By Gillian Schutte

Across Africa the rise of BRICS has generated renewed optimism about the weakening grip of Western dominance. Russia and China present themselves as partners rather than overseers, and their diplomacy is framed through the language of sovereignty, non-interference and mutual respect. Many Africans welcome this shift with genuine enthusiasm. After centuries of colonial subjugation and decades of Western conditionality, the emergence of a multipolar world appears to promise breathing space.

Yet Africa must approach this moment with intellectual sobriety. Multipolarity changes the global balance of power. It does not automatically complete the work of decolonisation.

The central question therefore remains unresolved. What relationship emerges between powers whose revolutionary transformations belong to an earlier historical era and societies whose own revolutionary processes remain incomplete?

The contrast between Burkina Faso and South Africa reveals how differently that relationship unfolds across the continent.

Burkina Faso currently occupies the terrain of political upheaval. The rise of Ibrahim Traoré reflects a wider Sahelian shift in which governments and populations rejected the Western military architecture that entrenched itself across the region during the past decade. French troops departed Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger amid widespread mobilisation and growing hostility toward the post-colonial security order.

The Burkinabè leadership frames its project through the legacy of Thomas Sankara. Sankara’s programme insisted that political independence without economic sovereignty merely preserves colonial dependency under new management. His insistence on food self-sufficiency, national control over resources and the dismantling of comprador elites produced one of the most coherent revolutionary economic programmes in modern African history.

The current Sahelian governments draw heavily from that intellectual inheritance. Sankara’s speeches circulated across the region long before the present wave of political transformation. They articulated a vision in which African states recover authority over their land, their production and their strategic decisions.

This tradition resonates strongly with the political writings of Amílcar Cabral. Cabral repeatedly warned that national liberation could collapse into a mere transfer of administrative authority if local elites simply inherited the colonial state apparatus. For Cabral the decisive question was always economic power: who controls production, resources and the direction of national development.

The Sahelian governments are grappling directly with this problem.

Within this atmosphere Russia has entered as a security partner. Military advisers, training missions and equipment transfers have appeared through networks once associated with Wagner structures and through organisations now closer to the Russian defence establishment. Russian personnel assist Burkinabè forces confronting insurgent formations that expanded dramatically during the years of Western military intervention.

These developments followed a political shift initiated by the Sahelian governments themselves. The regional leadership concluded that the Western counter-insurgency framework had failed. They then reorganised their external alliances accordingly.

Russia did not originate that transformation. It responded to a new strategic orientation already articulated by the governments of the region.

Burkina Faso therefore communicates a clear signal to the international system. Sovereignty will be defended through a decisive departure from the geopolitical arrangements that previously shaped its security environment.

South Africa tells a different story.

The negotiated transition that ended apartheid produced political democracy while leaving the deeper economic architecture of colonial accumulation largely untouched. Land ownership patterns, mineral capital and financial power remained embedded within structures inherited from the past.

The political economist Sampie Terreblanche spent decades documenting this continuity. Democratic institutions emerged during the early 1990s while the economic order created under colonialism and apartheid continued with remarkably little structural alteration.

This produced an unusual political formation. South Africa carries the symbolic prestige of a liberation struggle while operating within an economic structure that liberation never dismantled.

South African revolutionary thought recognised this danger long before the transition. Steve Biko insisted that liberation required not only the removal of legal apartheid but the psychological and material transformation of society. Black Consciousness placed the recovery of dignity, land and political agency at the centre of the struggle.

Robert Sobukwe argued that the central question confronting South Africa concerned the restoration of land and sovereignty to the African majority. His political philosophy located liberation within the reclaiming of territory and the dismantling of colonial power structures.

Chris Hani later warned that political freedom without economic transformation would leave the fundamental structures of inequality intact.

Yet the political language that emerged during the transition redirected the national imagination.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission converted historical violence into a process of confession, forgiveness and moral repair. Apartheid’s crimes were narrated before the nation. The economic foundations of racial domination moved seamlessly into the democratic era.

South Africa therefore receives a different form of engagement from the emerging powers of the multipolar world.

