When I was at school, I was involved in exactly one fight. As often happens at schools, there was a school bully and he hated me. I would love to think it was because he was jealous of my winning personality, fabulous good looks, academic brilliance and popularity.
In fact, I realised afterwards, it was probably because I was a geeky loner who spoke funny and looked worse. Also, as it happens, I thought in my heart of hearts that the school bully was a dickhead. And I had a sneaking suspicion that everybody else did too, but they didn’t say anything because the bully was a large, boisterous loudmouth and nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of him. So, in fact, he was the notionally popular one, and I spent my breaks in the library.
Anyway, frustrated at all the taunting, I eventually challenged him to fight. I had just had enough; I was frustrated, my pride was hurt and there was only one way to fix this and that was to settle matters according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. It was an amazingly stupid decision.
Now at my school, Pretoria Boys High School, at the time in the late 1970s, the Marquis of Queensbury was not in fact present. Fights didn’t happen surreptitiously behind the bicycle sheds. They were officially sanctioned by the school. They weren’t “fair” in any modern sense. You reported to the gym master, the whole class attended, you donned boxing gloves and beat each other to a pulp while everybody shouted at you.
This was lateish apartheid. The entire ethos of my boys’ school and many others of its ilk was to “toughen you up”. The ultimate reason, I think, was that white government schools had a sneaking suspicion that the primary utility of young white men would be as war meat in the defence of a racially biased society in which your side was going to be outnumbered. So best you learn how to manage your fists and deal with pain.
And pain was delivered in overwhelming quantities. School masters were sanctioned, actually expected, to cane scholars regularly, you know, “to toughen you up”; on some days I was caned by three different masters. A spelling mistake could end in a caning. Observant readers will notice that this was the same school so hated by Elon Musk, and I know exactly why; the entire ethos was rooted in brutality; academics, not so much. Like him, I hated the place.
Anyway, the fight duly took place, and I’m pretty sure I failed to land a single punch. I was asked several times by the gym master if I wanted to go on, clearly hinting broadly that I should not. But I kept on saying “yes” until eventually he didn’t give me a choice and called a halt. Even the notional friends of the bully felt sorry for me, and told me so afterwards. It did have one good effect: after that I was just ignored, which suited me just fine.
Head for the library
All of this painful memory comes back to me now in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s tariff tantrums. The lesson I learnt from this little slice of life is that if a bully who is much larger than you decides you are going to be a victim, the sensible thing to do is not to try and reason with them. You should definitely not taunt them. And most certainly, fighting is not a good idea. The sensible decision is to stay away and spend your breaks in the library.
Apparently, trade, industry and competition minister Parks Tau and US special envoy Mcebisi Jonas have “deployed a blend of dealmaking and diplomatic signalling aimed at resetting bilateral terms before Friday’s deadline to stave off the higher duties”, Business Day reports. Tau said in a statement on Tuesday: “The intersection of geopolitical, domestic and trade issues best defines the current impasse between South Africa and the US, and a reset is unavoidable.” He stressed that South Africa has no intention of decoupling from the US and has refrained from imposing reciprocal tariffs of its own.
That sounds extremely fancy, but we get the message: this is going to be extremely painful, and we should brace ourselves.
Both sides included in the discussions are obviously tight-lipped about what South Africa is offering, but the general idea is to reduce South Africa’s tariffs from the proposed 30% to 15% by undertaking to import more liquefied natural gas, invest about $3.3bn in US industries such as mining and metals recycling, and simplify agricultural market access. For that, South Africa is hoping for lower general tariffs, an exemption for counter-seasonal agriculture trade and exports for small businesses of less than $1m per annum.
I’m full of admiration for their genteel diplomacy and sensible proposals but, honestly, I don’t know why they are bothering. Why give a bully the pleasure of beating you into a pulp?
A rounding error
Contrast this to the response of the rest of the continent. South Africa is apparently the only African country to submit a country-specific proposal. The AU has confirmed intentions to offer a continental proposal under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to engage with the US, seeking collective tariff relief under World Trade Organisation guidelines. The only problem is that the AfCFTA is not yet a trade-organising body; it has no continental mandate. And its application is really a plea not a negotiation. Effectively, Africans have accepted the worst.
And for most African countries, other than the Democratic Republic of Congo and perhaps Angola, it’s not really relevant anyway. There is so little trade between the US and most African countries, and because most of it is unprocessed minerals that the US actually needs, it won’t really be affected. In 2024, overall US-Africa trade was $72bn, with about 30% of that involving South Africa. Compare that with US trade with China, which is now almost $500bn a year. We are little more than a rounding error in the overall trade war.
Even the “Liberation Day” tariff announcement by Trump suggested that tariffs for half of the continent would remain what they are. The amounts are just too small to bother. There are a couple of problem countries, and they are mostly those which have garment trade with the US, like Swaziland and Lesotho, and those with agricultural trade, like Algeria and Tunisia.
African trade with China is now about four times larger than African trade with the US. This is the other side of why the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) was implemented. It is skewed towards Africa, but it was intended to prime the trade pumps on the US side too, and not just hand the entire continent on a plate to the Chinese and the Russians. This is the deal Trump is apparently so keen to scrap.
And actually, it was working: the deal supports roughly $8bn-$10bn in annual African exports to the US, and total trade is about double what it was a decade ago. But honestly, this is small potatoes.
And because it’s small potatoes, the South Africans actually haven’t even heard back from the Americans about their proposal. Understood, the Americans have bigger issues at hand – like bullying the EU, which has now just been successfully achieved. But think about it, if the EU could not withstand the US tariff steamroller, with its trillion-dollar trade, what chance does Africa have?
I live in hope that somehow in the future justice will eventually be done, and that as Martin Luther King Jr famously said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Every reputable economist I read says these tariffs are a bad idea that will come back to bite the US in the arse. But so far, the expected increase in inflation in the US has not happened, or has not happened yet. It seems possible that Trump will emerge from this strengthened and victorious.
In a similar way, I don’t know what happened in later life to my tormentor, but I’m pretty sure he prospered just fine. Bullies, I find, in general, do well in the world.
But in one respect, I did have the last laugh. Several years ago, I was invited to a reunion at the school, an offer I turned down with joyous alacrity. In yet another act of duplicity, it turned out the “reunion” was actually a fundraiser and at the final black-tie event in the old school hall, “old boys” were asked to publicly declare they would make a regular financial contribution. The organisers contacted me afterwards to say that despite not attending the “reunion”, I was still free to send the school a monthly contribution.
I said I would think about it.
I didn’t. 🤑
Postscript: Lots of PBHS old boys have been on to me saying the school is very different now, and is a genuinely very good school, which I can well imagine. Vestact fund manager Byron Lotter says he attended PBHS in the post-apartheid era. "I absolutely loved it. Today it is even better, a beacon of diversity, churning out well mannered young men".
A lot of people have also pointed out that Musk did not hate PBHS. He was definitely badly bullied at Bryanston High and left in Std 8, for the PBHS, which was considered a more academic school at the time. This may be true, but the fact remains, bullies were rampant when I was there. As a "day boy", I was actually a minor victim; bullies don't discriminate much, I find.
Musk attended not long after I left, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was bullied there too, even though Walter Isaacson's biography doesn't specify. But the point is that the masters were well aware of what was happening, and they did nothing to stop the bullying - some even encouraged it. It was the ethos of lots of schools of the era, not only Bryanston High and PBHS. And actually lots of the Afrikaans schools were much, much worse at the time. People forget.
First published in https://currencynews.co.za/ subscribe here.
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