Cold War in Southern Africa

White Power, Black Liberation

Sue Onslow, Sue Onslow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135219321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

This edited volume examines the complexities of the Cold War in Southern Africa and uses a range of archives to develop a more detailed understanding of the impact of the Cold War environment upon the processes of political change.

In the aftermath of European decolonization, the struggle between white minority governments and black liberation movements encouraged both sides to appeal for external support from the two superpower blocs. Cold War in Southern Africa highlights the importance of the global ideological environment on the perceptions and consequent behaviour of the white minority regimes, the Black Nationalist movements, and the newly independent African nationalist governments. Together, they underline the variety of archival sources on the history of Southern Africa in the Cold War and its growing importance in Cold War Studies.

This volume brings together a series of essays by leading scholars based on a wide range of sources in the United States, Russia, Cuba, Britain, Zambia and South Africa. By focussing on a range of independent actors, these essays highlight the complexity of the conflict in Southern Africa: a battle of power blocs, of systems and ideas, which intersected with notions and practices of race and class

This book will appeal to students of cold war studies, US foreign policy, African politics and International History.

Sue Onslow has taught at the London School of Economics since 1994. She is currently a Cold War Studies Fellow in the Cold War Studies Centre/IDEAS

1 The Cold War in Southern Africa

White power, black nationalism and external intervention

Sue Onslow

The Cold War in the region possessed a particular and peculiar dimension which differentiated it markedly from the battle of systems and ideas in continental Europe. This was a direct product of the particular socio-economic development of Southern Africa, and its associated class structure which was indelibly linked to racial discrimination and exploitation. Despite the socialist bloc’s enduring faith that the march of history was on its side, the residual strength of the white settler regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia following the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in 1974–1975 prolonged this contest and gave anti-colonial struggles a particular intensity. Furthermore, as the first three chapters in this volume demonstrate clearly, communism cast a particular shadow over the white communities and elites in South Africa and Rhodesia. These white minority governments used the perceived threat of communism, aided and abetted by the Soviet Union, to demonize African liberation movements, and to divert domestic and international attention from the real causes of opposition to racist rule. Indeed, both Pretoria and Salisbury regarded the armed struggle of the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the MPLA in Angola, SWAPO in Namibia/South-West Africa, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and its combatants (ZIPRA), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and its guerrilla army (ZANLA), all as the products of an external and alien agency, rather than as an indigenous response to economic exploitation and varying degrees of political exclusion and suppression. The existence of communism as a universalist creed – backed by the power of states whose rhetorical legitimacy was founded on the export of revolution – also enabled governing elites in Southern Africa progressively to denigrate advocates of black workers’ rights and intellectual critics of white domination, as well as to tar African liberation movements with the soubriquets ‘radical’ and ‘subversive’. This removed the necessity of addressing the true impulses to radicalization: namely, domestic oppression, denial of civil or economic rights; or refusal to accelerate black political and economic advancement.

However, there is another angle which needs to be acknowledged. In the past, the white minority governments of South Africa and Rhodesia have been derided for their claims that they faced ‘a Total National Onslaught’ from radical black nationalism, manipulated and directed by the forces of communism; or that their country represented ‘the front line of the Cold War in Southern Africa’. The inference is that this was a mirage, an imagined threat with no substance – politically constructed, and entirely self-serving. But it has to be said that black nationalist movements did contain Marxist intellectuals (this is particularly true of the ANC, with the associated dominance of the small SACP within the movement, precisely because of the party’s links to the Soviet Union). Furthermore, the international communist movement had drawn much of its strength and solidarity from the Comintern, and its later post-war reincarnation, Cominform, with these organizations’ consistently declared intent and activities aimed at the destruction of the international capitalist system. Therefore South African and Rhodesian statements of an internationally directed communist movement, supporting black nationalists and their agendas for far-reaching social and economic change, were not inaccurate.¹ The whites, however, failed to appreciate the extent to which their own policies and activities had produced this threat and associated coalition of forces, which contributed to the appalling spiral of violence in the region.

