The trigger event for the ultimate colonisation of Southern Africa is, among other factors, the global trade demands driven by the pursuit of better trade routes to the East.
The Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the earliest multinational corporations involved in global trade, established a refreshment station at the Cape in 1652 after several shipwrecks along the shores. This station was mainly to provide resting and resupply points for ships travelling to and from the East Indies, with essentials such as water, food and other provisions.
Despite the dispossession and the brutally extractive effects on the indigenous people, the VOC’s decision established South Africa as a geopolitical hub with several global refreshment capabilities beyond the narrow colonial objectives that followed. Beyond the imperialist intents of later European nations, the refreshment character of South Africa assumed new and globally decisive meanings.
As the G20 summit sat in Soweto, Johannesburg, the stability of international trade routes, primarily through the Suez Canal, determines a Western, or rather European, to Eastern route that would require the Cape, and thus South Africa, as a refreshment station, just sovereign this time.
Highlighting South Africa’s role in global policy discussions, the summit underscored its ongoing importance in issues affecting humanity and world peace.
South Africa is recognised as the oldest country on the continent with a constitutional democracy framework. The 1910 constitution, a foundational document crucial to the existing constitutional order, defines the sovereignty of the state. Over time, the key difference has been how institutionalised racism dictated inclusion and exclusion of racial groups that were legally classified as non-white.
The racial, colonial and other chauvinist tensions led to the formation of nationalist movements in 1912 and 1913. These movements became essential moments in South Africa’s history. In response to the denial of fundamental human rights to black people, the African National Congress introduced the first African Bill of Rights in 1923. The Bill of Rights influenced the basic human rights outlook of continental, and arguably global, politics.
Through its leaders, regardless of race, South Africa played an influential role in shaping global governance structures. From the post-WW1 League of Nations to today’s UN, from the Non-Aligned Movement to the expanding Brics, including the G20 multilateral arrangements, its diplomatic legacy enhances South Africa’s soft power in global affairs, reinforcing its geopolitical significance.
South Africa’s fight against apartheid, the world’s leading legal representation of racism, and its associated social genocidal character, contributed to the erasure of the morality, if any ever existed, of global racism.
As a contribution to anti-colonial struggles in Africa, it decisively defined African claims beyond the colonial period. It sponsored a global democratic principle that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people. This principle is contained in the timeless 1955 Freedom Charter and underpins the liberation promise in the 1996 constitution.
South Africa’s fight against apartheid, the world’s leading legal representation of racism, and its associated social genocidal character, contributed to the erasure of the morality, if any ever existed, of global racism. Declaring apartheid, in any form, a crime against humanity has elevated all racism-driven actions by governments to matters for the International Court of Justice.
Racism-based occupation or economic exclusion is now an issue of international justice that requires legal resolution.
As a global citizen, South Africa led the way in crucial decisions that have proverbially refreshed the world. It is a signatory to several treaties concerning the well-being of humanity, including trade, climate justice, inequality, nuclear non-proliferation, global peace initiatives, post-disaster reconstruction and development, global illicit financial flows, and the comprehensive realisation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
Amid the chaos threatening the global multilateral governance system — such as provocative tariffs that undermine international trade, blatant disregard for global treaties on human safety and child protection, and ongoing ethnic cleansing in various regions — South Africa has become the most vocal advocate in international forums seeking justice and accountability.
Its moral authority and soft power position South Africa as a key player in global justice matters, exemplified by the G20 presidency in 2025 and the Soweto summit’s inclusive agenda.
The G20 declaration joins several other global declarations signed in and by South Africa as moments when the world had to pause and rethink new pathways to rescue humanity from itself.
The 2025 G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg, will go down in history as having redefined the global refreshment station character of South Africa. It has confirmed South Africa as the refreshment node between the East and the West in a non-aligned way.
For this, South Africa became the proverbial David that defeated the proverbial Goliaths of human inequality and the sovereign equality of nations.
Despite its discontents, South Africa hosted and convened a world-class summit with implications for posterity. How it democratised an essentially global elite nation’s construct to embrace the Global South Agenda was a diplomatic masterpiece.
The calmness with which it repudiated global nodes of racism, including in its backyard, demonstrated its commitment beyond South Africa’s reach of the founding values of its constitutional order. Soweto became the birthplace of a Government of Global Unity and Peace, a foundation from which the UN Reform process should take a leaf.
Overall, this was an excellent display by the government of the day. The Ramaphosa presidency and all involved sub-national jurisdictions showed political will, which must be maintained. South Africa’s leadership, public and private, should regard this performance as the standard. The country cannot afford a return to previous conditions.
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