Since Cyril Ramaphosa swept through London in a gilded carriage, waving like a giddy kindergartener on a tour of a sweetie factory, South Africans have told me he is clearly in the pay of the British royal family, that he is “giving us the middle finger”, that this is a great honour and reason to feel a surge of national pride.
To our collective credit, the first, and most obviously stupid, claim has mostly been made by a vocal but small minority, led by public laughing stocks such as Mzwanele Manyi, the head baton-twirler of Nkandla’s in-house cheerleading squad.
On Sunday, the sentient muff tweeted news reports previewing Ramaphosa’s state visit, adding: “The Head of the pseudo-sovereign state, South Africa, will be accounting to the master, the Head of the Commonwealth next week.”
Within seconds, Manyi was deluged by photographs from 2010, when his own paymaster and the man to whom he accounts went on exactly the same state visit, met exactly the same royal family and even rode in the same carriage. This, however, was futile: the whole point of running the Jacob Zuma Foundation or being part of the RET faction is that you never have to do boring things like know facts or draw logical conclusions from them.
The other two claims — that Ramaphosa’s visit is a slap in the face of stressed South Africans, and that it’s a big win for our tired little country — are much less cynical, and aren’t actively trying to collapse the country, but I’m afraid they’re not very much more grounded in reality.
To be fair, we can’t really blame ourselves.
The institution of monarchy, like organised religion with which it has wrestled for thousands of years, is designed to make us lose perspective. When you shuffle into St Peter’s in Rome, or stand respectfully aside as carriages rattle along flag-draped, soldier-lined streets in London, you are meant to feel extremely small and, by implication, believe the people you’re watching up there in the pulpit or in the palace are extremely big.
If the spectacle does its job and leaves you unmoored, it’s very easy to believe what you’re being told, or to push back to the opposite extreme, bitterly rejecting the whole thing as a cynical and insulting sham.
In both cases, we tend to lose sight of what we’re actually seeing: very old, very successful businesses, which have been marketing themselves for so long that the advertising bumf feels like history and tradition.
I understand if you believe Ramaphosa has abandoned us to go and cosplay leadership in Feudal Disneyland. But under the silly clothes and the absurd carriages, this is just a meet-and-greet at a particularly famous corporate head office. It’s no different to Davos, or COP27, or, to be fair, any South African boardroom or golf course where politicians and businesspeople go to shake the right hands and pat the right backs.
As for those who insist we should feel proud that Ramaphosa is pressing kingly flesh, well, I mean, if you want to believe that Mr Charles Mountbatten-Windsor is so special that simply being in the same room as him is such an achievement that an entire country can bask in reflected glory, I have some magic beans to sell you.
No, Ramaphosa has gone to do what all heads of state do all over the place, all the time: go somewhere shiny, pose for pictures, ask for money, get promised money, say and say thank you knowing you’ll never see a cent of it, commit entirely noncommittally to definite deals which will almost definitely not happen, eat some quails, drink some champagne and go home.
In short, he’s been doing something he hasn’t done for ages: his job.
