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The authors threw the kitchen sink, accusing South Africa of corruption, incompetence and being unable to govern itself. “Government has a history of substantially mismanaging a range of state resources and has often proven incapable of effectively delivering public services, threatening the South African people and the South African economy,” they write.
Calls to punish South Africa have been growing since December 2022, when the country allowed a U.S-sanctioned Russian cargo ship, the Lady R, to dock. South Africa denied allegations that weapons were offloaded.
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All that said, the optics are not good: striking against one of Africa’s biggest economic engines for the supposed offense of standing against genocide and apartheid.
As foreign policy, punishing South Africa doesn’t look so smart, either. The country is the United States’ largest trading partner on the continent, with $21 billion of traded goods moving between the two in 2021. Successive U.S. administrations, including the Biden administration, have explicitly declared that the U.S. interest in Africa is countering the influence of the Chinese. What better way to push South Africa into the arms of U.S. rivals?
“We have lots of policy disagreements with countries all over the world,” a Democratic congressional staffer told me. Consider Turkey: “friendly with Russia and openly friendly with Hamas. And we just agreed to send them a bunch of F-16s.” The bill “really just comes across as picking on South Africa.”
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And it is bad politics, especially for Democrats. In our multiracial nation, President Biden’s party is not helping his reelection by appearing hostile to South Africa while Black, Arab and Muslim Americans turn increasingly against administration policy in Gaza. More than 1,000 Black faith leaders have called for a cease-fire in Gaza. Last month, a USA Today-Suffolk University poll showed that Black support for Biden has dropped to 63 percent, down from 87 percent in 2020.
I called Cliff Albright in Atlanta, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, to get his thoughts about the potential political damage. “A lot of folks in the community are just kind of frustrated with the Democratic Party, not just with President Biden,” he said. “And now, some Democrats are working with Republicans on attacking a country that we identify with … on an issue that most Black voters identify with. This won’t end well for Democrats if they wind up joining with Republicans on this. This is a serious electoral issue.”
Nevertheless, South Africa is persisting. It has returned to the International Court of Justice to request emergency measures demanding “immediate and effective implementation” of steps to prevent genocide in Gaza. South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusimuzi Madonsela, said Tuesday: “South Africa bears a special obligation, both to its own people and the international community, to ensure that wherever the egregious and offensive practices of apartheid occur, these must be called out … and brought to an immediate end.”
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South Africa’s long-fought victory over apartheid means it carries a special moral power in the eyes of the world. Transnational movements helped bring down apartheid. That power is what frightens would-be enablers of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war in Gaza and is why they are hitting back so hard. Black international solidarity movements have overcome the most inhumane colonization strategies and the most sophisticated supremacist systems — all without missiles or mass slaughter campaigns against our oppressors.
Once again, America is finding itself on the wrong side of (Black) history. South Africa deserves respect for standing with oppressed Palestinians, not retaliation.
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No pun intended, but it feels darkly fitting, during Black History Month, that Black and African resistance to oppression is being criticized.
Earlier this year, South Africa, led by a Black-majority government, accused Israel — and the West by extension — of genocide before the International Court of Justice. The attacks came immediately. Germany, which ought to stand back when the topic is genocide, said South Africa’s “accusation has no basis whatsoever.” More than 200 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemning South Africa, saying the accusation “exposes how far Israel’s enemies will go in their attempts to demonize the Jewish state.”
U.S. lawmakers are now trying to turn scolding into punishment.
A bipartisan bill, introduced after the court upheld South Africa’s case, calls for a full review of U.S. relations with South Africa. Rep. John James (R-Mich) and Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) assert in their bill that South Africa has relationships with Russia, China and Iran as well as non-state actors such as Hamas. The bill requests “unclassified determination explicitly stating whether South Africa has engaged in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.”
The bill claims the African National Congress, the political party that has governed South Africa since apartheid’s end in 1994, maintains a “hardline stance of consistently accusing Israel of practicing apartheid” — the white supremacist system of oppression that long defined South African society. The bill accuses ANC leaders of harboring antisemitic motives behind their denunciation of Israeli settlements on occupied lands and charges that government officials “accepted a call with Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh.”
The authors threw the kitchen sink, accusing South Africa of corruption, incompetence and being unable to govern itself. “Government has a history of substantially mismanaging a range of state resources and has often proven incapable of effectively delivering public services, threatening the South African people and the South African economy,” they write.
Calls to punish South Africa have been growing since December 2022, when the country allowed a U.S-sanctioned Russian cargo ship, the Lady R, to dock. South Africa denied allegations that weapons were offloaded.
All that said, the optics are not good: striking against one of Africa’s biggest economic engines for the supposed offense of standing against genocide and apartheid.
As foreign policy, punishing South Africa doesn’t look so smart, either. The country is the United States’ largest trading partner on the continent, with $21 billion of traded goods moving between the two in 2021. Successive U.S. administrations, including the Biden administration, have explicitly declared that the U.S. interest in Africa is countering the influence of the Chinese. What better way to push South Africa into the arms of U.S. rivals?
“We have lots of policy disagreements with countries all over the world,” a Democratic congressional staffer told me. Consider Turkey: “friendly with Russia and openly friendly with Hamas. And we just agreed to send them a bunch of F-16s.” The bill “really just comes across as picking on South Africa.”
And it is bad politics, especially for Democrats. In our multiracial nation, President Biden’s party is not helping his reelection by appearing hostile to South Africa while Black, Arab and Muslim Americans turn increasingly against administration policy in Gaza. More than 1,000 Black faith leaders have called for a cease-fire in Gaza. Last month, a USA Today-Suffolk University poll showed that Black support for Biden has dropped to 63 percent, down from 87 percent in 2020.
I called Cliff Albright in Atlanta, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, to get his thoughts about the potential political damage. “A lot of folks in the community are just kind of frustrated with the Democratic Party, not just with President Biden,” he said. “And now, some Democrats are working with Republicans on attacking a country that we identify with … on an issue that most Black voters identify with. This won’t end well for Democrats if they wind up joining with Republicans on this. This is a serious electoral issue.”
Nevertheless, South Africa is persisting. It has returned to the International Court of Justice to request emergency measures demanding “immediate and effective implementation” of steps to prevent genocide in Gaza. South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusimuzi Madonsela, said Tuesday: “South Africa bears a special obligation, both to its own people and the international community, to ensure that wherever the egregious and offensive practices of apartheid occur, these must be called out … and brought to an immediate end.”
South Africa’s long-fought victory over apartheid means it carries a special moral power in the eyes of the world. Transnational movements helped bring down apartheid. That power is what frightens would-be enablers of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutal war in Gaza and is why they are hitting back so hard. Black international solidarity movements have overcome the most inhumane colonization strategies and the most sophisticated supremacist systems — all without missiles or mass slaughter campaigns against our oppressors.
Once again, America is finding itself on the wrong side of (Black) history. South Africa deserves respect for standing with oppressed Palestinians, not retaliation.
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