US EMPIRE AND SOUTH AFRICAN

SUBIMPERIALISM

P

ATRICK

B

OND

I

mperialism, subimperialism and anti-imperialism are all settling into

durable patterns and alignments in Africa – especially South Africa – even

if the continent’s notoriously confusing political discourses sometimes

conceal the collisions and collusions. ‘All Bush wants is Iraqi oil’, the highest-

profile African, Nelson Mandela, charged in January 2003. ‘Their friend

Israel has weapons of mass destruction but because it’s [the USA’s] ally, they

won’t ask the UN to get rid of it .… Bush, who cannot think properly, is

now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust. If there is a country

which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of

America.’

1

Mandela’s remarks were soon echoed at a demonstration of 4,000

people outside the US embassy in Pretoria, by African National Congress

(ANC) secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe: ‘Because we are endowed

with several rich minerals, if we don’t stop this unilateral action against Iraq

today, tomorrow they will come for us.’

2

After the fall of Baghdad, Mandela

again condemned Bush: ‘Since the creation of the United Nations there has

not been a World War. Therefore, for anybody, especially the leader of a

superstate, to act outside the UN is something that must be condemned by

everybody who wants peace. For any country to leave the UN and attack an

independent country must be condemned in the strongest terms.’

3

This was not merely conjunctural anti-war rhetoric. Mandela’s successor

Thabo Mbeki is just as frank when addressing the broader context of impe-

rial power, for example when welcoming dignitaries to the August 2002

Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development: ‘We have all

converged at the Cradle of Humanity to confront the social behaviour that

has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. This social

behaviour has produced and entrenches a global system of apartheid.’

4

Mbeki’s efforts to insert the phrase ‘global apartheid’ in the summit’s final

document failed, due to opposition by US secretary of state Colin Powell,

who in turn was heckled by NGO activists and Third World leaders in the

final plenary session. A year later, in the immediate run-up to the 2003

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World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mbeki

even hinted that Third World governments should align themselves with

radical social movements: ‘They may act in ways you and I may not like and

break windows in the street but the message they communicate relates.’

5

Moreover, in light of Pretoria’s centrality to the new India-Brazil-South

Africa bloc and the G20 group often credited with causing the Cancun

summit’s collapse, the logical impression is that the anti-imperialist move-

ment has an important state ally in Africa.

Unfortunately, these postures can best be understood as ‘talking left,

walking right’, insofar as they veil the underlying dynamics of accumulation,

class struggle and geopolitics. To illustrate, in early 2003, at the same time

as Mandela’s outburst, the ANC government permitted three Iraq-bound

warships to dock and refuel in Durban, and the state-owned weapons manu-

facturer Denel sold $160 million worth of artillery propellants and 326

hand-held laser range finders to the British army, and 125 laser-guidance

sights to the US Marines.

6

South Africa’s independent left immediately

formed a 300-organization Anti-War Coalition which periodically led

demonstrations of 5,000-20,000 protesters in Johannesburg, Pretoria and

Cape Town. Despite the embarrassment, Pretoria refused the Coalition’s

demands to halt the sales. George W. Bush rewarded Mbeki with an official

visit in July 2003, just as the dust from the Baghdad invasion had settled. ‘Let

us use this visit to impact as best as possible on the consciences of the

American electorate’, the South African Communist Party (SACP) secretary-

general, Blade Nzimande, remarked. ‘It would, we believe, be a mistake to

press for a cancellation of the visit. But it would be equally mistaken to

present the invasion of Iraq as a ‘thing of the past’, as ‘something we’ve put

behind us’, as we now return to bi-national US/SA business as usual.’

7

But business as usual seemed to prevail. As Johannesburg’s Business Day

editorialized, the ‘abiding impression’ left from Bush’s Pretoria stopover was

‘of a growing, if not intimate trust between himself and president Thabo

Mbeki. The amount of public touching, hugging and backpatting they went

through was well beyond the call of even friendly diplomatic duty.’

8

Organizing large demonstrations in Pretoria and Cape Town, the Anti-War

Coalition countered: ‘The ANC and SACP claim to be marching against the

war … while hosting the chief warmonger, George Bush. The ANC’s public

relations strategy around the war directly contradicts their actions, which are

pro-war and which have contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civil-

ians.’

9

Public relations finally caught up to realpolitik, as Mandela, too, recanted

his criticism of Bush in May 2004, because ‘It is not good to remain in tension

with the most powerful state.’

10

A month later, Mbeki joined the G8 summit

in Sea Island, Georgia, along with Africa’s other main pro-Western rulers:

Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, John Kufuor of Ghana, Olusegun Obasanjo

of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

Treated only to a lunch meeting which began late and ended early, the

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Africans promised the G8 to help unblock the multilateral ‘logjam’ that

emerged at the Cancun WTO summit. The next day, Mbeki was in

Washington for the funeral of Ronald Reagan – a notorious supporter of the

old Pretoria regime, even during the mid-1980s states of emergency – and

justified his presence to National Public Radio: ‘For those of us who were part

of the struggle against apartheid, it was actually during Reagan’s presidency

[that] the US government started dealing with the ANC.’

11

How can we understand this political inconsistency. How much does it

reflect the requirements of a US-led capitalist empire that uses Africa for

surplus extraction and the spreading and deepening of global neoliberalism,

and that especially relies on South Africa for legitimacy and subimperial

deputy-sheriff support. To answer, consider first the context of modern

imperialism, which in Africa combines an accumulation strategy based on

neoliberalism and the extraction of ever cheaper minerals and cash crops,

with increasing subservience to US-led, indirect, neocolonial rule. The next

step is to locate South Africa’s position as the regional hegemon, identifying

areas where imperialism is facilitated in Africa by the Pretoria-Johannesburg

state-capitalist nexus, in part through Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s

Development (NEPAD) and in part through the logic of private capital.

