy. For that Putin had him poisoned.
German chancellor Angela Merkel helped extricate Navalny to Berlin, but he insisted on returning to Russia, certain of arrest on trumped-up charges and with every reason to believe he would never come out. He was right.
Putin couldn’t break him the way O’Brien broke Winston Smith in 1984, but the methods were no different. So, in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle Navalny was murdered, but not before leaving a memoir every bit as potent as Mandela’s Rivonia statement.
I asked ChatGPT, as one does nowadays, how the SA government reacted. I hope this was a case of artificial intelligence hallucination: “Following the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on February 16 2024 the SA government initially remained silent.
“When questioned, Clayson Monyela, head of diplomacy at the department of international relations & co-operation (Dirco), indicated that no statement would be issued, noting: “There are other politicians who’re being held in prisons and dying. If we issue a statement about one, we must be consistent.
“Subsequently, Dirco minister Dr Naledi Pandor expressed concern over Navalny’s death, hoping for a thorough investigation by Russian authorities and extending condolences to his family and loved ones.”
I then asked ChatGPT how the US government reacted to the Mandela conviction and life sentence in 1964. “The US government avoided explicitly criticising SA for Mandela’s conviction or the apartheid regime’s policies. Officials justified their stance by citing SA’s strategic importance in combating communism in Africa...
“While there was international outcry against Mandela’s life sentence and apartheid policies, the US maintained diplomatic and economic ties with the apartheid regime, emphasising non-interference in SA’s internal affairs.”
At least the Americans were straightforward in their response. They said: hey, we are not going to dump on Pretoria — we are on the same side. They didn’t weasel out like Monyela and Pandor. Rasool has some explaining to do.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington.
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