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Last week, Cyril Ramaphosa staged a photo opportunity via a visit to the home of Zimbabwean dictator Emmerson Mnangagwa. The purpose was nominally to boost Mr Ramaphosa’s image as a populist revolutionary and came just days before he made a shallow appeal for Europe and America to pay reparations to Africa for colonialism and slavery, arguing that those two evils continue to pin the continent into poverty and underdevelopment.

What a lot of nonsense.

Firstly, a lot of the continent is no longer pinned to a future of poverty and underdevelopment, and the bulk of the world’s fastest-growing economies are now in Africa. The ratio of aid to trade dollars long since flipped in favour of the latter. The number of megawatts added to Africa’s electrical grid is rising exponentially. It is widely held that, beyond the popular question of critical minerals, Africa is the world’s last great untapped consumer market and the solution to the global protein crisis. That South Africa has become a laggard in all those respects, and today shows an economic growth rate of just a fraction of its leading African peers, is a reflection on its own government, not on the outlook for the broader continent.

Secondly, while slavery was an unmitigated evil, the practice was common to every culture in history. Nor was slavery a one-way street in which only black Africans were the hapless victims and the modern-day Western world the perpetrators. More than a million Europeans were abducted and enslaved by the North African Barbary pirates between the early 1500s and late 1700s. In the 1800s, more than 2 000 British naval personnel died in combat seeking to stop slavery off Africa’s west coast, a trade facilitated on the supply side by Africans themselves. Should West African taxpayers pay reparations to Britain? The whole notion of settling history via reparations is absurd.

Indeed, it is not even history yet and the practice of slavery continues to be perpetrated in Africa by Africans to this day! Human rights activists estimate that over five million Africans are enslaved via forced labour and compelled sexual servitude.

The reason why parts of Africa continue to suffer in poverty has far more to do with the likes of Mr Ramaphosa’s Zimbabwean host than with the savagery of slavery of centuries ago.

Well done to the Democratic Alliance’s Ryan Smith, the party spokesperson on foreign affairs, for reminding South Africans that just weeks ago, Mr Mnangagwa saw to it that a leader of the Zimbabwean opposition, Tendai Biti, was thrown into prison for opposing a law that might cement Mr Mnangagwa’s dictatorship.

Is that really what it has come to for Mr Ramaphosa and his party, to spend what remains of their careers in the company of such a person and thereby take on the mantle of all the economic failure and suffering that Zimbabwe has been through? What an insult to all the good people who worked with the African National Congress (ANC) for the liberation of South Africa and who believed in its bona fides. At this newspaper, we think the ANC is a better party than that, but it and its leader are sure working hard to prove us wrong.