Sanctions don’t always cripple.
I know, I lived through them.
I remember seeing glimpses of the 1984 Olympics coverage on our new colour Television wondering why our country wasn’t there?
Or why we couldn’t watch Clive Rice or Graham Pollock play a test against the Windies — the best cricket team in the world at the time.
Soon I learned that we had long-running sanctions imposed on our country.
It wasn’t just non-ecomomic sanctions.
I remember one day Barclays Bank being in our local shopping mall and the next day all of its signage coming down.
This was just one of many disinvestment moves from big corporations.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa meant we were shut off from the world.
Even our own national government shut the world out from us.
In November 1985, the South African Government banned any form of international press.
Travelling was near impossible, but there was the odd country that would let us in for a bit of R&R. Should one fancy a holiday in Lesotho or Swaziland.
While I was lucky enough to get my hands on the odd comic book, the adverts and back pages were full of halo-like goods I could only imagine.
What does Mellow Yellow taste like?
How big is a Big Mac?
I remember searching for an NBA basketball channel on my black & white portable TV in my room.
The signal wasn’t great, but if you propped the TV up a certain way you were be able to pick up a channel from Bophuthatswana, known as BOP TV.
Basketball was so foreign to me in every way.
While all of these luxuries were out of arms reach it never felt like the country I was growing up in was any worse off.
Of course in segregated far off suburbs we were rolling out egregiously unjust and inhumane national racist policies.
But while political terror and tensions festered most white children growing up like me were sheltered from all the ‘goings-on’.
It was as foreign to us as a Hershey’s bar.
While the world kept imposing stricter sanctions, it felt like South Africa was finding new ways to adapt and be innovative.
Living on a continent that was abundant in natural resources allowed for some of the greatest inventions during the years of forced isolation.
Besides creating the Kreepy Krauly, Prately Putty, the CT Scan and the first heart transplant, our military was suprisingly a force to be reckoned with.
Despite the arms embargo South Africa could still design their own weapons, ordinance, aircraft and fueling systems.
Having developed the first mine-resistant personnel carrier, the Casspir was rolled out to carry troops to the border to fight in the Bush War as well as patrolling townships during heated uprisings. The four-wheeled behemoth even made it’s way onto the District 9 movie set as the white MNU truck that carried Wikus and his team into an alien compound.
Then there was the Rooivalk (Red Falcon) helicopter. What made it so unique was it became the first of its kind to be able to do a full 360 degree loop. A feat previously seen as impossible.
Over the years our military grew a reputation as having the best ability when it came to fighting in bush terrain of any army in the world. Our infantry was second to none alongside Israel.
I mention all of this not to boast, but to raise a point. While sanctions crippled us in many ways, it also forged an undercurrent of solidarity. Not so much as in defiance, but as we say in South Africa, “a boer maak a plan” (a farmer makes a plan). We just had to get on with it. In doing so it galvanised our best minds along with our resources to help innovate and supply that which the rest of the world was starving us from having.
While in theory sanctions were effective in applying external pressure, internal pressure was in fact the dominant motivator in transformation to a free and democratic republic in 1994. You only need to read Tomorrow is Another Country to understand how unsustainable a minority rule over a segregated majority can realistically last.
As Russia draws closer to Kyiv, I’m reminded of how effective sanctions really are and whether Russia is in fact immune to them. While NATO and the rest of the world will try to squeeze Russia economically, we should all be mindful that it could inherently strengthen them in the long term. Countries which isolate tend to become even more sinister and dangerous. One only needs to look at the history of North Korea and Cuba to name a few.
I have no doubt that sanctions will affect the Russian oligarchy the most. But I fear the every day Russians who waited so long for the sickle and hammer to be lowered on December 25, 1991, will again have to sit this one out for a very long time.
As for Putin and his cronies?
Well, just like the Nats took a kraal-like mentality in defiance to West, so too will they enclose themselves even more while plotting and scheming their next move.
It might be an innovation or it might be another devastating land-grab.
