What does South African president Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit last Friday to the White House—and the trip last month by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Pretoria—mean for geopolitics and the US-Africa relationship?

Start with symbolism. Typical of the way Joe Biden conducts politics is with self-flattering reminiscences, in the hope he won’t be caught out. At a crucial, primary-election-changing South Carolina campaign rally in early 2020, he bragged to an African-American audience: “I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador (Andrew Young) on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see (Nelson Mandela) on Robbens Island.”

Well, he was certainly called out on that whopper. So last Friday at the White House, he made fun of himself a bit: “I had been stopped trying to get to uh to visit him and see him in prison. And uh, I had said once, I said I got arrested. It wasn’t arrested. I got stopped and prevented from from from moving.”

The incident in December 1976 was apparently just a diversion during his entry to South Africa in December 1976, at Jan Smuts Airport, because he wouldn’t go to the Europeans-Only queue (thus separating from African Americans on the same delegation); and sure, good for him. But Soweto was a long long long way from Robben Island (offshore Cape Town), where Mandela served most of his jail term. That self-serving story obviously rests on his conscience.

And yet Biden is indeed actually owed some gratitude because in the mid-1980s when Ronald Reagan’s veto on anti-apartheid sanctions had to be overruled by Congress, he actually played a very strong role.