Russia and China do not approach the country through security alliances or military cooperation. Their presence appears through diplomatic forums, economic agreements, technology partnerships and cultural exchange. Academic collaborations expand, student exchanges grow and international dialogue platforms multiply. These relationships build influence through institutions, culture and development partnerships rather than through armed cooperation or strategic security restructuring.

In international relations this approach is commonly described as soft power.

Across the contemporary world soft power increasingly defines international engagement. Cultural exchange programmes, academic partnerships, diplomatic forums and development initiatives become the primary instruments through which influence is exercised. China’s global presence includes cultural institutes, student exchanges and civilisational dialogue through institutions such as the Confucius Institute. Russia also engages through cultural diplomacy, multilateral forums and strategic partnerships.

For middle classes and governing elites these engagements appear constructive and stabilising. They promise investment, recognition and participation in an emerging global order.

Yet revolutionary traditions observe the situation differently.

Across South Africa there remains a deep historical affection for Russia rooted in the memory of the Soviet Union. During the liberation struggle the USSR provided training, material support and diplomatic backing to anti-apartheid movements. That solidarity became embedded in the political consciousness of the struggle generation.

This historical memory also shapes contemporary perceptions of Russian leadership. Many within revolutionary circles view Vladimir Putin as a leader who restored national sovereignty after the turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and who has repeatedly framed global politics around the defence of national independence and resistance to Western domination.

Black Consciousness and African liberation philosophy developed from societies confronting conquest, dispossession and economic domination. Their intellectual frameworks centre land, sovereignty, production and psychological liberation.

Soft power rarely engages this terrain. It privileges elite dialogue and cultural exchange while deeper questions of political economy remain suspended.

Over three decades the revolutionary vanguard that once animated South African political life has steadily diminished. The intellectual traditions of Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and socialist transformation have been pushed to the margins by a political culture shaped by donor institutions, international NGOs and media ecosystems closely aligned with Western strategic interests. Within this environment the language of reconciliation, governance reform and global integration displaced the earlier vocabulary of land, sovereignty and economic liberation.

At the same time the social base that historically sustained revolutionary politics has been steadily weakened. The economically dispossessed majority lives under conditions of chronic unemployment, food insecurity and shrinking public resources. Survival absorbs political energy. Communities exhausted by daily struggle rarely possess the organisational capacity required for sustained revolt. This condition is not accidental. Political economies built on extraction and inequality often produce precisely such outcomes.

The result is a society that still remembers its revolutionary history but rarely speaks in its revolutionary voice.

External powers interpret the political terrain that confronts them. Russia responds to the signals transmitted by governments and societies.

When Russia encounters Burkina Faso and South Africa it reads two very different political landscapes.

The Sahelian governments present themselves as states reorganising their security environment and asserting sovereignty against the external structures that governed them for decades. Military cooperation follows that orientation.

South Africa presents itself as a constitutional democracy pursuing reform within the existing global order. Diplomatic engagement, economic partnerships and cultural exchange become the natural form of interaction.

The comparison therefore leads to a difficult question.

Why does Burkina Faso appear on the world stage as a state reclaiming political agency while South Africa remains anchored within the political framework produced by its negotiated settlement?

The answer does not lie in Moscow or Beijing.

It lies within South Africa’s own political trajectory.

Amílcar Cabral warned repeatedly that liberation movements must remain vigilant against the emergence of national elites who grow comfortable managing inherited colonial institutions. Frantz Fanon described a similar danger when nationalist leadership becomes absorbed in the administration of the postcolonial state rather than pursuing deeper transformation.

South Africa now sits within that historical dilemma.

If the country were to confront Western economic domination with the same determination now visible in parts of the Sahel, would Russia and China stand beside such a movement as partners in a renewed anti-imperialist struggle?

Or does multipolar diplomacy follow a harder rule of statecraft: revolutions must be made by the people themselves, while external alliances adjust only after the political ground has already moved?

The decisive question therefore returns to South Africa itself.

When will the dismissed majority, together with the radical traditions that once animated the liberation struggle, reach the moment when compromise no longer holds?

Cabral warned that the most dangerous moment in any liberation struggle arrives when a people begins to believe that history has already ended.

South Africa has not yet reached the end of its history.