NEOLIBERALISM AND SURPLUS EXTRACTION

What does imperialism ‘need’ from Sub-Saharan Africa, whose 650

million people generate just 1 per cent of global GDP. During the twentieth

century, a great organic tradition of anti-imperialist political economy and

radical politics emerged to explain general and specific cases of African subor-

dination and promote revolutionary solutions. More recently, a revival of

commentaries concerning imperialism’s logic has provided at least three

strands of argument that are especially relevant for the purposes of this essay.

First, the transition from post-War prosperity to the neoliberal era, beginning

around 1980, can be traced to problems experienced in maintaining capital

accumulation in the core regions of capitalism. Second, these problems were

managed from the core – especially the Bretton Woods Institutions and the

US state/military – through techniques that amplified uneven development

and threatened Africa’s social and economic reproduction. And third, these

forms of management left the continent and its main political actors at the

beck and call of imperial power, particularly the US state’s, notwithstanding

a variety of multilateral outlets and regional associations.

Recent analyses of the sustained crisis tendencies in global capitalism’s core

regions have shown that the current economic conjuncture follows logically

from a long structural crisis of capitalism characterized by three decades of

lower global GDP growth during a period of persistent ‘overaccumulation’,

untenable speculation and periodic financial collapses, frantic outsourcing of

production across the world, hyperactive trade, the emergence of system-

threatening ecological problems, soaring inequality, and the near-universal

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lowering of both labour’s remuneration and the social wage.

12

In the last

decade, one symptom of global capitalism’s desperation is the extraction of

surpluses from the Third World at an unprecedented rate. Thus, from a situ-

ation of positive net financial flows of more than $40 billion per year to

‘developing economies’ during the mid-1990s, the East Asian crisis was

followed by a $650 billion South-North drain in the four years 1999-2002.

13

Although Africa is typically given very little attention in contemporary

Marxist accounts of imperialism, there is no question that the continent has

been drawn deeper into global circuits of crisis management through the irre-

sponsible liberalization of trade and finance that, in turn, cheapened the

continent’s products for northern consumption.

14

While some commodity

prices – for oil, rubber and copper – have risen in recent years, thanks to

Chinese demand, the major coffee, tea and cotton exports many countries

rely upon continue to stagnate or fall.

15

Debt servicing also grew ever more

onerous, notwithstanding the Bank/IMF ‘Highly Indebted Poor Countries’

(HIPC) relief initiative. From 1980 to 2000, Sub-Saharan Africa’s total

foreign debt soared from $60 billion to $206 billion, and the ratio of debt to

GDP rose from 23 per cent to 66 per cent, leaving Africa repaying $6.2

billion more than it received in new loans in 2000.

16

Meanwhile, donor aid

was down 40 per cent from 1990 levels, and capital flight exacerbated the

problem of access to hard currency. James Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana

established that a core group of thirty Sub-Saharan African countries, with

a joint foreign debt of $178 billion, suffered a quarter century of capital flight

by elites totalling more than $285 billion, including imputed interest earn-

ings, leaving Sub-Saharan Africa ‘a net creditor vis-à-vis the rest of the

world.’

17

Drawing upon Rosa Luxemburg’s insights into the interactions between

capitalism and non-capitalist aspects of production and social reproduction,

David Harvey has provided a nuanced explanation of how the permanent

process of primitive accumulation

18

evolves into what he terms a system of

‘accumulation by dispossession’.

19

That process is very important for under-

standing contemporary imperialism in Africa. Accumulation by dispossession

intensifies as a result of the onset of capitalist crisis and the widespread adop-

tion of neoliberalism, as the system seeks to mitigate and displace (though

never fully resolve) crisis tendencies. Harvey interprets these reactions as

‘spatial and temporal fixes’ for overaccumulated capital, because they also

serve as crisis management tools.

20

Beyond these processes, the sphere of reproduction – where much prim-

itive accumulation occurs through unequal gender power relations – remains

central to capitalism’s looting. This is especially evident in areas such as

Southern Africa which are characterized by migrant labour flows, largely

through the super-exploitation of rural women in childrearing, healthcare

and eldercare. More broadly, this is part of what Isabella Bakker and Stephen

Gill term ‘the reprivatization of social reproduction’.

21

For Africans, the

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denial of access to food, medicines, energy and even water is the most

extreme result; people who are surplus to capitalism’s labour requirements

find that they must fend for themselves or die. The scrapping of safety nets

in structural adjustment programmes worsens the vulnerability of women,

children, the elderly and disabled people. They are expected to survive with

less social subsidy and greater pressure on the fabric of the family during

economic crisis, which makes women more vulnerable to sexual pressures

and, therefore, HIV/AIDS.

22

Even in wealthy South Africa an early death for

millions was the outcome of state and employer AIDS policy, with cost-

benefit analyses demonstrating conclusively that keeping most of the

country’s five million HIV-positive people alive through patented medicines

cost more than these people were ‘worth’.

23

The imposition of neoliberal policies in this spirit has amplified combined

and uneven development in Africa. In macroeconomic terms, the

‘Washington Consensus’ entails trade and financial liberalization, currency

devaluation, lower corporate taxation, export-oriented industrial policy,

austere fiscal policy aimed especially at cutting social spending, and mone-

tarism in central banking (with high real interest rates). In

microdevelopmental terms, neoliberalism implies not only three standard

microeconomic strategies – deregulation of business, flexibilized labour

markets and privatization (or corporatization and commercialization) of state-

owned enterprises – but also the elimination of subsidies, the promotion of

cost-recovery and user fees, the disconnection of basic state services to those

who do not pay, means-testing for social programmes, and reliance upon

market signals as the basis for local development strategies. As Gill has shown,

enforcement is crucial, through both a ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ entailing

constant surveillance, and a ‘new constitutionalism’ that locks in these poli-

cies in over time.

