I visited South Africa in just before Mandela got out if prison. A lovely rich clean country with whites who looked nervously at the fate of Rhodesia Zambia and almost everywhere else on that continent and pretended it seemed to me that some how this time it would be different.
The white liberals remind me so much of the left in the UK. They believe in fairytales of their own making that e.g. net zero will work, undocumented immigration is not going to lead to more crime. When the facts are already known.
Everyone knew what would happen when they put a terrorist organisation in charge of a country. They had seen it happen time after time in Africa before. But they did it anyway and destroyed the future health and prosperity for everyone black and white.
Why did you do this??? Is the question I asked from afar. My South African friends gave me extremely liberal answers which everyone except themselves could see was at best naive and at worse ……
Also the more relevant question. Are we going down the same road of deliberately destroying our own country ( and people) to satisfy what is clearly, ideological wishful thinking?
To me and I think a lot of people it is obvious that we are.
Do you have even the faintest idea what “apartheid” means?
Let me enlighten you. It means “partition” . The clue is that both words contain the letters p-a-r-t .
Ironically, the most militant of America’s Black organisations want exactly that: partition.
Of ccourse, not everyone in South Africa was wealthy.
Yet it was so much richer than its neighbours that Blacks from as far away as the Congo made their way to Johannesburg, which they called “eGoli” – The Place of Gold – if you prefer, El Dorado.
Nell Clover
1 year ago
Old money or new money? Money exists to buy things and stuff, now or in the future. It literally has no other purpose.
The West once made or owned the production for really useful stuff and created some really nice things from the earnings. One needs the currency of the seller to buy the really useful stuff and really nice things. So the West’s then new money came to dominate the world.
Over time, the West has made less of the really useful stuff and owned less of the production too, but it has a stock of really nice things – assets, real estate, banking, courts – that has remained in demand. Yet whilst really useful stuff can be made ad infinitum, nice things are hard to replace. Nice things can only be a net sale to a foreign buyer once, unless there is a speculative bubble in nice things. So asset bubbles have become absolutely essential to supporting the West’s now old money. Bubbles mean successive foreign buyers need more and more Western currency to buy the ever inflating nice things. When nice thing prices get too high and foreign demand moderates, the bubble must be deflated – and the foreign owners left out of pocket – in order to begin the cycle once again. This rinsing of foreign capital will over time debase the niceness of the really nice things until they stop being nice.
We saw this effect in the UK after new money industrialists and their industrial economy created more really useful stuff than the old money land owning gentry were creating. The long decline of the aristocracy began: living in the past, trading on the past and literally selling off the past – their really nice things – to pay the bills until eventually most of the really nice things had been sold and the really nice things left were looking decidedly less nice and a lot more moth eaten. It took 150 years – until the 1930s – for the threadbare chintz to become obvious (in banking it took even longer for the old City firms to be proved to be busted flushes) but the mirage of wealth did eventually evaporate.
The clear lesson is new money eventually wins, but it might take centuries. South Africa is wise to build relations with new money Asia to access the really useful stuff it offers, but South Africa can’t be too hasty in cutting relations with the old money West and its really nice things that form the existing fabric of international commerce and probably will do so for at least another half century.
Last edited 1 year ago by Nell Clover
Paul Beardsell
1 year ago
I don’t see South Africa siding with Russia, I see South Africa not buying 100% into the Western narrative about the Russia-Ukraine war. I rush to insist I am no Putin apologist, but the idea that no criticism of the West is appropriate is just false. Truth is not quite what we’re fed, there’s propaganda both sides. Similarly, when SA doesn’t side wholeheartedly with the West on *all* aspects of its position that does not mean it sides with Russia.
Will Will
1 year ago
Looks like not only should South Africa have continued with the planned nuclear energy programme, it was far more forward thinking than the saps in the UK in charge of our energy policy.
John Hicks
1 year ago
Pottinger continues his Boswell like exposé of this strange and troubled land. Thanks that he does. Without it, as Sgt Shultz observed, “We know nothing!”
Yet he omits a crucial point. ALL politics in Africa is tribal. President Ramaphosa is a Venda in a Zulu organisation – which means he has to watch his back 24×365.
