The state of South African House in Trafalgar Square is commensurate with the state of South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Courts of Justice. Underestimated, managed afar by twisted people who cannot or do not want to listen, and reeking of piss.

But make no mistake: its unexpected shuttering is a disgrace. For its facilities to have decayed or broken to the extent they have insults every single South African at home and abroad.

South Africa House is more than a magnificent building. Its prominence adjacent to one of the world’s most recognisable squares isn’t luck or favouritism but meaning; for all of history’s turbulence and sacrifice, dispossession and suffering, the fixture represents home in the manner of unconditional love, simplified to birth, blood, inheritance, and the increasingly rare sense of permanence.

This feeling inside what is ultimately our country’s most prominent Western expression is almost impossible to articulate. You could be Winne Mandela’s greatest supporter living in London, hold a wildly inaccurate interpretation of your country’s history, or refuse to entertain any criticism of the African National Congress (ANC). And yet, waiting in a queue to speak to someone, or attending an event in one of the rooms, you are just the same as those who depart from your views. Ghosts command that building, and we, their children, obey.

The incumbent High Commissioner Kingsley Mamabolo cannot be blamed. A kind, gentle, and thoughtful man, he has been pulling his hair out at the state of the place. Sources inside the diplomatic corps point the finger at his predecessor, Nomatemba Tambo, but others go way back to Mendi Msimang (High Commissioner from 1995 to 1997), and the first indication of complacency creep.

More Expensive

When Grade II listed property is subjected to decay, the process of restoration is invariably more expensive because of the regulations imposed by conservation bodies tasked with preserving historical integrity. In buildings like this, essentially a series of interconnecting features, decay begets decay. The same problem has struck London’s Victorian plumbing infrastructure for over 100 years; in the same ways councils have neglected routine maintenance, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) evidently ignored warnings.

For the last two years, readers of The Telegraph have anointed Cape Town their favourite international destination. In 2024, over a quarter of a million Germans visited the country. South Africa boasts some of the world’s best safari lodges, wine farms, and golf courses. Yet walk the first inches eastward on the Strand and you’ll be forgiven for thinking the country has been plunged into war and all the staff have been sent to the front lines.

In a wider scope the last two years bear witness to an astonishing effort to expose and destroy individuals and groups set – supposedly – on embarrassing their country in the eyes of the world.

Emphasis on South Africa’s unacceptably high crime rate. The stories of municipal corruption and collapse. The success of groups proofing their communities from local government. The racket of broad-based black economic empowerment and its (extremely) limited pool of beneficiaries – not to mention grotesque gorging schemes being sunlit at the Madlanga Commission. The “genocide” aspersion (almost certainly peddled with the complicity of the state) and the Afrikaners seeking refuge in the United States.

Punished

The punishment for talking about these things has been brutal. Yet for all the accusations of treachery and the stamping of little feet in newsrooms, nothing represents a worse example of the country than the closure of one of its most powerful symbols – for entirely avoidable reasons. No Afrikaans or Jewish group or independent media schemed and executed this – and no wafty platitudes about unity or choice can unblock a urinal.

So, the building becomes the story of our country in the eyes of the sensible world. A never-ending procession of celebrations in which entitlements and moral grandeur deprive us of sound judgement and priority. We puff our chests as liberators and defenders of the marginalised, yet when it comes to ensuring these sometimes contentious views have foundation, our hubris turns around and smacks us in the face. You could not find a wider distance between what South Africa thinks of itself and what it actually looks like.

But appearance has never been a major concern for the type of thinking contained in DIRCO. Instead they aspire to the logic of Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health. Addressing a recent Q&A on the subject of health being inseparable from human dignity, the substantial Mofokeng decided to talk about herself, using the language of contemporary suicidal Palestinian empathy peppered with “anti-colonialism” and “anti-imperialism”. In addition to the obsession with self we discover (especially) among unelected officials eager to scold, there was an absence of actual health information.

This is the way DIRCO sees the world today. While an amateur practice of open border advocacy is useful to curry favour with the media, it scorns the usual business of the world, diplomacy, and patriotism. Ordinary people opting or encouraged or forced to live outside of their country do not apply the extravagant filters dreamed up through niche academia.

Vindicated

Longtime critics of the ANC will feel all sense of vindication. Why give your enemies the ammunition?

They will be able to draw straight lines between Trafalgar Square and Rand Water and City Power and all the other institutions contaminated with sleaze and incompetence – and they will be right. But much worse than the crumbling interior or the dirty exterior is the attitude accompanying it, split in two parts.

The one suggests that it's okay with decline – a casual what-will-be-will-be. The second hints at the country’s international reputation being shifted into the hands of initiatives such as The Hague Group – that is to say the impressions of our country will henceforth be decided by obscure gambles.

Basically, the coward’s surrender: what we think, as opposed to what we do.