24

Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin point to US empire’s management capaci-

ties via the neoconservative petro-military-industrial complex in the Bush

White House and the Pentagon, and the Washington Consensus nexus of the

US Treasury, Bretton Woods Institutions and Wall Street.

25

While they do

not see this as emanating from the need to displace a structural economic

crisis at home, the Sub-Saharan African case seems, in fact, to demonstrate

both the structurally-rooted need of global capital to extract surpluses, and

the importance of Washington’s political-economic power. However, in a

recent survey, Robert Biel identified two central contradictions in US impe-

rialism vis-à-vis Africa: ‘First, central accumulation always tends to siphon

away the value which could form the basis of state-building, bringing with

it the risk of “state failure”, leading to direct intervention. Second, the inter-

national system becomes increasingly complex, characterized by a range of

new actors and processes and direct penetration of local societies in a way

which bypasses the state-centric dimension.’ Because of the complexity of

indirect rule, and the difficulty of coopting all relevant actors, Biel continues,

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‘A reversion to the deployment of pure power is always latent, and the post-

September 11th climate has brought it directly to the fore. This is a

significant weakness of international capitalism.’

26

Likewise, Panitch and

Gindin argue, ‘An American imperialism that is so blatantly imperialistic risks

losing the very appearance that historically made it plausible and attractive ….

This is especially important. Since the American empire can only rule

through other states, the greatest danger to it is that the states within its orbit

will be rendered illegitimate by virtue of their articulation to the imperium.’

27

Indeed, one critical area of agreement between most political economists

today is the ongoing relevance of the national state, not only to accumula-

tion via traditional facilitative functions (securing property rights, the

integrity of money, and the monopoly on violence), but also to the ‘coau-

thorship’ of the neoliberal project, in turn reflecting a shift in the balance of

forces within societies and state bureaucracies. South Africa is an excellent

case in point, we shall observe.

In sum, thanks largely to capitalist crisis tendencies and the current orien-

tation to accumulation by dispossession, imperialism can neither deliver the

goods nor successfully repress sustained dissent in Africa, not least in Sub-

Saharan Africa, rife with ‘state failure’ and ‘undisciplined neoliberalism’

(witnessed in repeated IMF riots). The ideological legitimation of ‘free

markets and free politics’ requires renewal, therefore. For this, the US needs

a subimperial partner, even one whose politicians are occasionally as cheeky

as those in Pretoria – and who have become, hence, just as vital for broader

systemic legitimation as Washington’s talk-left, walk-right allies in New

Delhi and Brasilia. After all, anti-imperial critique continues to emerge

throughout Africa, not just rhetorically (as cited at the beginning of this essay)

but also in practical form, as when trade ministers from low-income Africa

– not the G20 or South Africa, India and Brazil – withdrew their support for

a consensus at the WTO’s Seattle and Cancun summits. Thus NEPAD

becomes an especially important surrogate for imperialism, as argued below.

Next, however, we consider the expansion of US geopolitical and military

activities.

WASHINGTON’S REACH

What are US planners up to in Africa. As one illustration, an expert at the

US Naval War College recently drew up ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’, high-

lighting countries now considered danger zones for imperialism. In Africa,

these included Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo

(DRC), Rwanda, Somalia and even South Africa, sites which could not only

‘incubate the next generation of global terrorists’, but also host interminable

poverty, disease and routine mass murder.

28

Benign – or malign – neglect

would no longer be sufficient. The period during the 1990s after the failed

Somali intervention, when Washington’s armchair warriors let Africa slide

out of view, may have come to an end with September 11. Army General

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Charles Wald, who controls the Africa Programme of the European

Command, told the BBC in early 2004 that he aims to have five brigades

with 15,000 men working in cooperation with regional partners including

South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and two others still to be chosen.

29

NATO’s

Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General James Jones, confirmed the

US geographical strategy in May 2003: ‘The carrier battle groups of the

future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future may not spend six

months in the Mediterranean Sea but I’ll bet they’ll spend half the time down

the West Coast of Africa.’

30

Within weeks, 3,000 US troops had been

deployed off the coast of Liberia (and went briefly ashore to stabilize the

country after Charles Taylor departed). Potential US bases were suggested for

Ghana, Senegal and Mali, as well as the North African countries of Algeria,

Morocco and Tunisia.

31

Another base was occupied by 1,500 US troops in

the small Horn country of Djibouti. Botswana and Mozambique were also

part of the Pentagon’s strategy, and South Africa would remain a crucial

partner.

Central and eastern Africa remains a problem area, and not merely because

of traditional French and Belgian neocolonial competition with British and

US interests.

32

President Clinton’s refusal to cite Rwanda’s situation as formal

genocide in 1994 was an infamous failure of nerve in terms of the emerging

doctrine of ‘humanitarian’ imperialism – in contrast to intervention in the

(white-populated) Balkans. With an estimated three million dead in Central

African wars, partly due to struggles over access to coltan and other mineral

riches, conflicts worsened within the Uganda/Rwanda bloc, vis-à-vis the

revised alliance of Laurent Kabila’s DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia.

Only with Kabila’s assassination in 2001 and Pretoria’s management of peace

deals in the DRC and Burundi, did matters settle, however briefly, into a

fragile peace combining neoliberalism with opportunities for minerals

extraction. However, as turmoil resumed in mid-2004, it was clear that coups

and outbreaks of strife would be a constant threat, demonstrating how

precarious Pretoria’s elite deals are when deeper tensions remain unresolved.