I didn’t understand the power and influence of the tribe in Africa until I was trying to motivate a young woman of African descent, her parents were African, her father still worked in the country where he was born. I told her about a female STEM academic who was the first black woman to be published in an esteemed journal whose father was from the same country as her father. The young woman was interested and asked for the name of the black academic. When I told her the name, she just said, ‘Not of my tribe, ‘ and all interest immediately ceased.
The word tribe is used for people we disparage. We use the word nation for ourselves. African country boundaries were drawn arbitrarily by the colonisers and do not match “tribal” boundaries.
Tim Lever
1 year ago
“There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission…… But the row has served to remind us what drives the ruling African National Congress’s policy towards Russia and its allies: ideology and nostalgia, self-interest and greed.” Yes, of course, illegally preventing a ship docking would have been a principled stand for the…Rules-based Order. You can’t make this stuff up
Tony Taylor
1 year ago
Russia has always duchessed tin pot African nations like New South Africa.
Samir Iker
1 year ago
“There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission. In this, he was right.”
And that’s the bottomline.
There is a good reason most of the world outside the US block is refusing to take sides. It’s the same reason why they refused to speak up when Iraq was invaded for non existent WMDs, Libya was destroyed or Yemeni and Kurdish civilians bombed with weapons supplied by the same countries who are squealing about “aggression” in Ukraine.
The world is a nasty place. And the West, though a shining light in terms of human rights and decency inside their countries, are the nastiest around when it comes to behaving internationally with other countries. While the West basks in a glow of self satisfaction in Ukraine, where any avenue of a negotiated peace was blocked off, the likes of South Africa, UAE or India hold their nose and look away.
Edwin Blake
1 year ago
Excellent and revealing read. Made connections on the financials that I had not seen before.
Some of hankering for the good old (Apartheid) days in these comments is rather disconcerting though!
Just because Communism killed more people than Apartheid isn’t any reason to praise the latter.
More people died in the concentration camps than in the Rwanda genocide but I’m not going to sit here and talk up the actions of the Hutu militias
In the “good old apartheid days” a Black worker could go to his place of employment to work a night shift – and be reasonably sure that his wife and kids would still be alive when he got home.
This nostalgia for a lost age is very ill informed. A black worker could not get a place of employment in the first place because the pass laws dumped him in places with nothing.
If he was granted a pass to work in your “Egoli” his family would not be allowed to come along.
And Egoli was named after the gold mines where African labourers worked for very small wages in extremely dangerous conditions. At first no one wanted to work there so blacks were taxed to force them into the cash economy.
Who says who is virtuous when it comes to 2 former Soviet Republics, now both corrupt oligarchies, fighting over Soviet drawn borders in a post Soviet world?
Add in the fact that this ‘war’ has been going on since the Victoria Nuland incitement to Maidan to begin a coup against a legitimately elected President, and one has to wonder just how much Daddy Biden’s strings are being pulled by Biden Jr. He made a fortune out of Ukraine, and given he appears to have few talents, perhaps it is his lineage that he sold? “My daddy will have your back if you poke the Bear once too often.”
Dave Smith
1 year ago
The global south has nothing now in common with the West. China is the coming power and they know it. Russia is all part of this as it has thrown it’s lot in with China
We had a good run but it is over. End of an empire that was well overdue .
‘We had a good run but it is over’
Who had a good run?
odd taff
1 year ago
The current situation where all the world pariahs Russia, North Korea, China and their new friends India and South Africa are in some loose association reminds me of the end of Blazing Saddles where Headly Le Mar calls up all the badest villains in history to attack Rock Ridge.
Martin Smith
1 year ago
Yet Ramaphosa is ready to accept billions of dollars in long term foreign currency low interest loans, the details of which are secret, from the Western powers to finance the supposed transition from coal to renewables. Great for him and his faction of the ANC in the immediate and short term, especially with the coming Elective Conference, but in the long run? A Western ‘Belt and Road’ that ends up effectively owning SA’s power infrastructure? Whither BRICS then? Plus cą change…
Last edited 1 year ago by Martin Smith
Rod McLaughlin
1 year ago
The ANC can’t afford to be virtuous
Siding with NATO isn’t virtuous, it’s homicidal, genocidal and suicidal
I visited South Africa in just before Mandela got out if prison. A lovely rich clean country with whites who looked nervously at the fate of Rhodesia Zambia and almost everywhere else on that continent and pretended it seemed to me that some how this time it would be different.
