As Cyril Ramaphosa tries to wash orange off his shirt cuffs, some pundits don’t seem sure that it was a good idea for him to take Ernie Els and Retief Goosen along to the filming of the latest episode of Donald Trump’s reality show, Keeping Up With Imaginary White Victimhood. But I think it made a lot of sense.
After all, if you’re trying to debunk the myth that a white genocide is happening in South Africa, the best evidence you can offer is proof of life, and to Trump the second-highest form of life is white men who are very good at golf. (The highest is, of course, Vladimir Putin, who plays golf by dropping a ball and then having a hole dug around it, but that’s another story.)
No, the logic is so clear even a 78-year-old toddler like Trump can understand it: if white South African men are still free to exercise the universal basic human right of playing golf, then it can’t be much of a white genocide.
I also disagree with those colleagues in the media who are arguing that Ramaphosa fell into Trump’s “trap”, or that he was “disappointing”, or looked “weak”, mostly because these arguments imply a possible alternative in which Ramaphosa might have emerged looking strong. If only Ramaphosa had said the right things (these arguments imply) or brought the right people, a man whose political movement is based on contempt and fake victimhood might have thawed and shown him the kind of respect and friendliness he offers people like Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Given all of the psychological, emotional and historical subtext that vibrated in that room, and that this was a meeting not with a president but a raw, twitching bundle of complexes, compulsions and disorders, I think Ramaphosa did pretty well
In other words, they seem to have misunderstood what these Oval Office shaming rituals are and how they work. They still seem to believe that this was statecraft and not the triumphalist spectacle of empire; a child Caesar summoning some distant vassal from the frontier to come and be hectored and lectured and scolded.
Given all of the psychological, emotional and historical subtext that vibrated in that room, and that this was a meeting not with a president but a raw, twitching bundle of complexes, compulsions and disorders, I think Ramaphosa did pretty well to emerge from the theatrical part of the day without Trump having slapped South Africa with 500% tariffs and swingeing sanctions.
As for what happened in the private meetings, well, let’s wait and see.
Some of Trump’s most vocal critics in the US believe that his tariffs, and his provocations in the Oval Office, are little more than a way of exerting pressure to elicit bribes — that if you offer him, say, a $400m Boeing, or give his son-in-law first dibs on developing Trump Gaza, he’ll make a few concessions — but this doesn’t really help South Africa.
I mean, what could we offer him that he doesn’t already have? He seems to like wealthy South African white people — that was the whole strategy of taking Els, Goosen and Johann Rupert, surely? But he’s already got a whole Elon Musk, and he doesn’t even seem to like him that much any more. Throw 49 self-identified Afrikaner self-identified refugees into the mix and he’s got way more than he wants.
No, it’ll have to be good old cash. Someone send word to Phala Phala to prepare the couch for a withdrawal ...
For opinion and analysis consideration, email Opinions@timeslive.co.za
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