Another particularly difficult site is Sudan, where US Delta Force troops have

been sighted in informal operations (although not to protect Darfur from

genocide), perhaps because although China showed some interest in oil

exploration there during the country’s civil war chaos, US oil firms have

subsequently arrived. On the west coast, the major petro prize remains the

Gulf of Guinea. With oil shipment from Africa to Louisiana refineries taking

many fewer weeks than from the Persian Gulf, the world’s shortage of super-

tankers is eased by direct sourcing from West Africa’s offshore oil fields.

In this context, it is not surprising that of $700 million destined to develop

a 75,000-strong UN peace-keeping force in coming years, $480 million is

dedicated to African soldiers.

33

But Africa is also a site for the recruitment of

private mercenaries, as an estimated 1,500 South Africans – including half of

Mbeki’s own 100 personal security force – joined firms such as South Africa’s

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Executive Outcomes and British-based Erinys to provide more than 10 per

cent of the bodyguard services in occupied Iraq.

34

Some African countries,

including Eritrea, Ethiopia and Rwanda, joined the ‘Coalition of the

Willing’ against Iraq in 2003, although temporary UN Security Council

members Cameroon, Guinea and the Republic of the Congo opposed the

war, in spite of Washington’s bullying. The Central African Republic proved

reliable during the reconciliation of Jacques Chirac and the Bush regime in

March 2004, when Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped

and temporarily dumped there, prior to taking up a cautious residence in

South Africa. Africa is also an important site for Washington’s campaigns

against militant Islamic networks, especially in Algeria and Nigeria in the

north-west, Tanzania and Kenya in the east, and South Africa. Control of

African immigration to the US and Europe is crucial, in part through the

expansion of US-style incarceration via private sector firms like Wackenhut,

which has invested in South African privatized prison management, along

with the notorious Lindela extradition camp for ‘illegal immigrants’, part of

a highly racialized global detention and identification system.

Of course, the US military machine does not roll over Africa entirely

unimpeded. Minor roadblocks have included Pretoria’s rhetorical opposition

to the Iraq war, conflicts within the UN Human Rights Commission (espe-

cially over Zimbabwe), and the controversy over US citizens’ extradition to

the International Criminal Court. On the eve of Bush’s 2003 Africa trip, the

Pentagon announced that it would withdraw $7.6 million worth of military

support to Pretoria because the South African government – along with

thirty-four military allies of Washington (and ninety countries in total) – had

not agreed to give US citizens immunity from prosecution at The Hague’s

new International Criminal Court. Botswana, Uganda, Senegal and Nigeria,

also on Bush’s itinerary, signed blackmail-based immunity deals and retained

US aid.

35

Competition from other neocolonial sponsors has occasionally been a

factor limiting US arrogance, for example in the only partially successful

attempt by Monsanto to introduce genetically modified (GM) agriculture in

Africa. Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola have rejected World Food

Programme and US food relief because of fears of future threats to their citi-

zens, and not coincidentally, to European markets. Linking its relatively

centralized aid regime to trade through bilateral regionalism, the European

Union aims to win major Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) country conces-

sions on investment, competition, trade facilitation, government

procurement, data protection and services, which along with grievances over

agriculture, industry and intellectual property were the basis of ACP with-

drawal from Cancun. The EU’s ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPAs)

under the Cotonou Agreement (which replaced the Lome Convention) will

signify a new, even harsher regime of ‘reciprocal liberalization’ to replace the

preferential agreements that tied so many African countries to their former

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colonial masters via cash-crop exports. If the EPAs are agreed upon by late

2005 and implemented from 2008, as presently scheduled, what meagre

organic African industry and services remained after two decades of structural

adjustment will probably be lost to European scale economies and techno-

logical sophistication. An April 2004 meeting of parliamentarians from East

Africa expressed concern, ‘that the pace of the negotiations has caught our

countries without adequate considerations of the options open to us, or

understanding of their implications, and that we are becoming hostage to the

target dates that have been hastily set without the participation of our respec-

tive parliaments.’ Even Botswana’s neoliberal president Festus Mogae

admitted, ‘We are somewhat apprehensive towards EPAs despite the EU

assurances. We fear that our economies will not be able to withstand the

pressures associated with liberalization.’

36

But the EU’s substantial aid

carrots and sticks will be the final determinant, overriding democratic consid-

erations.

What of Washington’s development aid to Africa. During the early 1990s,

numerous US Agency for International Development mission offices in

Africa were closed by the Clinton Administration. The highest-profile

measures now relate to HIV/AIDS treatment, amounting to what the State

Department called its ‘full-court press’ – including threats of further aid cuts

– against governments which made provisions for generic medicines produc-

tion; something which Clinton only backed away from in late 1999 because

of sustained activist protest.

37

Bush promised a $15 billion AIDS programme,

then whittled it down to a fraction of that, then refused to provide funds to

the UN Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and then prohibited

US government financing of generic medicines. Bush also introduced an

innovative vehicle to fuse neoliberal market conditionality with, supposedly,

greater social investment: the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). With

USAID budgets still declining in real terms, the delinked MCA funding will

rise from $1 billion in 2004 to $5 billion in 2006, a 100 per cent increase on

2004 spending for all US overseas development assistance. But of seventy-

four ‘low income’ countries that are meant to be eligible, of which

thirty-nine are in Africa, only sixteen passed the first test of governance and

economic freedom in May 2004. Half of these were African: Benin, Cape

Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique and Senegal. The

criteria for funding these countries’ aid programmes have been established by

a series of think tanks and quasi-government agencies: Freedom House (civil

liberties and political rights), the World Bank Institute (accountability, gover-

nance and control of corruption), the IMF and the Heritage Foundation

Index of Economic Freedom (credit ratings, inflation rates, business start-up

times, trade policies and regulatory regimes), and the World Health

Organization and the UN (public expenditure on health and primary educa-

tion, immunization rates and primary school completion rates).

