In a scene more fitting for a satirical dystopia than a serious moment of diplomacy, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa found himself at the symbolic heart of American imperial power — the Oval Office — turned overnight into a make-believe martial tribunal.
Presiding was President Donald Trump, a man who himself once flouted subpoenas and scorned judicial norms. Playing prosecutor was Elon Musk, the billionaire born in South Africa but reborn as the high priest of unregulated techno-capitalism.
Watching from the jury bench: a smirking JD Vance, representing the smouldering conscience of America’s entertainment-justice complex.
This was no real trial — it was political theatre, a show trial designed not for justice but for a performance of power. In this Oval courtroom, Ramaphosa stood accused not for crimes of corruption or incompetence, but for daring to challenge a sacred cow of Western foreign policy: the impunity of Israel.
Earlier, South Africa had petitioned the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The move sent tremors through the Western world’s carefully constructed narrative scaffolding, where only non-Western states are meant to appear in the docket, and only African warlords or Balkan nationalists are to be branded with the moral weight of international criminality.
Ramaphosa’s South Africa flipped the script — and now, he was being made to pay for it, in symbolism if not in law.
Trump’s Oval courtroom is the very antithesis of The Hague. Here, justice is inverted: the judge is an indicted demagogue, the prosecutor an unelected oligarch, and the jury a caricature of populist opinion.
The trial is not about law, but about loyalty — to empire, to capital, and to the racialised global order that continues to define who may rule and who must obey.
The prosecution of Ramaphosa — staged, imagined, or allegorical — is not a response to any legal breach. It is a response to an act of disobedience. South Africa’s challenge to Israel at the ICJ punctured the Western myth of impartial international law.
That challenge, modest as it may seem in military or economic terms, was revolutionary in symbolic value. It reminded the world that African states can still speak with moral clarity — and worse, with legal authority.
That is the true provocation. Not the ICJ filing, but the audacity to file it.
Ramaphosa’s performance in Trump’s court echoes the infamous “Zelensky moment” — but inverted. Where President Volodymyr Zelensky sat before Trump in solemn appeal for weapons and solidarity, Ramaphosa stands accused for speaking truth to power. Zelensky was lauded for aligning with Western interests. Ramaphosa is lambasted for challenging them.
The encounter in Trump’s Oval Office, though fictionalised, captures a deeper geopolitical truth: when African leaders defy the expectations of docility, they are recast from partners into pariahs.
When they exercise the very international mechanisms the West helped build, they are told they have overstepped. The problem is not that Ramaphosa has broken the rules — it is that he has dared to play the game with agency.
This is not to sanctify Ramaphosa. His domestic record is far from clean. His ANC government wavers between moral gestures abroad and political decay at home. But the international system is not interrogating his failures — it is punishing his defiance.
And this punishment is more symbolic than juridical. Musk’s role as prosecutor is not coincidental. He represents the extrajudicial elite — those who wield power without democratic mandate or legal accountability.
That he, not a jurist or diplomat, leads the charge against Ramaphosa speaks volumes about what this performance is truly about: the containment of postcolonial voice within acceptable bounds.
This spectacle sends a clear message to the Global South: use the law, and the law will be turned against you. Seek justice, and justice will become your noose. Challenge empire, and even its clowns will put you on trial.
But this message need not be received with fear. It should instead embolden. For if the law is manipulated by the powerful, then reclaiming it — even symbolically — becomes an act of radical resistance.
Ramaphosa’s challenge to Israel may not succeed in court, but it has already succeeded in court of global consciousness. The South, long regarded as the audience of world affairs, is stepping onto the stage.
In the end, Trump’s Oval courtroom is just a set — elaborate, loud, and ultimately hollow. The real courtroom lies elsewhere: in the hearts of people who believe justice is not a Western monopoly.
Ramaphosa’s trial, however absurd, is a metaphor for the cost of telling the truth in a world where truth itself is on trial.
Let this moment mark a shift — not into the theatre of submission, but into the drama of dignity. The Global South must not only appear in the empire’s plays — it must start writing the script.
Dr Sibangilizwe Moyo writes on Church and Governance, politics, legal, and social issues. He can be reached at moyolegal@yahoo.com