“We never asked them to kiss our ass,” a former US diplomat said in exasperation this week as the fallout from US ambassador Reuben Brigety’s allegation that a covert shipment of weapons to Russia was loaded onto the Lady R in Simon’s Town in December hit home in Washington.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Lady R in South Africa

What he meant was that the US is used to the slings and arrows, which it often deserves, but that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the world. It unleashed an upsurge in Cold War-style hostility towards the US in South Africa while US sensitivity to anti-Americanism rose, especially when coupled with support for Russia in a war seen as integral to US national security.

Where Brigety crossed the line was not only in publicising the weapons allegation but in going after the ANC for its attacks on the US. US diplomats in the past would simply ignore the rhetoric and concentrate on interacting with the grownups in government.

Brigety met on Wednesday with ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula, who apparently wrung out from him another apology for breaking protocol. Clearly, the envoy is under instructions from the State Department to tamp things down after the diplomatic equivalent of poking a beehive with a stick.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ANC’s Mbalula smooths over Lady R diplomatic rift between SA and US

But before anyone sees this as some kind of relief, be warned: the mood in Washington towards the South African government has soured.

The Republican response was predictable. Senator Jim Risch, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blamed the State Department for dropping Brigety in the soup and slammed the ANC’s “anti-American screeds”.

Even liberal democrats like former US ambassador to Botswana, Michelle Gavin, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, welcomed Brigety’s willingness to confront the ANC’s anti-Americanism.

“It’s long past time to stop romanticising the US-South Africa relations, or pretending that a one-sided enthusiasm for cooperation with the South African government is a critical linchpin in US-Africa policy,” she wrote.

South Africa’s friends in DC are perplexed at what they say amounts to a form of diplomatic malpractice. South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Nomaindia Mfeketo, has been missing in action for more than two months through this crisis. She is on sick leave.

South African Ambassador to the US Nomaindiya Cathleen Mfeketo. (Photo: Wikimedia)

The view in Washington is that the delegation headed by National Security Advisor Sydney Mufamadi was hastily arranged, badly timed and did not get to meet the A team in DC.

Though one goal of the trip was to address the fear that South Africa is going to be kicked out of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, Ebrahim Patel, under whose ministry Agoa falls, was not even included in the delegation.

South Africa has no lobbyists in the US to proactively and consistently go out to represent its interests and explain itself, no regular interaction with Congress and virtually no pushback when unfriendly articles appear in the press.

Agoa representations are meanwhile being led by Botswana’s ambassador Onkokame Kitso Mokaila, a former businessman and cabinet minister who is widely respected in Washington. 

The thing that might save South Africa’s Agoa privileges at the end of the day would be an unwillingness to subject the region to the knock-on effects of such an action.

And yet, as J Peter Pham, former US special envoy to the Sahel and the Great Lakes points out, South Africa has benefitted more than any other African country from US development programmes — especially Agoa and the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief (Pepfar).

Pepfar has funded South Africa to the tune of at least $6-billion during the last 20 years, and helped develop the country’s world-class infection-fighting capacity. Life expectancy in South Africa went from 53.9 years in 2003, when Pepfar was created at the height of the HIV/Aids crisis, to 64.8 years in 2023.

Writing in The Hill newspaper, Pham sees South Africa as an object lesson in the failure of soft power because, “with the possible exception of the Eritrean dictatorship, no country on the African continent has a foreign policy as much at odds with US interests”.

But such a cost-benefit analysis misses the point. The foundation of the special relationship between the two countries came from an emotional investment that many Americans felt in ending apartheid and seeing the new South Africa succeed.

The simplistic view within the ANC is that the Soviet Union supported the armed Struggle while the US was on the side of apartheid during the Struggle.

Though it was certainly true of the US government, it airbrushes out the contribution of millions of Americans who campaigned against apartheid on college campuses, in local governments and state houses, and on Capitol Hill itself.

Groups such as TransAfrica, whose activism was born out of the civil rights movement created grassroots-driven foreign policy, forced the banks to refuse to roll over loans to Pretoria and a bipartisan super-majority in Congress to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. President Joe Biden and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell were among those who voted for it.

The sanctions and disinvestment movement were probably the major factor in convincing the apartheid government and big business that the game was up, and they had to seek an accommodation with the country’s black majority.

The shine might have gone off since the glory years of Nelson Mandela but there is still everything to play for in the US.

No matter what the ANC feels about the past and present policies of the US government, a lot of Americans remain well-disposed towards South Africa. This is goodwill that should not be squandered.

Those in South Africa who are joyful at the prospect of dumping the US and lining up with Brics should Google which country is China’s largest trading partner. It’s the US. The same goes for India. The US is Brazil’s second-largest trading partner after China.

With the exception of North Korea, the whole world is trying to get access to what remains the world’s largest consumer market.

If South Africa wants to keep its special privileges in that market, it needs to get serious about engaging Washington. At the very least, there should be an ambassador in place.

It should also do some soul-searching about who its real friends are and what values and principles it is prepared to go out to die for.

If, at the end of the day, South Africa loses out on Agoa or Pepfar gets cut, there are those who will claim they are victims of a bullying and browbeating hegemon. But that will be no comfort for those who lose their jobs or their businesses. DM