During the G20 summit last November, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Freedom Park near Pretoria to honour Bruce Haigh, an Australian diplomat here in the 1970s. Bruce was fabulously subversive. He ran messages all over the country for Steve Biko, and he helped the then banned editor of the Daily Dispatch, Donald Woods, flee the country in 1978.
Watching Bruce charm his way through a repressive state remains a vivid memory as a young man. It made me appreciate how diplomats could make a material difference in a difficult and dangerous country.
Bruce worked undercover, and it is a measure of our democracy today that when the new US ambassador to South Africa, Brent Bozell, wanted to lecture the government this week, he did so in public in Hermanus.
Bozell’s formal speech to Alec Hogg’s annual BizNews conference was broadly positive. “Though I have only recently arrived,” he began, “I have already begun to experience the richness and complexity of this remarkable country. I have travelled beyond Pretoria to Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town … I have met with government officials, business leaders and local communities. I have visited the Apartheid Museum and the District Six Museum.
“These are not mere tourist stops. They are places that remind you that South Africa’s history is lived memory — sacrifice, struggle, resilience and unfinished work.”
But sitting down to talk to Hogg after his speech, Bozell let his guard down, perhaps feeling he was among conservative, like-minded friends. Hogg asked him about US President Donald Trump’s demand that the government condemn the song Kill the Boer, despite the Constitutional Court ruling it is not hate speech.
Bozell was hand-picked by Trump, a man who does more hate speech in a morning than Julius Malema ever could
“I’m sorry, I don’t care what your courts say,” Bozell replied, “it’s hate speech.” He may well be right, but our Constitutional Court and the constitution it upholds were built on authentic struggle against terrible cruelty. “I don’t care” was bound to get him into trouble, and the next day he was formally demarched, correctly, by the government for his disrespect.
We must be careful in the wake of this not to get carried away. Bozell was hand-picked by Trump, a man who does more hate speech in a morning than Julius Malema ever could.
The core of his speech was a list of demands he said “we put forward to the South African government”. That’s not factually true. The list is an exact replica of demands an Afrikaner delegation brought home from a visit to the White House last July. It was the work of the senior Africa policy director in the White House, Brendan McNamara, and the group itself, led by FF+ leader Corné Mulder.
Building on Trump’s obsession with Afrikaners and the fiction that they are being murdered in a genocide, Mulder’s delegation introduced the list as the “necessary preconditions” for a normalisation of relations between the US and South Africa.
First, farm attacks should be classified as a priority crime; second, “a clear and unequivocal” condemnation from the ANC of Kill the Boer; third, no land expropriation without compensation; and fourth, US companies investing here should be exempt from BEE requirements, which Trump officials view as a non-tariff barrier. Bozell also said the US wanted the close ties between South Africa and Iran neutered, but that’s an addition to the original list.
The “demands” are not onerous. Farm murders of blacks or whites are a clear political problem, and having the Hawks investigate them would cost the state nothing. Equally, singing Kill the Boer is a disgrace a strong leader should have no trouble denouncing. Introducing the prospect of expropriation of property with zero compensation was done to keep the extreme left of the ANC onside. Alongside that, subjecting inward investment to the rule that BEE partners should take 30% is the most foolish barrier to investment imaginable.
On the other hand, the demands are a clear interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Trump does this all the time in the UK and Europe and is invariably ignored.
Bozell will need to make his case better. The US is easily our most valuable trading partner, and culturally we are close to Americans. Reaching a trade and investment deal with them that outlives Trump is something we should be seriously alive to.
Quite who, if anyone, in the government is dealing with Bozell’s list is not clear, and handing it to a private delegation was highly irregular. We, anyway, don’t have an ambassador in Washington capable of receiving it in the first place, though that might soon change.
Meanwhile, Bozell is a guest and we must be generous hosts, whatever we think of his politics. We’re now a real democracy, and we all cherish the freedom to say what we think. Barring insult, Bozell should be free to speak his mind here too.
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