Opinion | To decipher South Africa’s strange foreign policy, look to its past (2024)

I was surprised when Ramaphosa intoned, “If we are to build a society of equals, a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, we must end the discrimination and intolerance directed at people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

“We must resist the efforts of those who want to take us backwards,” he said, “who express reactionary and hateful views directed at members of the LGBTQI+ community.” His words were met with cheers from the staunchly pro-African National Congress crowd decked out in green and gold T-shirts and hats. He was preaching to the faithful.

But I couldn’t help thinking how his words might have landed 4,000 miles away in Ghana, where just weeks earlier the parliament had passed a harsh bill to impose strict prison terms for anyone identifying as gay or “promoting” gay rights. Ghana’s president has yet to sign the legislation.

Or in Uganda, which last year passed one of the continent’s strictest anti-gay laws — signed by the president and upheld by the courts — imposing life imprisonment for engaging in gay sex and the death penalty for “aggravated hom*osexuality.”

South Africa legalized same-sex marriage in 2006 and is regularly listed as one of the most gay-friendly tourist destinations on an otherwise unfriendly continent. The country also carries a certain moral weight in the world, owing to the long liberation struggle against the abhorrent apartheid regime.

But why does South Africa stay publicly silent as more and more of its African neighbors pass horrific anti-gay laws?

This is not the only thing mysterious about South Africa’s foreign policy.

The United States, Britain and the European Union are major investors in the country and key trading partners. But South Africa seems to have much warmer relations with Russia — an economic lightweight.

South Africa used its moral authority to take Israel before the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice over its war in Gaza, which South African diplomats have said amounts to genocide. But it has issued scarcely any condemnation of Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in tens of thousands of casualties on both sides and the bombing of Ukrainian cities.

Although it is one of the continent’s most stable democracies, South Africa seems most at home in the BRICS group, which includes Russia and China (a growing trade partner) along with democracies India and Brazil. China has made no secret of its ambition to use the BRICS group to challenge what it considers U.S. and Western hegemony in the world.

Whose side is South Africa on?

The answer, as with most things here, is rooted in the country’s long anti-apartheid struggle.

It was after the Sharpeville massacre that the ANC embraced armed struggle and established its military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe. That was at the height of the Cold War, and the United States and Britain branded the ANC a pro-communist terrorist organization. (The ANC inexplicably remained on the U.S. terrorism list until April 2008.) The official U.S. policy was “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime.

Shunned in the West, the ANC found support from the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Libya under Moammar Gaddafi and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The ANC’s leaders include many stalwarts of that liberation fight. The old soldiers recall fighting in the bush in Angola alongside Cuban mercenaries with Russian weapons, against U.S.-backed anti-communist UNITA fighters.

ANC members still keep close ties to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and the Chinese Communist Party, including by sending ANC members for “party-to-party diplomacy” and fully funded training sessions to Russia and China.

The ANC also received support from other African countries as South Africa became the continent’s last stand against White colonial rule. And after liberation, with the first all-race democratic election in 1994, its leaders were loath to openly criticize African neighbors — even close ones like Zimbabwe, then ruled by the corrupt dictator Robert Mugabe.

South Africa does not want to be seen as the continent’s “Big Brother,” hectoring over human rights. It tried that in 1994, when President Nelson Mandela privately implored Nigeria’s military dictator Sani Abacha to spare the life of Niger Delta environmental campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa. Mandela was humiliated when Saro-Wiwa was executed in 1995 on the opening day of a Commonwealth meeting in New Zealand. When attempts to have Nigeria sanctioned by the African Union left South Africa isolated, it largely retreated as the continent’s voice of moral authority.

South Africa needs the West for investment and trade. But the ANC remembers the liberation movement’s oldest friends. The resulting tensions are what make South Africa’s foreign policy seem at times inexplicable. As the world becomes more polarized between democracies and authoritarian regimes, the tensions may also become harder to sustain. “I feel that South Africa’s foreign policy is incompatible with its internal democracy,” said Branko Brkic, editor of the Daily Maverick newspaper.

Some foreign policy analysts I spoke with said South Africa also suffers from a communication problem: Its diplomats do not always adequately explain the rationale behind their policies or consider how certain actions will be perceived — as with trying to stay nonaligned on the Ukraine war. “It opens itself up to criticism,” said Philani Mthembu, executive director at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a think tank. “South Africa needs to improve how it anticipates its partners will react.”

There’s a lesson for the United States, too: Foreign policy decisions are remembered for a long time. It’s always better to be on the side of those fighting for democracy than to support the dictators and tyrants trying to thwart it.