VUYANI PAMBO | 'South Africa must defend its sovereignty against external influence'

The election of Trump as President of the United States of America in November 2024, and the tectonic shifts his presidency has ushered into the world of global diplomacy from the moment he took office in early 2025, cannot be understood outside of a re-emergent and re-emboldened putsch for imperialism. 

At the core of this putsch is an aggressive attempt to redefine global politics in a manner that makes almost everyone else subservient to the whims of American politics. 

Every single announcement made in very unconventional diplomatic channels by all those associated with Trump constantly re-emphasises this point; the US is prepared to use its might to reinforce white supremacist thinking across the word. 

You see this in the manner Trump approaches the war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocidal actions in Palestine, and his obsession with South Africa.

In his seminal book “Discourse of Colonialism”, renowned Martinique philosopher, Aime Cesaire, posits that “the colonizers' sense of superiority, their sense of mission as the world's civilizers, depends on turning the Other into a barbarian”. 

It is therefore not violence that the colonising imperialists like Trump, those who came before him, and those who will come after them are against, it is violence against the white skin. 

Cesaire argues that the imperialist forces hate Hitler not because Hitler killed, but because Hitler applied the violence that had been normalised against black people on white skins. This is the reason why Hitler is demonised, but not King Leopold, whose tenure as King of Belgium saw the annihilation of the population of the Congo. 

The indignation, therefore, is not of the indiscriminate killings of people, but of the indiscriminate killing of white people. In the mind of a white supremacist, there is a clear distinction between white and non-white, between what is considered human and non-human. 

Bouventura de Sousa Santos coinage of the concept of an “abyssal line” emanates from this distinction. De Sousa Santos argues that the abyssal line is the divide that separates being from non-beings, at least in the supremacist conception of reality. 

In terms of this conceptualisation, Lucia Sarimento Verano argues that beyond the abyssal line “lies the world of “the other” the one that does not exist in discourses of “humanity” or human rights, with whom no equivalence or reciprocity is imaginable because they are not considered fully human. We are talking about the colonised, the wretched of the world, in Fanon’s words.”

How is this then manifested by the conduct of the Trump administration? One needs to go no further than how the Trump administration has asserted its powers concerning the Ukraine war, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and its approach to South Africa.

In Ukraine, despite some humiliation to President Zelensky, Trump is preoccupied with silencing the guns and stopping the senseless loss of human life.

He pays no regard to who may have done what to instigate the war, he simply wants Caucasians to stop senselessly killing each other. The sight of mutilated corpses of white Ukrainians splattered across the landscape is deeply disturbing to white supremacists, it is a sight they would want to prevent at all costs.

In Israel, there is documented evidence spanning over a century of Israeli de-humanisation of Palestinian people. From the moment of the Balfour Declaration, issued in November 1917 by the British government, committing to the establishment of a Jewish settlement to satisfy the long-held Zionist aspiration for the establishment of a Jewish territory for the Jewish people who had been scattered across the world, Palestinian people have never known peace. 

This Zionist movement was very particular about the location of the state they aspired to; it had to be on the land that was occupied by Palestine. The recent upsurge in violence in the region is a culmination of mobilisation of just over a century, supported by America and the rest of the Western world.

At the core of this is the refusal to see Palestinians as human beings worthy of rights. Their blood is not as important, and their plight is not deserving of attention. The escalation of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza recently, and the brazen manner this is done, and the reality that no one is standing up for the people of Palestine in any significant way, is evidence that the problem of race is still as strong as ever. 

As recent as the 18th of March in 2025, Israel sprayed bombs over Gaza, instantly killing over 400 people, breaking the ceasefire agreement that had been in place. Trump is in full support of this indiscriminate killing of Palestinian people, he supports this because he doesn’t see them as fully human.

This is the same logic the US is applying in their relentless obsession with South Africa. South Africa must be one of very few places on earth where there is a sizeable white population that is not in full control of political power.

The assertion by a tiny group of racists that the post-1994 dispensation has persecuted them is not difficult to dismiss. Whites are a settler minority in this country. Despite this, whites continue to wield massive social and economic power. 

They own the land, own the mines, own almost every other industry in this country. It is not whites, but blacks who stay in rat-infested and flea-ridden shacks, it is blacks who are worked as slaves in white owned farms, it is blacks who are daily victims of crime. And yet, despite all of this, the supremacist yearning for full control blinds this settler minority and fuels their nostalgia for full apartheid, not just the economic apartheid that still benefits them.

The characterisation made by Ebrahim Rasool that Trump is fuel for the global mobilisation of white supremacists is a correct one. South Africa must refuse to bow to this pressure, regardless of the costs that the country may suffer. 

The ideals our ancestors fought for can never be traded off for a few pence. In the short term, South Africa must refuse to grant credentials to any US appointment for ambassadorship in this country if that person seeks to undermine the country’s sovereignty in any way.

Vuyani Pambo is the head of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) presidency.