Next weekend, the South African city of Johannesburg will host the Group of 20 summit of the world’s top economies.
It will be the first G20 to be held on African soil.
Ireland is not a member but has been invited as a guest by the South African presidency. Taoiseach Micheál Martin will lead the Irish delegation.
It's a reflection of what officials describe as a "warm bilateral relationship" - in no small part borne out of Ireland's role in helping bring about the end of the apartheid regime.
When the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited Ireland last month, he met former Dunnes Stores workers who famously went on strike in 1984 after refusing to sell South African grapefruit.
This act of protest by the "grapefruit ladies" led to Ireland becoming the first western nation to ban all goods from the apartheid regime.
Later, Mr Ramaphosa played a crucial role as a weapons inspector during decommissioning in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.
Speaking during his October visit to Áras an Uachtaráin, he paid tribute to the Dunnes Stores workers as well as those currently supporting South Africa’s "initiative of helping the people of Palestine".
The country instigated a case of genocide against Israel in December 2023, which Ireland joined the following year.
The South African leader also referenced the trade ties between the two nations, saying that South Africa is Ireland’s largest trading partner in Africa and noting that Ireland exported some €46 million worth of whiskey to the country last year.
Also on their way to South Africa are leaders of several other European countries, including Germany, France and Italy and the European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, representing the EU bloc.
China and Russia will send high-level delegations, but not their top leaders. (South Africa would be legally obliged to act on the International Criminal Court warrant for President Putin's arrest on war crimes charges.)
But the world's largest economy - the United States - will be conspicuous by its absence.
In another first in G20 history, the US has decided to boycott the leaders' event.
For some time, Vice President JD Vance was tipped to attend with a large US delegation in tow. But his trip too was cancelled.
Why?
It's no secret that President Donald Trump has a major beef with South Africa.
It was a "total disgrace" the country was hosting the summit, he posted on social media.
"Afrikaners, people who are descended from Dutch, and also French and German settlers, are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated," he wrote, adding that no US government official would attend the summit, "as long as these Human Rights abuses continue."
It was not the first time he had raised these allegations, widely dismissed in South Africa, and beyond, as false.
When the South African President visited the White House in May, Mr Trump insisted they sit and watch a video of a far-left South African politician singing an anti-apartheid song that critics say calls for violence against white farmers.
The video also showed footage of white crosses he said were burial sites. They were not.
As the tense meeting progressed, he presented his guest with a stack of articles he said documented how white farmers faced "death, death, death, horrible death".
The US President had already cut all US aid to South Africa and opened a refugee programme for white South Africans only.
Also, while claiming "white genocide" in South Africa, Mr Trump condemned South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, calling it "aggressive" against the United States and its allies.
The South African government has repeatedly pointed out that most violent crime victims in South Africa are black and that the vast majority of farmland is still owned by the minority white population, with just 4% under black ownership - to no avail.
Mr Trump’s stance won him some support among some white South Africans, some of whom took up his offer to relocate to the United States.
But last month, a prominent group of Afrikaners spoke out against what they saw as the misuse of their identity for political ends.
"We reject the narrative that casts Afrikaners as victims of racial persecution in post-apartheid South Africa," the group of academics, clergy, lawyers, journalists and diplomats wrote in an open letter.
"We are not pawns in America’s culture wars. We are South Africans, part of a diverse evolving nation still grappling with its past and striving toward a more just future," they wrote.
The United States has been involved in G20 working groups throughout this year, but its boycott of the leaders’ summit may have an impact on the outcome.
This is a group that operates by consensus - hard to achieve when such a major player stays away.
And there is the question of what happens when South Africa has to hand the G20 presidency baton to the United States, due to host the summit next year - surely a recipe for some awkwardness at the very least.
US officials have already made clear they will be focusing on macroeconomics next year – in sharp contrast to South Africa’s theme of "solidarity, equality, sustainability".
Nevertheless, as final preparations got underway in Johannesburg this week, African leaders were determined the event would be a success.
And there were those even looking on the bright side.
"Some diplomats in Pretoria realised that had JD Vance or Trump come to the G20 Leaders’ Summit, they would have basically stood in the spotlight," said Pauline Bax, Africa Programme, International Crisis Group.
"A lot of attention would have gone to whatever US leaders would say, rather than trying to find some common ground between the leaders who are present next week," she told RTÉ News.
Certainly, the South African hosts were keen to brush off the US absence.
"Their loss," was how Mr Ramaphosa described it.
The US was "giving up the very important role that they should be playing as the biggest economy in the world," he said.
Of course, this isn’t just seen as a snub to South Africa alone - other African leaders view hosting the G20 as a proud moment for all of them.
"It is indeed unfortunate that the United States boycotts this G20 Summit," the Somalian chairperson of the African Union Commission Mahmoud Ali Youssouf told a news conference at the UN in New York on Wednesday.
"But let me reassure you, I think the African continent has decided to take its destiny in its hands and we are definitely working to increase self-reliance," he said.
"My best response to what others say, is that I will be there," the UN Secretary General António Guterres chimed in.
"I will be there, and I am totally committed to work within the G20 to move all the key reforms that are essential in the international financial system and to create the conditions for the development agenda, particularly in Africa," he told reporters.
For some observers, this summit is the time to put Africa’s vast natural resources - and who benefits from them - at the top of the agenda.
African envoys hardly need reminding that the "Scramble for Africa," in the late 19th and early 20th Century left much of the continent colonised and plundered by Western powers.
Now as the race for critical minerals - essential for green energy technology, digital innovation and even modern defence systems - heats up, Africa finds itself once more at the crossroads of global competition.
Despite its abundance, "Africa risks remaining being a supplier of raw materials without a unified strategy and bold diplomacy," according to Nqobile Xada, of Resources Futures in Africa, Open Society Foundations.
"The upcoming G20 summit in South Africa offers an opportunity to rewrite this narrative and to transform Africa’s mineral wealth into a foundation for cooperation and equitable growth across the Global South," she wrote in The Africa Report, an online news publication.
