The Pillars of The Jacob Zuma-Led South Africa's Foreign Policy : An Afrocentric Review

The pillars upon which South Africa's foreign policy rests have been a subject of significant scholarly enquiry, most of which have been framed from a Western paradigm. A particularly notable feature from the available literature on the pillars of South Africa's foreign policy is the occasional tendency of the country to deviate from some of these pillars in favour of other interests. Given the above, revisiting the cornerstones of the Jacob Zuma administration's foreign policy with an alternative Afrocentric lens is a worthy exercise. First, the exercise shall indicate whether the Zuma administration made any substantial changes to the objectives that guided the previous administrations' foreign policy. Second, the exercise enables one to understand whether the Zuma administration was able to resist the 'habit' of jettisoning what is on paper in favour of other interests. Methodologically, this article adopts document study and discourse analysis in its broadest form.