The white liberals remind me so much of the left in the UK. They believe in fairytales of their own making that e.g. net zero will work, undocumented immigration is not going to lead to more crime. When the facts are already known.
Everyone knew what would happen when they put a terrorist organisation in charge of a country. They had seen it happen time after time in Africa before. But they did it anyway and destroyed the future health and prosperity for everyone black and white.
Why did you do this??? Is the question I asked from afar. My South African friends gave me extremely liberal answers which everyone except themselves could see was at best naive and at worse ……
Also the more relevant question. Are we going down the same road of deliberately destroying our own country ( and people) to satisfy what is clearly, ideological wishful thinking?
To me and I think a lot of people it is obvious that we are.
WOW – it’s as if Apartheid didn’t happen and all in SA were rich and happy! As ye sow so shall ye reap
Well they were certainly richer.
No. Apartheid di happen. What has happened since was predictable.
The BLM want Apartheid, so why the problem?
Do you have even the faintest idea what “apartheid” means?
Let me enlighten you. It means “partition” . The clue is that both words contain the letters p-a-r-t .
Ironically, the most militant of America’s Black organisations want exactly that: partition.
Of ccourse, not everyone in South Africa was wealthy.
Yet it was so much richer than its neighbours that Blacks from as far away as the Congo made their way to Johannesburg, which they called “eGoli” – The Place of Gold – if you prefer, El Dorado.
Old money or new money? Money exists to buy things and stuff, now or in the future. It literally has no other purpose.
The West once made or owned the production for really useful stuff and created some really nice things from the earnings. One needs the currency of the seller to buy the really useful stuff and really nice things. So the West’s then new money came to dominate the world.
Over time, the West has made less of the really useful stuff and owned less of the production too, but it has a stock of really nice things – assets, real estate, banking, courts – that has remained in demand. Yet whilst really useful stuff can be made ad infinitum, nice things are hard to replace. Nice things can only be a net sale to a foreign buyer once, unless there is a speculative bubble in nice things. So asset bubbles have become absolutely essential to supporting the West’s now old money. Bubbles mean successive foreign buyers need more and more Western currency to buy the ever inflating nice things. When nice thing prices get too high and foreign demand moderates, the bubble must be deflated – and the foreign owners left out of pocket – in order to begin the cycle once again. This rinsing of foreign capital will over time debase the niceness of the really nice things until they stop being nice.
We saw this effect in the UK after new money industrialists and their industrial economy created more really useful stuff than the old money land owning gentry were creating. The long decline of the aristocracy began: living in the past, trading on the past and literally selling off the past – their really nice things – to pay the bills until eventually most of the really nice things had been sold and the really nice things left were looking decidedly less nice and a lot more moth eaten. It took 150 years – until the 1930s – for the threadbare chintz to become obvious (in banking it took even longer for the old City firms to be proved to be busted flushes) but the mirage of wealth did eventually evaporate.
The clear lesson is new money eventually wins, but it might take centuries. South Africa is wise to build relations with new money Asia to access the really useful stuff it offers, but South Africa can’t be too hasty in cutting relations with the old money West and its really nice things that form the existing fabric of international commerce and probably will do so for at least another half century.
I don’t see South Africa siding with Russia, I see South Africa not buying 100% into the Western narrative about the Russia-Ukraine war. I rush to insist I am no Putin apologist, but the idea that no criticism of the West is appropriate is just false. Truth is not quite what we’re fed, there’s propaganda both sides. Similarly, when SA doesn’t side wholeheartedly with the West on *all* aspects of its position that does not mean it sides with Russia.
Looks like not only should South Africa have continued with the planned nuclear energy programme, it was far more forward thinking than the saps in the UK in charge of our energy policy.
Pottinger continues his Boswell like exposé of this strange and troubled land. Thanks that he does. Without it, as Sgt Shultz observed, “We know nothing!”
Yet he omits a crucial point. ALL politics in Africa is tribal. President Ramaphosa is a Venda in a Zulu organisation – which means he has to watch his back 24×365.