38

Washington’s attempt to disguise and legitimize imperialism through aid that

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carries ‘good governance’ and ‘social investment’ conditionalities dates to the

Clinton era, but under Bush’s MCA it involves more sophisticated discipli-

nary neoliberal surveillance, especially in combination with the World

Bank.

39

However, with so few African states receiving MCA funding, and with

so much more at stake than can be handled by the expansion of military

spending, it is vital for Washington to identify reliable allies in Africa to foster

both imperialist geopolitics and neoliberal economics. Does South Africa

qualify. There is much to consider in the hectic activities of Mbeki and his

two main internationally-oriented colleagues – finance minister Trevor

Manuel (chair of the IMF/World Bank Development Committee in 2002-

04) and trade/privatization minister Alec Erwin (the leading candidate to

replace Supachai Panitchpakdi as WTO director-general in 2005 if his health

allows). But the question must be posed: are these men breaking or instead

shining the chains of global apartheid.

PRETORIA’S SUBIMPERIAL FUNCTIONS

During an August 2003 talk to business and social elites at Rhodes House

in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela offered the single most chilling historical

reference possible: ‘I am sure that Cecil John Rhodes would have given his

approval to this effort to make the South African economy of the early 21st

century appropriate and fit for its time.’

40

Indeed, in Rhodes’ spirit,

Mandela’s less honourable foreign policy intentions were difficult to disguise.

Although South Africa can claim one intervention worthy of its human rights

rhetoric – leadership of the 1997 movement to ban landmines (and hence a

major mine-clearing role for South African businesses which had helped lay

the mines in the first place) – Mandela’s government sold arms to govern-

ments which practised mass domestic violence, such as Algeria, Colombia,

Peru and Turkey; recognized the Myanmar military junta as a legitimate

government in 1994; gave the country’s highest official award to Indonesian

dictator Suharto three months before his 1998 demise (in the process

extracting $25 million in donations for the ANC); and invaded neighbouring

Lesotho in 1998, at great social and political cost, mainly so as to secure

Johannesburg’s water supply. The latter incident was, according to veteran

foreign policy scholar Peter Vale, ‘rash – a rashness born, perhaps, of the

power of mimicry and sanctioned by the new world order discourses, a call

to policy action encouraged by an ensemble of new controlling values.’

41

Once the South African government had shown its willingness to put self-

interest above principles, the international political power centres placed

increasing trust in Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel and Erwin, giving them insider

access to many international elite forums. As global-establishment institutions

came under attack and attempted to reinvent themselves with a dose of New

South African legitimacy (such as Mandela’s 1998 caressing of the IMF

during the East Asian crisis, and of Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal),

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Pretoria’s leading politicians were allowed, during the late 1990s, to preside

over the UN Security Council, the board of governors of the IMF and Bank,

the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the

Commonwealth, the World Commission on Dams and many other impor-

tant global and continental bodies. Simultaneously taking Third World

leadership, Pretoria also headed the Non-Aligned Movement, the

Organization of African Unity and the Southern African Development

Community. Then, during a frenetic two-year period beginning in

September 2001, Mbeki and his colleagues hosted, led, or played instru-

mental roles at the following dozen major international conferences or

events: the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (September 2001);

the launch of NEPAD in Abuja, Nigeria (October 2001); the Doha, Qatar

ministerial summit of the World Trade Organization (November 2001); the

UN’s Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico (March

2002); the G8 summits in Genoa, Italy (July 2001) and Kananaskis, Canada

(June 2002); the African Union launch in Durban (July 2002); the World

Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg (August-

September 2002); the Davos World Economic Forum (January 2003); the

Evian G8 Summit (June 2003); George W. Bush’s first trip to Africa (July

2003); the Cancun WTO ministerial (September 2003); and the World

Bank/IMF annual meeting in Dubai (September 2003).

However, virtually nothing was actually accomplished through these

opportunities. At the UN racism conference, Mbeki colluded with the EU

to reject the demand of NGOs and African leaders for slavery/colo-

nialism/apartheid reparations. By all accounts, NEPAD provided merely a

homegrown version of the Washington Consensus. At Doha, Erwin split the

African delegation so as to prevent a repeat of the denial of consensus that

had foiled the Seattle ministerial in December 1999. In Monterrey, Manuel

was summit co-leader (with Michel Camdessus and disgraced Mexican ex-

president Ernesto Zedillo), but his role was merely to legitimize ongoing

IMF/WB strategies, including debt relief gimmicks. From Kananaskis,

Mbeki departed with only an additional $1 billion commitment for Africa

(aside from funds already pledged at Monterrey). The African Union

supported both NEPAD and the repressive Zimbabwean regime of president

Robert Mugabe. At the Johannesburg WSSD, Mbeki undermined UN

democratic procedure, facilitated the privatization of nature, and did nothing

to address the plight of the world‘s poor majority. In Davos, global elites

ignored Africa and from Evian, Mbeki returned with nothing. For hosting

a leg of Bush’s Africa trip, Mbeki became the US ‘point man’ on Zimbabwe

(as Bush pronounced), and avoided any conflict over Iraq. In Cancun, the

collapse of trade negotiations left Erwin ‘disappointed’, because he and his

G20 colleagues hoped for a deal, no matter how contrary it would be to

ACP country interests. At Dubai, with Manuel leading the Development

Committee, there was no Bretton Woods democratization, no new debt

THE EMPIRE RE-LOADED 135

relief and no ‘Post-Washington’ policy reform. This was evident in March

2004 when a new IMF managing director was chosen, amidst Third World

elite consternation about the job’s reserved ‘European-only’ designation.

