My readers have revealed many surprising things to me over the years, like that I am a radical Marxist who wants to destroy Western civilisation and that I am an imperialist hell-bent on oppressing the African child. But this weekend one reader taught me something entirely new.
Well, I say “reader”, but you know what I mean. Also, before I go on, I should admit that I’m not even sure I was dealing with a real person: the AI-generated profile picture suggested that my accuser was nothing more than one of the digital ghosts now being pumped onto social media by the sociopathic oligarch class to entrench political and social divisions and to radicalise young white men.
Still, whether this person was real or not, his discovery was dramatic: according to the fake Wikipedia page he/it posted, I was born somewhere called “United state” which proved that I was a secret Democrat agitator sent here to harass local fans of Donald Trump and the Maga revolution.
While I like a conspiracy theory as much as the next bot, I must say that growing Manchurian candidates in the United state and then installing them as freelance writers back in SA seems like an awful lot of effort to go to. After all, if you want to agitate lots of white people in this country all you have do is point out that Trump’s refugee plan is B-grade political theatre in the service of a racist lie.
Being insulted or treated with disdain by Trump and Maga has done wonders for other politicians lately...
Once you drift down into these shallow depths, however, you learn other things, too; and what I’ve learnt over the last couple of days of floating around in the comments section is that a startling number of South Africans from a variety of backgrounds and political outlooks have found common cause in a shared desire to see Cyril Ramaphosa roundly and loudly humiliated in his meeting with Trump this week.
Admittedly, some of that unity of purpose is attributable to the merging of the far left and far right fringes of the old political world, both of which have goose-stepped so far away from the centre that they’ve gone and met round the back on the common ground of patriarchal fantasy and, bizarrely, a shared love of Vladimir Putin and his determination to save his country from gay people, or from Nato, or some sort of combination of the two, perhaps Gato. Either way, the marriage of tankies and honkies continues apace.
Some of those relishing a potential humiliation for Ramaphosa clearly fall into those camps: there are white supremacists salivating at the prospect of watching Trump perform baasskap over Ramaphosa, while on the former left, some acolytes of Jacob Zuma can’t wait for his capitalist stooge of a successor to be shamed by a kind of Zuma proxy — a jovial king dedicated not to his country but to a settling of personal scores and the constant stroking of the thinnest of skins.
And yet between these I’ve seen many others who see Trump for what he is but can’t help hoping that he might, through sheer unpleasantness, penetrate the carapace of Ramaphosa’s unflappable immobility and stir him into doing something. Anything.
Being insulted or treated with disdain by Trump and Maga has done wonders for other politicians lately, propelling moderates into power in Canada, Germany, Australia and most recently Romania.
But if Ramaphosa emerges from that meeting feeling that he has been treated with contempt, he must try to understand that that is how most South Africans feel about him and his party, and that anti-Trump sentiments are no substitute for doing his job.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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