The roots of Afrikaner nationalism, like those of black African nationalism within the country and elsewhere on the continent, predated the onset of the Cold War. Its original stimulus lay in the economic, material and social conditions of this white minority group, as well as its constructed historical identity on the southern African continent.² The triumph of the National Party in 1948 represented the attainment of state power as the vehicle to ensure the protection of the Afrikaner community, via its political domination within South Africa over the ethnically heterogeneous black majority, English-speaking white minority, Indian and ‘coloured’ groups. It is pure coincidence that this event mirrored the formalization of the Cold War in Europe through the Berlin crisis and division of Germany. This accident of historical dates has led some observers to conclude that the fate of apartheid South Africa was defined entirely by the rise and fall of the Cold War in the twentieth century; but this is a fallacious conclusion.³

Since its accession to power in 1948, the Nationalist Party elite had been increasingly aware of their country’s vulnerability in terms of its industrial and military capacity – and thus limited ‘hard power’ – especially against the backdrop of accelerated European decolonization and transference of power to black nationalist regimes by the start of the 1960s. The rising crescendo of criticism of the apartheid system and calls for economic sanctions, typified by the UNO voluntary arms embargo of 1963, enhanced this sense of vulnerability. The accelerated programme of industrialization from the 1950s, which was further stimulated by the economic advantages South Africa managed to seize from the international boycott of the Rhodesian market following the unilateral declaration of independence in November 1965, meant that by the end of the 1960s South Africa had become the region’s economic power-house.⁴ Furthermore, this burgeoning industrial strength was vital as the basis of the expanding domestic weapons industry. It must be said that although the socialist bloc regarded South Africa as a bastion of capitalism, its economy was far from being laissez-faire on free-market lines. Outside observers were often struck by the level of state control of key sectors of the economy.

By the 1970s, thanks to rapid industrialization in the previous decade, matched by its economic domination of the region stimulated by the imposition of economic sanctions on the renegade Rhodesian government, and its growing arms industry, South Africa had emerged as the regional hegemon. Although the Afrikaner government (as well as the South African white business community, dominated by English speakers) enjoyed a sense of success and relative invulnerability at the start of the decade, the National Party did not regard itself as a bastion of white imperialism. On the contrary: Afrikaner nationalism defined itself as the victim and inveterate opponent of the British Empire.⁵ There were well-established historical antecedents for this constructed memory. An important section of the Afrikaner elite and wider community loathed Britain and all it stood for, as the scars of the Anglo-South African wars ran very deep. Motivated by a continuing desire to throw off the residual influence of British imperialism, the National Party in the 1920s and 1930s had even resorted to clandestine approaches to the Soviet Union. Although these probes had come to nothing, it was symptomatic of the NP’s enduring realpolitik mindset of ‘my enemy’s enemy could be my friend’.

The future of the apartheid state was immeasurably complicated by the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) rebellion in 1965. There had certainly emerged a growing affinity of outlook between Pretoria and Salisbury in the early 1960s, underlined by the Rhodesian Front election victory in 1962. This growing perception of mutual interests stemmed directly from events in Kenya, the Congo crisis and accelerated European decolonization in Central and Southern Africa. Both governments were transfixed by the perceived dangers of black nationalism and associated political extremism. This threatened the explosive cocktail of political instability and racial strife. Both Pretoria and Salisbury regarded white African ‘civilization’ to be under threat.

However, the South African government remained profoundly ambivalent about the whole issue of Rhodesian UDI, clearly recognizing the potential dangers for South Africa. Open South Africa support would heighten the threat of a trade boycott, and the accusation of interference in the domestic affairs of another country – setting a disastrous precedent for South Africa itself. Here the struggle against communism was one of the key factors for South African and Portuguese support for Smith’s government in the run up to UDI in November 1965, enabling Salisbury to defy London and the wider international commun-ity.⁶ Dr Salazar, the Portuguese leader, was loath to see a Rhodesian UDI, fearing possible settler rebellion within the Portuguese territories.⁷ The attitude of South Africa, obviously a crucial player, has been described as distinctly averse to seeing the emergence of another white minority government on her frontiers. The reason given is that South Africa felt that another white minority government would compromise RSA’s claim that it did not pose a threat to regional stability outside its borders.