Nothing else, aside from the peace-keeping funding and a minor extension

of the ineffectual HIPC, was provided at Sea Island, while in contrast, Iraq

won debt cancellation worth $87 billion.

There is insufficient space to recount here details of Mbeki’s consistent

defeats.

42

In sum, however, Pretoria’s failures left South Africa slotted into

place as a subimperial partner of Washington and the EU. Although such a

relationship dates to the apartheid era, the ongoing recolonization of Africa

– in political, military and ideological terms – and the reproduction of

neoliberalism together require a strategy along the lines of NEPAD.

From the late 1990s, Mbeki had embarked upon an ‘African Renaissance’

branding exercise, which he endowed with poignant poetics but not much

else. By 2001, Mbeki managed to sign on as partners for NEPAD’s first draft,

the ‘Millennium Africa Recovery Plan’, two additional rulers from the

crucial North and West of the continent: Bouteflika and Obasanjo. Both

suffered regular mass protests and various civil, military, religious and ethnic

disturbances at home. By early 2001, in Davos, Mbeki made clear whose

interests NEPAD would serve: ‘It is significant that in a sense the first formal

briefing on the progress in developing this programme is taking place at the

World Economic Forum meeting. The success of its implementation would

require the buy in from members of this exciting and vibrant forum!’

43

International capital would, in theory, benefit from large infrastructure

construction opportunities on the public-private partnership model, priva-

tized state services, ongoing structural adjustment, intensified rule of

international property law and various NEPAD sectoral plans, all coordinated

from a South African office staffed with neoliberals and open to economic

and geopolitical gatekeeping. Once Mbeki’s plan was merged with an infra-

structure-project initiative offered by Wade, it won endorsement at the last

meeting of the Organization of African Unity, in June 2001. (In 2002 the

OAU was transformed into the African Union, and NEPAD serves as its offi-

cial development plan.)

In early 2002, global elites celebrated NEPAD in sites ranging from the

World Economic Forum meeting in New York City to the summit of self-

described ‘progressive’ national leaders (including Blair) who gathered in

Stockholm to forge a global Third Way. Elite eyes were turning to the

world’s ‘scar’ (Blair’s description of Africa), hoping that NEPAD would serve

as a large enough bandaid, for as Institutional Investor magazine reported, the

G8’s ‘misleadingly named’ Africa Action Plan represented merely ‘grudging’

support from the main donors with ‘only an additional $1 billion for debt

relief. (The G8) failed altogether to reduce their domestic agricultural subsi-

dies (which hurt African farm exports) and – most disappointing of all to the

Africans – neglected to provide any further aid to the continent.’

44

Mbeki

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136

had requested $64 billion in new aid, loans and investments each year, but

South Africa’s Sunday Times reported that ‘the leaders of the world’s richest

nations refused to play ball.’

45

So on the one hand, within a period of weeks in mid-2002, NEPAD was

endorsed by the inaugural African Union summit, by the WSSD, and by the

UN heads of state summit in New York. On the other, pro-NEPAD lip-

service could not substitute for the missing ‘new constitutionalism’ (to

borrow Gill’s phrase) that would translate into long-term, non-retractable

leverage over the continent. The main reason for doubt about Mbeki’s

commitment to disciplinary neoliberalism and the rule of law was his

repeated defence of the main violator of liberal norms, Mugabe.

46

Both

Mbeki and Obasanjo termed Zimbabwe’s stolen March 2002 presidential

election ‘legitimate’, and they repeatedly opposed punishment of the

Mugabe regime by the Commonwealth and the UN Human Rights

Commission. The NEPAD secretariat’s Dave Malcomson, responsible for

international liaison and coordination, admitted to a reporter, ‘Wherever we

go, Zimbabwe is thrown at us as the reason why NEPAD’s a joke.’

47

Nevertheless, NEPAD was still, in mid-2003, considered by the Bush

regime’s main Africa official to be ‘philosophically spot-on’.

48

Just prior to

the Evian summit, the former International Monetary Fund managing

director Michel Camdessus, subsequently France’s personal G8 representa-

tive to Africa, explained NEPAD’s attraction in the following way: ‘The

African heads of state came to us with the conception that globalization was

not a curse for them, as some had said, but rather the opposite, from which

something positive could be derived …. You can’t believe how much of a

difference this makes.’

49

THE CONTRADICTONS OF SUBIMPERIALISM

There were many observers who, like Manuel Castells, thought that ‘the

end of apartheid in South Africa, and the potential linkage between a demo-

cratic, black majority-ruled South Africa and African countries, at least those

in eastern/southern Africa, allows us to examine the hypothesis of the incor-

poration of Africa into global capitalism under new, more favourable

conditions via the South African connection.’

50

In reality, the most impor-

tant new factor in that incorporation is the exploitative role of Johannesburg

businesses, especially in the mining, construction, financial services, retail and

tourism sectors.

51

Those quite substantial investments have been, mainly,

takeovers, not greenfield projects. Indeed, in spite of a high-profile mid-2002

endorsement of NEPAD by 187 individuals and firms, led by Anglo

American, BHP Billiton and Absa, there were no investments made in

twenty key infrastructure projects two years later, only vocal corporate

complaints that NEPAD’s emerging peer-review system had insufficient

‘teeth’ to discipline errant politicians. According to the (pro-NEPAD)

Sunday Times after a disappointing World Economic Forum regional

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summit, ‘The private sector’s reluctance to get involved threatens to derail

NEPAD’s ambitions.’

