President Joe Biden on Friday will welcome South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa to the White House, part of a renewed US courting of the developing world power after its caution in condemning Russia.
The visit by Ramaphosa comes a month after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made his own trip to South Africa, where he vowed that the United States will do more to listen to Africans.
Successive US administrations have focused much of their energy in Africa on countering the growing influence of China, which has become the continent’s dominant trading partner.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a new front in the US battle for influence in Africa, where many nations have been reluctant to embrace the West in its campaign to punish and pressure Moscow.
“There are reasons for the perspectives that exist and one should never, I think, try to pretend that there aren’t histories,” said South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor.
She pointed to the former Soviet Union’s championing of anti-apartheid forces compared with periods of Western cooperation with South Africa’s former white supremacist regime.
“I think we’ve been fairly clear, in our view, that war doesn’t assist anyone and that we believe the inhumane actions we have seen against the people of Ukraine can’t be defended by anybody,” she said this week at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
“But what we have said is that a lot of the public statements that are made by leading politicians are not assisting in ameliorating the situation, because the first prize must be to achieve peace.”
The United States has sought to highlight the invasion’s role in soaring food prices, as Ukraine was one of Africa’s largest suppliers of grain.
Russia has sought to blame food scarcities on Western sanctions, an argument dismissed by the United States, which says it is not restricting agricultural or humanitarian shipments. (TheSouthAfrican)