The Atlantic has a very good article on SA's negative reaction to bin Laden's death this week. I highly recommend reading it for background on SA's foreign policy.
An excerpt:
"The ANC's position on bin Laden's demise is illustrative of a disturbing trend: South Africa's transformation, under its tutelage, into an increasingly anti-Western power. Supported by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the ANC's alliance with the communist bloc was more than just a tactical alignment for an exiled, decimated, and desperate liberation movement. Most of the ANC's senior leaders during the apartheid years were simultaneously members of the South African Communist Party, and today, the ANC governs the country as part of a formal "Tripartite Alliance" with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Thanks to its intellectual kinship with Marxism-Leninism, decades-long working alliance with such thugs and terrorist movements like Muammer Qadaffi and the PLO, and lingering resentment towards Western governments for not taking a harder line against the apartheid government, the ANC elite has never gotten over its deep suspicion of the West in general and America in particular. Coloring all this is the continuing legacy of apartheid, which has made the party's intellectual elite hostile toward anything that carries even a hint of "colonialism" about it."
On a related note, the front-page headline in The Star, an SA paper, the day after the death was that OBL was unarmed. This turned out to be true and confirmed by the White House, but at the time the only source of that was a statement from one of OBL's wives. That they would take that statement and state it as fact on a headline despite the (then) contradictory message from the people actually involved said something to me.
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