Kim Heller’s Fanagalo: African Politics for Dummies
Political satire in which Gillian Schutte marks Kim Heller’s article like an exasperated lecturer, exposing its weak theory, colonial tone and habit of patting the colonial subject on the head while calling it analysis.
Judith February’s Boogeymen Politics
By Gillian Schutte So here we are. Judith February walks into Daily Maverick with a global crisis in one hand, a local murder docket in the other, and somewhere in between she finds Donald Trump and decides, yes, that’s the guy. That’s the problem. Pack it up. Geopolitics solved. South Africa saved in one sweep. Trump, of course, obliges. He always does. He stomps into the piece like a reality TV villain who forgot he’s supposed to be running an empire. Loud. Erratic. Easy to hate. He does the heavy lifting so nobody else has to think too hard. Meanwhile, seventy years of US foreign policy quietly slips out the back door. Because the United States did not suddenly wake up under Trump and decide to destabilise the Middle East. That script has been running since Mossadegh nationalised oil in 1953 and paid the price. Since then it has been one long, well-funded routine. Iraq. Libya. Sanctions. Bases. Alliances. The empire does not care who sits in the Oval Office. It only prefers some of them to speak in complete sentences. But Judith needs Trump. Without Trump, the story gets complicated. With Trump, everything becomes a personality problem. Clean. Contained. Convenient. Then comes the balancing act. She tells us the United States and Israel started the war with Iran. Good. We’re still grounded. And then, almost immediately, she reaches across, pulls Iran into frame, dusts it off, and places it neatly beside them as co-author of the mess. There we go. Everyone’s equally bad. Moral symmetry restored. Liberal equilibrium intact. The United States runs a global military network and controls financial systems that can shut down economies at will. Israel operates with that backing. Iran survives under sanctions, pressure and constant threat and builds whatever deterrence it can. Judith surveys this landscape and decides, yes, same energy. Russia and China drift in next, because no liberal script feels complete without them hovering somewhere in the background, apparently “having a field day.” Everyone outside the club now shares a table. The West remains the slightly embarrassed adult in the room, still in charge of discipline, still convinced it holds the moral centre. Then we get the United Nations. International law. The polite furniture of global order. The Security Council veto sits there like a giant “Do Not Enter” sign, but we are told the system still works if everyone behaves properly. Now oil briefly forces its way in. The Strait of Hormuz matters. Energy matters. Control matters. Wars cluster where resources sit. Judith acknowledges this and moves on quickly, because material interests complicate a perfectly neat moral storyline. And then, just when you think we’re still somewhere between Tehran and Washington, she takes a sharp turn and lands in Johannesburg. Fuel crisis. Corruption. Strategic Fuel Fund. Yes, South Africa has problems. It always has. But these problems did not arrive last week. They grew out of colonial extraction, apartheid planning and a global system that still expects the Global South to import what it once produced. Judith trims that history down to “governance issues.” Clean. Manageable. Almost fixable. And then – plot twist – she brings in murdered lawyers. Chinette Gallichan. Thomas and Cloete Murray. Tracy Brown. Bouwer van Niekerk. Coreth Naude. Real people. Real violence. Real stakes. And suddenly they are standing in the same paragraph as Iran. You can almost hear the editorial logic. “How do we raise the stakes?”“Add murder.”“Perfect. Now it lands.” Because nothing says Middle East war analysis quite like a South African labour lawyer shot outside the CCMA. So what is she doing? She is building atmosphere. She is stacking crises until the reader feels surrounded. Tehran bleeds into Johannesburg. Oil prices bleed into courtrooms. Violence becomes ambient. The message settles in: instability sits everywhere, across everything, all at once. And when everything feels terrifyingly unstable, people reach for order. Enter the Constitution. Enter Nicholas Haysom, calm, measured, reassuring. The rule of law will save us. Institutions will guide us. Accountability will restore balance. It is a beautiful ending. It carries the full weight of the argument. Because that Constitution remains tied to property relations forged under colonialism and apartheid. It protects white capital while declaring that the land belongs to all who live in it. It protects land accumulated through conquest. It accommodates foreign ownership, Israeli capital among it, and endless mall developments that reproduce the same spatial logic. It narrows the path for land restitution and secures an arrangement that remains deeply unequal. The rule of law enforces that arrangement with precision. Judith looks at this and says we need more of it. Of course she does. She is not writing into a void. She writes for a specific audience. The policy circuit. The NGO class. The Government of National Unity. Boardroom liberals. Democratic Alliance voters who prefer their crises neatly arranged and morally balanced. The international gaze that still looks to Washington for cues. Even Lex Libertus and AfriForum can read this and feel reassured. As far as she is concerned everyone recognises the language. Everyone finds their place in it. The donors stay calm. The report reads well. Trump absorbs the blame. Iran joins the pile. Russia and China hover in the background. South Africa needs better governance. Lawyers must be protected. The Constitution stands tall. Liberalism survives another day. And the structure of power continues without interruption. So let’s ask. What exactly did Judith February explain here? Other than the fact that if you gather enough boogeymen into one room, the Constitution starts to look like a superhero… and the funding continues to flow to the rule-of-law industry without disturbance. Image: AI-assisted composite based on original photograph.