I didn’t understand the power and influence of the tribe in Africa until I was trying to motivate a young woman of African descent, her parents were African, her father still worked in the country where he was born. I told her about a female STEM academic who was the first black woman to be published in an esteemed journal whose father was from the same country as her father. The young woman was interested and asked for the name of the black academic. When I told her the name, she just said, ‘Not of my tribe, ‘ and all interest immediately ceased.
The word tribe is used for people we disparage. We use the word nation for ourselves. African country boundaries were drawn arbitrarily by the colonisers and do not match “tribal” boundaries.
“There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission…… But the row has served to remind us what drives the ruling African National Congress’s policy towards Russia and its allies: ideology and nostalgia, self-interest and greed.” Yes, of course, illegally preventing a ship docking would have been a principled stand for the…Rules-based Order. You can’t make this stuff up
Russia has always duchessed tin pot African nations like New South Africa.
“There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission. In this, he was right.”
And that’s the bottomline.
There is a good reason most of the world outside the US block is refusing to take sides. It’s the same reason why they refused to speak up when Iraq was invaded for non existent WMDs, Libya was destroyed or Yemeni and Kurdish civilians bombed with weapons supplied by the same countries who are squealing about “aggression” in Ukraine.
The world is a nasty place. And the West, though a shining light in terms of human rights and decency inside their countries, are the nastiest around when it comes to behaving internationally with other countries. While the West basks in a glow of self satisfaction in Ukraine, where any avenue of a negotiated peace was blocked off, the likes of South Africa, UAE or India hold their nose and look away.
Excellent and revealing read. Made connections on the financials that I had not seen before.
Some of hankering for the good old (Apartheid) days in these comments is rather disconcerting though!
Apartheid pales into insignificance when compared to the atrocities of Communism.
Just because Communism killed more people than Apartheid isn’t any reason to praise the latter.
More people died in the concentration camps than in the Rwanda genocide but I’m not going to sit here and talk up the actions of the Hutu militias
True, that would be embracing the BLM’s flawed ideology!
In the “good old apartheid days” a Black worker could go to his place of employment to work a night shift – and be reasonably sure that his wife and kids would still be alive when he got home.
This nostalgia for a lost age is very ill informed. A black worker could not get a place of employment in the first place because the pass laws dumped him in places with nothing.
If he was granted a pass to work in your “Egoli” his family would not be allowed to come along.
And Egoli was named after the gold mines where African labourers worked for very small wages in extremely dangerous conditions. At first no one wanted to work there so blacks were taxed to force them into the cash economy.
Why is this plainly factual posting down-voted?
Who says who is virtuous when it comes to 2 former Soviet Republics, now both corrupt oligarchies, fighting over Soviet drawn borders in a post Soviet world?
Add in the fact that this ‘war’ has been going on since the Victoria Nuland incitement to Maidan to begin a coup against a legitimately elected President, and one has to wonder just how much Daddy Biden’s strings are being pulled by Biden Jr. He made a fortune out of Ukraine, and given he appears to have few talents, perhaps it is his lineage that he sold? “My daddy will have your back if you poke the Bear once too often.”
The global south has nothing now in common with the West. China is the coming power and they know it. Russia is all part of this as it has thrown it’s lot in with China
We had a good run but it is over. End of an empire that was well overdue .
Really? Check the recent situation; maybe China’s going bankrupt even more quickly than the US and EU.
‘We had a good run but it is over’
Who had a good run?
The current situation where all the world pariahs Russia, North Korea, China and their new friends India and South Africa are in some loose association reminds me of the end of Blazing Saddles where Headly Le Mar calls up all the badest villains in history to attack Rock Ridge.
Yet Ramaphosa is ready to accept billions of dollars in long term foreign currency low interest loans, the details of which are secret, from the Western powers to finance the supposed transition from coal to renewables. Great for him and his faction of the ANC in the immediate and short term, especially with the coming Elective Conference, but in the long run? A Western ‘Belt and Road’ that ends up effectively owning SA’s power infrastructure? Whither BRICS then? Plus cą change…
Siding with NATO isn’t virtuous, it’s homicidal, genocidal and suicidal