In the palaces of early modern Europe, access to the sovereign was everything. Between ruler and subject stood a powerful class of intermediaries: the courtiers. They were neither elected nor accountable, yet they held immense power.
They shaped the sovereign’s image, absorbed his moods, silenced his critics, and cloaked self-interest in the language of loyalty. Theirs was the politics of proximity. Their loyalty was to power, not to the public.
South Africa’s post-election Government of National Unity (GNU) has seen the rise of the revived modern courtier. Today’s courtiers do not drift through the marble halls of palaces — they transcend physical confines through curated social media campaigns, they tweet and post, scripting press releases, spinning crisis into cohesion, staging photo opportunities and trading visibility.
Yet, their role remains unchanged: to filter power through performance, to conceal uncertainty with appearance, and to govern the people by managing their perception.
Courtiers thrive in systems where ambiguity protects power and the power of proximity overrides principle. In the case of the GNU, this ambiguity is not accidental: it is structured by necessity.
Fragile alliances, broad-stroke mandates and uneasy ideological pairings create the perfect conditions for unaccountable actors to flourish. The recent “Whitfield-gate” saga has simply amplified the dissonance in the public discourse. Influence no longer flows from ideas or mandates, but from access alone. The courtier does not serve the public, only the powerful; fluent in persuasion, loyal to position and accountable to no one.
The GNU has not merely redistributed power, it has multiplied the illusion of access to it. With more parties brought into the Cabinet, the circle of those closest to executive authority has also broadened.
Growing networks of unarticulated proximity without a corresponding expansion of accountability reinforces the courtier dynamic: the more intermediaries are seen to speak for and to power, the harder it becomes to locate who governs and on what terms.
In this way, the GNU has not diluted the politics of proximity; it has institutionalised it. This is not transparency: it is choreography.
Writing in the early 16th century, in “The Book of the Courtier”, B Castiglione describes the ideal courtier as one who has mastered how to “conceal art, for if it is discovered, it ... destroys [his] credit and brings [him] into small esteem” — an elaborate scheme of appearing effortless while crafting power relations behind the veil of charm.
A courtier is not a legislator, nor are they a leader; they are the hand behind the curtain, the adulator, rewarded for being indispensable and invisible in equal measure.
Skilled in words but vacant of mandate
The courtier is skilled in words but vacant of mandate. They are loyal to perception, not to policy. When engaging with the public, they often feign intercession and intervention with those who hold power, leveraging proximity into perceived merit, influence grounded in familiarity, not substance.
Some might say it echoes lobbying, but the contrast is stark. For instance, corporate lobbying around climate policy, such as Sasol’s private interventions with the Treasury over the carbon tax, is public record, regulated and debatable. Lobbying, for all its flaws, is regulated, its actors are declared, its funding traced and its outcomes can be contested.
Daily Maverick’s exposé of the IDT “Dior-edition” alleged bribe blatantly strips the courtier of his velvet glove. Proximity is currency; perception a weapon; the public interest an inconvenience to be managed.
When power is exercised channelling courtiers, it is unregulated, informal and unaccountable. Influence by proximity and ambiguity plays out both in back rooms and in public performance.
In the GNU, compromise is no longer a tool of deliberation, but a cover for contradiction. It is this ambiguity that nourishes the courtier, a political environment where clarity is not required, only coherence of tone. As long as the right hashtags trend and the press briefings are well worded, the courtier’s job is done. Power is exercised through narrative, not through consequence.
This erosion is particularly stark in the field of immigration enforcement. Before the GNU, the Democratic Alliance’s election platform offered a markedly different tone, one grounded in law, process and long-term planning of inclusion. It favoured rationalised policy over punitive expedience.
Yet in office, the DA Minister of Home Affairs Dr Leon Schreiber’s stance has visibly shifted.
With public endorsements and social media posts praising mass deportations and raids, and military-style branding such as “Operation New Broom”, the minister seems to have fallen for the politics of spectacle, leaving us to question the voices that now shape his ministerial choices.
The transformation is not merely administrative, it is theatrically punitive, a display of authority. Such moves not only signal a departure from policy coherence, but risk entrenching arbitrary enforcement as a political strategy, undermining not just trust, but the very principle of rule-bound governance.
As I argued in a recent commentary on Operation New Broom, this shift is not an isolated policy correction, but part of a broader and troubling performative turn. The courtier thrives here too, puppeteering trolls, recasting executive authority into a carefully staged performance, where legitimacy is measured not by the rule of law, but by audience reception.
Governance through image is dangerous because it is misleading.
Unemployment remains severe, criminal rates keep spiking, institutional incompetence is real and inequality is structural. These are not conditions that can be managed through performance. They require vision, authority and, above all, accountability.
Accountability begins with knowing who is governing
As Castiglione understood, the courtier exists to please, never to confront. They soothe the sovereign. They flatter the moment. And in doing so, they empty the role of public servant of its only virtue: service.
What replaces it is a politics of convenience, where image takes precedence over integrity, and where proximity to power replaces accountability to the people.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of political actors whose strength lies in “clout”. The ability to shape sentiment on social media has become a currency of influence. Digital virality, not ideological consistency, determines access. Influence is no longer won through democratic mandate, but through algorithmic popularity.
It is the return of the courtier, dressed in retweets and TikTok reels. The implications are far reaching. When visibility becomes a qualification for power, and performance a substitute for policy, democratic substance is slowly hollowed out.
What remains is a structure filled with actors, but devoid of purpose.
Even outside the realm of formal politics, the courtier archetype endures. Figures like Elon Musk now play courtier roles on a global scale, unelected but indispensable; private, but proximate.
With a single post or platform policy, he can reframe national debates, destabilise regulatory consensus, or recast sovereign narratives as marketable disruptions.
To accept this trajectory is to resign ourselves to a politics without truth, where decisions are made in strategy rooms, not by elected representatives, but by fixers. The courtier, once a figure of aristocratic courts, is reborn as the architect of democratic illusion.
Even when not overtly corrupt, the courtier poses a systemic danger: they distort the relationship between the governed and the governor. In early modern governance, courtiers stood not only between sovereign and subject, but above the accountability structures that bound both.
Courtiers do not merely channel power, they reshape how power sees the world, insulating leadership from reality, and filtering decision-making through performance.
Donald Trump’s administration’s reception of the 59 Afrikaner “refugees” stands as a symbolic instance in which facts mattered less than optics. Just as the Afrikaner “refugee” narrative in the US was weaponised for domestic political resonance, so too has South African immigration policy become a stage for symbolic enforcement.
This is precisely the danger. When proximity to power enables the recasting of isolated incidents into emblematic causes, governance becomes mood management and policy becomes theatre.
That trend has only sharpened and has broadened across the GNU’s Cabinet: performative populism continues to outpace substance, with ministerial platforms used less for communicating governance than for consolidating profile.
This is not mere optics, it is systemic drift, where media management substitutes for accountable leadership. DM