SA's proposals to the US include continuation of AGOA
WASHINGTON - South Africa's proposals to the United States (US) include the continuation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).
More than 32 African countries benefit from the US piece of legislation, giving them duty-free access to the US market.
South Africa has faced threats that it could be booted out of the programme following months of frosty relations with the US.
This could have dire consequences on the rest of the continent. There's already a view that the hike in tariffs by Trump already nullifies the trade act.
ALSO READ: Ramaphosa says working visit to US achieved goal of opening communication channels
South Africa said even as the US mulls over its proposed trade and investment framework, there are no plans to leave the rest of the region and Africa behind.
President Cyril Ramaphosa said that as one of the largest economies on the continent, it's important for South Africa to maintain its African Union (AU), Southern African Development Community (SADC), and sub-Saharan perspective.
He said this is also how they will approach the tariff war that's currently on pause.
'When we do settle down to talk about, for instance, tariffs, we are part of the Southern African Customs Union, so we will be talking about tariffs in that broader context,' said Ramaphosa.
South Africa's president also believes the pair has some views in common when it comes to geopolitics, mainly centred around the building of and keeping peace across nations.
He said Trump also acknowledged the role South Africa plays in peacekeeping efforts.
'We were condemned at an early stage, but much later people realised the role we play is a constructive role.'
Trump surprised some in the Oval Office when he gave a nonchalant response to questions about South Africa taking Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
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In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
