When it comes to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, our position is crystal clear: according to Cyril Ramaphosa, SA is “firmly on the side of peace”, which I assume is about a kilometre inside the Polish border because God knows there’s very little peace east of that.
In a newsletter published in Monday, the president explained that SA had abstained from voting on the UN’s resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine because the resolution “did not foreground the call for meaningful engagement”. In other words, we should never stop or even protest a violent act until the perpetrator and the victim have checked their diaries and agreed on a date to start a process of restorative justice.
To Ramaphosa’s credit, he didn’t indulge in the whataboutery now galvanising the less cerebral parts of SA’s left, where it is commonly agreed that the continued existence of political hypocrisy in general, and the US in particular, has made international borders illegitimate. Well, except SA’s: here, Auslanders still need to raus.
Ramaphosa’s “both sides” approach, however, was telling in another way, revealing yet again the ANC’s long-standing hesitancy to denounce abusers, while simultaneously urging the victim of abuse to stop getting abused. This is a country, after all, in which “gender-based violence” is perpetrated by, well, er, someone, and schoolgirls just “fall pregnant”, as if being clumsy can trigger parthenogenesis.
At the weekend, however, those tendencies took a wild lurch towards geopolitics in a nasty little parable posted to Facebook by former ANC MP and current Armscor director Phillip Dexter.
In this parable a husband and wife are discussing the war.
The wife is denouncing Russia, insisting Ukraine should be allowed to join Nato if it wants.
The husband promptly goes to the kitchen, fetches a large knife and says it’s time for bed.
The wife is horrified. Why is he bringing a knife to bed? He tells her it’s none of her business, but she needn’t worry, he’s just protecting his freedom. When she demands a further explanation, he tells her: “You don’t even trust your own husband. How can you expect Russia to trust Ukraine? Me sleeping with a knife is like Ukraine joining Nato.”
The post was met with the sort of applause Stalin used to demand, suggesting its profoundly regressive gender politics hadn’t registered or hadn’t alarmed any of the little online apparatchiks who stood and cheered.
Certainly, none of them seemed to have a problem with Russian imperial interests being defended in Dexter’s parable by a clear-thinking man, or Ukrainian interests being represented by an emotional woman who needs to be taught a scary lesson.
Certainly, none of them seemed to have a problem with Russian imperial interests being defended in Dexter’s parable by a clear-thinking man, or Ukrainian interests being represented by an emotional woman who needs to be taught a scary lesson.
They also didn’t seem to mind that the two were portrayed not as neighbours sharing a fence, but as husband and wife — according to most traditionalists, a couple bound together not only by the law, but by God.
They definitely weren’t interested in applying the parable to anything resembling historical fact, where this “marriage” turns into something else entirely: a ghastly history of abuse in which a “husband” slowly, deliberately and often violently cuts a “wife” off from her family, her past and her identity.
When she tries to leave him in 1917, he forcibly drags her back and, in 1922, tells the world she has no right to exist outside his home. In 1933 he tries to starve her to death. By 1937 he’s murdering any of her friends who even whisper about her leaving him.
Admittedly, some of Dexter’s audience seemed to know the “husband” had had a severe heart attack in 1991, but none were particularly interested in why his “wife” had left him as soon as she could, or why she immediately sought the company of people who’d disliked him (including Nato), or why, 30 years after their separation, he was still insisting she didn’t really exist without him.
But sure. Let’s keep pretending they’re still married and that he’s the one who needs to sleep with a knife in his bed.
Dexter’s parable was obviously dishonest, but the problem with manipulations of this type is they make all of us somewhat dishonest. In the face of such obvious violence and glaring imbalances in power, it is difficult to hold important nuances. Many of those who are outraged by Russia’s aggression have begun to reimagine Ukraine as a type of eastern Sweden, which it absolutely isn’t. Transparency International suggests it is considerably more corrupt than SA. Anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sentiments continue to fester there, as they do across most of Eastern Europe and Russia.
These, however, are societal blights that must be cured through education, integration and contact with modernity, not through invasion, and certainly not invasion by the cynical love child of gangster capitalism and the ghost of Stalin.
Deep down Ramaphosa must surely know the tanks need to leave. Perhaps he even tried to say it, insisting in his newsletter that “another war is something the world does not need”.
But he can’t because he, like Vladimir Putin, is the leader of a disgraced state which equivocates between abuser and victim, and which may yet take a knife to bed and tell us it is simply protecting itself from us.
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