This is emphatically not the case. In the looming UDI crisis, neither RSA nor Portugal wished to see a repetition of the Congo crisis, and the Cold War was a key element in shaping their attitudes to UDI. Indeed, the RSA Department for External Affairs described it as just as much a crisis for South Africa. RSA archives show clearly that by the end of 1964, for a variety of strategic, ideological, economic and racial reasons, the RSA was increasingly prepared to offer the Smith government crucial financial and military support, and intelligence cooperation. Pretoria had already entered into a defence arrangement with Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Central African Federation in 1961–1962,⁸ and started the provision of military hardware and intelligence. Thereafter, an ‘unholy alliance’ emerged between Lisbon, Pretoria and Salisbury, based on their shared sense of an ‘advancing tide’ of black nationalism, backed by Moscow and Beijing, and encouraged these three white minority regimes to make common cause despite their differing domestic agendas and underlying animosities.⁹ Rhodesia was perceived as a buffer to protect South Africa from African radical nationalism and deny the African National Congress (ANC) external support and forward bases. There were also hopes for commercial advantage; and expansion of separate development. These attitudes all built upon traditional attitudes within South Africa of Rhodesia as the ‘sixth province’, dating back to creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.

When discussing the South African–Rhodesian relationship in the following decade, it is important to point out that behind the façade of apparent racial and ideological affinity, there were enduring political tensions between the politicians in Salisbury and Pretoria.¹⁰ In broad terms, these represented two strands of white African nationalism, with very different cultural and political perceptions, mindsets and agendas. Admittedly, to speak of ‘white African nationalism’ in itself raises a polemic – although much less so for ‘Afrikanerdom’, given the length of white settlement in the Cape, than for white Rhodesians, most of whom had arrived since 1945.¹¹ And certainly, neither community represented a monolithic bloc, in terms of ethnic origin, political views or racial attitudes – nor indeed on their attitudes to their own military and national conscription.¹² What is undeniable is that the political leaders in South Africa and Rhodesia were neither European in experience nor cultural outlook, although each society bore the imprint of its European origins.¹³ Each might talk of the need to defend ‘Western civilized values’ and ‘European’ development, but this common use of language is misleading. Within the Afrikaner community there existed a strong sense of cultural vulnerability, religious and linguistic insularity, as well as inveterate suspicion towards the English¹⁴ – and Rhodesia was regarded as a bastard product of British imperialism. This was very different to the mindset of the Rhodesian white settler community, with its own class tensions,¹⁵ different religious and pioneer traditions, and pride in the country’s contribution in two world wars.

This sense of difference was both consciously and subconsciously asserted: for example, the Rhodesian white community genuinely believed, and publicly claimed, that its racial attitudes and treatment of the indigenous African population were more progressive than South Africa’s policy of apartheid.¹⁶ (The reality of this, of course, was very much in the eye of the beholder depending which side of the racial fence one was sitting. However, it must be acknowledged that, in general, inter-racial relationships were better in Rhodesia than in South Africa.) In reality, the Nationalists were far from a homogeneous unit on questions of race; and, just as in Rhodesia, white society in South Africa covered the spectrum of attitudes, from active participation in the liberation struggle to outright bigotry. Furthermore, the apartheid system itself was neither monolithic nor static in the period between 1948 and 1990. However, the political leaderships of each country made common cause in the shared conviction that they formed the front line in the Cold War struggle in Southern Africa. This ‘Ptolemaic view of the Cold War’¹⁷ – a conviction that the sun revolved around Pretoria and Salisbury – was a direct product of cultural insularity and geographic distance.

For the South African political and military leadership, its perception of looming confrontation with radical black nationalism backed by Soviet-led communism required Western solidarity with the apartheid state. Evidence shows that the Cold War ideological climate ensured that to a considerable degree South Africa and Rh...