Poetic Licence: From Woolworths bags to White House rage

Vusimuzi "Cat" Matlala is a reminder of what we prefer to forget, the unfinished business of a liberation movement that produced heroes and hustlers, martyrs and manipulators, saints and sinners, who often lived inside the same skin. He returns to us like a stone thrown into still water, ripples of discomfort reaching every corner of a democracy that has never quite known what to do with its own ghosts.

And just as we were sitting with that discomfort, another judgement came hurtling from across the Atlantic. Donald J Trump, in his familiar tone of bluster dressed as authority, announced that South Africa will not be invited to the 2026 G20 summit in Miami. As if we were guests at a braai and not a founding member of the G20. As if our sovereignty were a loyalty card that could be revoked because the DIRCO handover ceremony wasn’t grand enough for his ego. As if the world’s diplomatic architecture bends to the mood swings of a single man.

Trump is angry because Pretoria refused to turn the G20 presidency handover into a spectacle fit for American television. So he retaliated with the subtlety of a wrecking ball: “No invitation.” It is the foreign-policy equivalent of kicking over a chessboard because you don’t like the next move. And yet South Africa, steady, almost bored in its response, reminded him, and the world, that we do not need an invitation to a table we helped build.

So here we are, standing at the intersection of two storms: the internal one that tests our integrity, and the external one that tests our dignity.

Inside the house, Matlala asks if we are honest enough to confront corruption when it speaks in the first person. Outside, Trump questions whether we deserve global respect at all. One forces us to reckon with our own failures; the other forces us to reckon with how the world treats us when we refuse to submit.

But the truth is this: South Africa has always been shaped by pressure. We are a nation built by people who survived drowning and taught themselves how to breathe underwater. So when a man like "Cat" Matlala splashes into the public consciousness with accusations of dirty money and political favours, we flinch, but we do not sink. And when a man like Trump tries to score points by disciplining us, we raise an eyebrow, not a white flag.

This moment, messy, loud, inconvenient, is a reminder that our story has never been linear. We are a country balancing between ghosts and giants, between our own contradictions and the world’s arrogance. We are flawed, loud, fragmented, beautiful. And we have never asked permission to exist.

Perhaps the real question is not whether Trump can ban us or whether Matlala is telling the truth. The real question is whether South Africa is finally ready to confront both the sins we commit and the insults we absorb, and to decide, once and for all, who we are beyond the noise.

Because a nation that forgets its ghosts is doomed to repeat them.

But a nation that bows to bullies loses itself entirely.

And South Africa, for all its chaos, has never been the bowing type.