52

Much is made of Johannesburg-based corporations’

malevolent attitudes and extractive orientation. The prospect that these firms

will be ‘new imperialists’ was of ‘great concern’, according to a leading

member of Mbeki’s cabinet, Jeff Radebe: ‘There are strong perceptions that

many South African companies working elsewhere in Africa come across as

arrogant, disrespectful, aloof and careless in their attitude towards local busi-

ness communities, work seekers and even governments.’

53

But who, really, is to blame for this power relationship. Ideological

backing for corporate-oriented subimperialism can usually be found within

the South African Institute for International Affairs (SAIIA) at Johannesburg’s

University of the Witwatersrand. Yet because SAIIA heartily supports

Pretoria’s pro-corporate strategy, its writers have the space to speak a certain

kind of realpolitik truth to corporate power. In 2001, a SAIIA researcher

warned that Erwin’s self-serving trade agenda ‘might signify to the Africa

group of countries that South Africa, a prominent leader of the continent,

does not have their best interests at heart.’

54

In 2003, a colleague issued a

technical report on trade which conceded that African governments viewed

Erwin ‘with some degree of suspicion’ because of his promotion of the

WTO. Indeed, at Seattle and Cancun Erwin stood in direct opposition to the

bulk of the lowest-income countries, whose beleaguered trade ministers were

responsible for derailing both summits.

55

A few South African journalists have also picked up hostile vibes from the

rest of the continent. In August 2003, the Sunday Times remarked on

Southern African government delegates’ sentiments at a Dar es Salaam

regional summit: ‘Pretoria was “too defensive and protective” in trade nego-

tiations [and] is being accused of offering too much support for domestic

production “such as duty rebates on exports” which is killing off other

economies in the region.’

56

More generally, according to the same paper,

reporting from the July 2003 African Union meeting in Maputo, Mbeki is

‘viewed by other African leaders as too powerful, and they privately accuse

him of wanting to impose his will on others. In the corridors they call him

the George Bush of Africa, leading the most powerful nation in the neigh-

bourhood and using his financial and military muscle to further his own

agenda.’

57

Mbeki’s agenda is not that of the majority of Africans or South Africans.

If the largely parasitical – not development-oriented – Johannesburg corpo-

rations profit from NEPAD’s legitimation of neoliberalism and lubrication of

capital flows out of African countries, these flows mainly end up in London,

where Anglo American Corporation, DeBeers, Old Mutual insurance, South

African Breweries and others of South Africa’s largest firms re-listed their

financial (though not operational) headquarters during the late 1990s. And

if Mbeki and his colleagues are benefiting from the high profile provided by

NEPAD and all the other global-managerial functions discussed above, the

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138

real winners are those in Washington and other imperial centres who,

increasingly, require a South African frontman for the ongoing super-

exploitation and militarization of Africa.

The function of Pretoria’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, cited at the outset, is

evident: disguising subimperial practices during an encouraging recent rise of

social movement protest against neoliberalism at home

58

and across the

African continent.

59

The African left has expressed deep scepticism about

Mbeki’s main strategies, for example in a hard-hitting resolution from a

conference of the Council for Development and Social Science Research in

Africa and Third World Network-Africa in April 2002,

60

and in various

independent statements by leading intellectuals and organizations.

61

Not only

do the left forces nearly uniformly oppose NEPAD, they also openly call for

their finance ministers to default on the illegitimate foreign debt. They advo-

cate not only kicking the World Bank and IMF out of their countries, but

also international strategies for defunding and abolishing the Bretton Woods

institutions. US groups like the Center for Economic Justice and Global

Exchange work with Jubilee South Africa and Brazil’s Movement of the

Landless, amongst others, to promote the ‘World Bank Bonds Boycott’,

asking of their Northern allies: is it ethical for socially-conscious people to

invest in the Bank by buying its bonds (responsible for 80 per cent of the

institution’s resources), and to receive dividends which represent the fruits

of enormous suffering. Other examples of what is being termed ‘deglobal-

ization’ include the successful efforts to deny Trade-Related Intellectual

Property Rights status to AIDS medicines, to keep GMOs out of several

Southern African agricultural markets, and to reject French and British water

privatizers. To these ends, the African Trade Network and the Gender and

Trade Network in Africa put intense pressure on the continent’s delegates

to reject the WTO’s Cancun proposals. And with the US and EU offering

no concessions on matters of great importance to Africa, bilateral or regional

trade deals are also resisted by both civil society groups and African

governments.

On a more local level, inspiring examples of what might be termed

‘decommodification’ are underway in Africa, especially South Africa. There,

independent left movements are struggling to turn basic needs into human

rights: free anti-retroviral medicines to fight AIDS and other health services;

free water (50 litres/person/day); free electricity (1 kilowatt hour per person

per day); thorough-going land reform; prohibition on services disconnections

and evictions; free education; and even a ‘Basic Income Grant’, as advocated

by churches and trade unions. The idea is that all basic services should be

provided to all as a human right, and to the degree that it is feasible, financed

through imposition of much higher prices for luxury consumption.

Because the commodification of everything is still under way in South

Africa, this could provide the basis for a unifying agenda for a widescale

movement for fundamental social change, if linked to the demand to ‘rescale’

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many political-economic responsibilities that are now handled by embryonic

world-state institutions under the influence of neoliberal US administrations.

