They say the sign of a good compromise is that everyone leaves the table feeling they came off second best, which, if true, suggests that Roelf Meyer might have been an inspired choice to become South Africa’s ambassador to the United States.
Historical ironies abound. A generation ago, Meyer and Cyril Ramaphosa led the process of trying to find common ground between South Africans, both in multiparty talks to end apartheid and in helping shape the new constitution. And this week it seems they’ve once again brought together South Africans from a variety of political and ideological positions, unifying them in shared outrage at Meyer’s posting to Washington.
The objections seem to boil down to two main arguments.
For some in the centre and many on the left, Meyer is inextricably bound to the apartheid regime he served as a member of parliament, PW Botha’s deputy minister of defence or full defence minister in FW de Klerk’s cabinet, a promotion that effectively put him in charge, albeit briefly, of the military machine that had waged war across southern Africa to prop up white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
His reputation as a negotiator, likewise, is dismissed by the left (or, in the case of Carl Niehaus, the fake left) as oppression — or at least Machiavellianism — disguised as progressivism. Meyer, they insist, was merely hammering out a negotiated settlement that kept white capital firmly entrenched as the ruling power in South Africa.
To the white right, most noisily represented by Kallie Kriel and his Afrisol Trumpsuckers, the appointment of Meyer is an outrage because of his decision to join the ANC in 2006, a move, they claim, that made him complicit in the corruption and failure of that party.
Of course, there are other layers of complexity to each of these arguments.
Ramaphosa is loathed by vast swathes of those cynics and predators who comprise the fake left, like Jacob Zuma’s faction, and his decision to appoint someone with links to the apartheid regime is prime ammunition to fire back at him. Never mind that Zuma appointed the literal head of the National Party, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a former member of the youth wing of the Broederbond, as a full cabinet minister in his first cabinet: this is too juicy an opportunity to miss.
On the right, the cynicism runs even deeper, as the likes of Kriel pretend that their objection is about Meyer being what Kriel called “an ANC cadre” when, in fact, the white right’s antipathy to Meyer goes back to the early 1990s when the hardline white supremacists in the apartheid regime considered him to be dangerously liberal.
As a part of De Klerk’s inner circle during the 1994 transition, he was always going to be branded a sellout and a race-traitor, but, for those whites who deeply regret the end of apartheid, Meyer’s final defection to the ANC 12 years later put him firmly in the same category as Judas, Helen Suzman and whoever blew the whistle on Rudolf Straeuli’s ‘Kamp Staaldraad’.
Of course, there’s another, more recent, reason for Afrisol to be unhappy about his appointment to Washington: as an Afrikaner, Meyer will be perfectly placed to explain to everyone he meets that white people are not being persecuted in South Africa, and that anyone who says differently is doing it as a fundraising hustle. In other words, Meyer represents a very real threat to the race grift currently being run by all those white South Africans who see the Trump regime as a once-in-a-generation cash cow.
Still, I know that a lot of people are angry about this, so let me leave them with two tiny slivers of comfort.
If you believe that Meyer is a creature of the old regime and a stooge of white capital, then you must also surely concede that he knows how to extract small concessions from heavily armed racists and white supremacists.
And if you believe that he’s an ANC cadre, then you will no doubt agree that he is highly experienced at being diplomatic and charming around corrupt, incompetent arrogant cadres wasting taxpayers’ money.
So I ask you both: who could be better qualified to attend the court of King Donald?
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