The decommodification principle could become an enormous threat to

imperial capitalist interests, in the form of a denial of private intellectual prop-

erty (such as AIDS medicines), resistance to biopiracy, the exclusion of GM

seeds from African agricultural systems, the nationalization of industries and

utilities, or the empowerment of African labour forces. To make any

progress, delinking from the most destructive circuits of global capital will

also be necessary, combining local decommodification strategies and tactics

with the call to close the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. Beyond that,

the challenge for Africa’s progressive forces, as ever, is to establish the differ-

ence between ‘reformist reforms’ and reforms that advance a ‘non-reformist’

agenda. The latter would include generous social policies stressing decom-

modification, and capital controls and more inward-oriented industrial

strategies allowing democratic control of finance and ultimately of produc-

tion itself. These sorts of reforms would strengthen democratic movements,

directly empower the producers, and, over time, open the door to the

contestation of capitalism itself.

Not only does imperialism stand in the way, however, so do Pretoria’s

various subimperial barriers. Notwithstanding occasionally leftist rhetoric and

the world-historic damage inflicted by US empire, Mbeki and his colleagues

are situating South Africa as the continent’s leading bourgeois-aspirant

country, parallel to what Frantz Fanon so poignantly described as the stunted

‘national bourgeoisie’ of a post-colonial African state, i.e., the modern equiv-

alent of an old Bantustan, where the coopted elite prosper under conditions

of global apartheid:

Content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, it

will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner.

But this same lucrative role, this cheap-Jack’s function, this meanness

of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolize the incapability

of the middle class to fulfill its historic role of bourgeoisie. Here, the

dynamic, pioneer aspect, the characteristics of the inventor and of the

discoverer of new worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisies

are lamentably absent .… In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie

of the colonial country identifies itself with the decadence of the bour-

geoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is

in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to

know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.

62

NOTES

1 South African Press Association (Sapa), 29 January 2003.

2 Business Day, 20 February 2003.

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3 Reuters, 28 June 2003.

4 Thabo Mbeki, ‘Address at the Welcome Ceremony of the WSSD’,

Johannesburg, 25 August 2002.

5 The Straits Times, 3 September 2003.

6 Andy Clarno, ‘Denel and the South African Government: Profiting from the

War on Iraq’, Khanya Journal, 3(March), 2003.

7 Umsebenzi, 2, 13, 2 July 2003.

8 Business Day, 11 July 2003.

9 Anti-War Coalition Press Statement, 1 July 2003.

10 Mail and Guardian, 24 May 2004.

11 Washington File, 11 June 2004.

12 See, e.g., Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, London: Verso, 2003;

Robert Pollin, Countours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape

of Global Austerity, London: Verso, 2003; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of

Capital, London: Verso, 2003; and Robert Biel, The New Imperialism,

London: Zed Books, 2000.

13 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and

Development Report 2003, Geneva, 2003, p. 26.

14 Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Aspects’,

New Left Review, 15, 2002; John Saul and Colin Leys, ‘Sub-Saharan Africa in

Global Capitalism’, Monthly Review, July 1999.

15 Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Africa’s Trade Today’, Paper for the Review of

African Political Economy and CODESRIA 30th Anniversary Conference,

Wortley Hall, Sheffield, 27-29 May 2004. See also Michael Barratt Brown

and Pauline Tiffen, Short Changed: Africa and World Trade, London: Pluto

Press, 1992.

16 World Bank, Global Finance Tables, Washington, DC, 2002.

17 James Boyce and Leonce Ndikumana, ‘Is Africa a Net Creditor. New

Estimates of Capital Flight from Severely Indebted Sub-Saharan African

Countries, 1970-1996’, Occasional Paper, University of

Massachusetts/Amherst Political Economy Research Institute, 2002.

18 Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and

the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham: Duke University Press,

2000.

19 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press, 2003.

20 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Second Edition, London: Verso, 1999.

21 Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, ‘Ontology, Method and Hypotheses’, in I.

Bakker and S. Gill, eds., Power, Production and Social Reproduction, Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p. 36.

22 See, e.g., Dianne Elson, ‘The Impact of Structural Adjustment on Women:

Concepts and Issues’, in B. Onimode, ed., The IMF, the World Bank and the

African Debt, London: Zed Books, 1991; and Sara Longwe, ‘The Evaporation

of Policies for Women’s Advancement’, in N. Heyzer et al., eds., A

Commitment to the World’s Women, New York: UNIFEM, 1991. A

comprehensive African literature review by Dzodzi Tsikata and Joanna Kerr

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shows that ‘mainstream economic policymaking fails to recognize the

contributions of women’s unpaid labour – in the home, in the fields, or in the

informal market where the majority of working people in African societies

function. It has been argued that these biases have affected the perception of

economic activities and have affected economic policies in ways that

perpetuate women’s subordination.’ See Dzodzi Tskikata and Joanna Kerr,

eds., Demanding Dignity: Women Confronting Economic Reforms in Africa,

Ottawa: The North-South Institute and Accra: Third World Network-

Africa, 2002.

23 In the case of the vast Johannesburg/London conglomerate Anglo American

Corporation, the cut-off for saving workers in 2001 was 12 per cent – the

lowest-paid 88 per cent of employees were more cheaply dismissed once

unable to work, with replacements found amongst South Africa’s 42 per cent

unemployed reserve army of labour. For more, see Patrick Bond, Elite

Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Foreword to the

Second Edition, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

24 Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

25 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Global Capitalism and American Empire’, in

Socialist Register 2004, London: Merlin Press, 2003.

26 Robert Biel, ‘Imperialism and International Governance: The Case of US

Policy Towards Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 95, 2003, p. 87.

27 Panitch and Gindin, ‘Global Capitalism and American Empire’, p. 33.

28 Thomas Barnett, ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’, United States Naval War

College, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrules/ ThePentagonsNewMap.htm,

2003.

29 Martin Plaut, ‘US to Increase African Military Presence’,

http://www.bbc.co.uk, 23 March 2004.

30 http://www.allAfrica.com, 2 May 2003.

31 Ghana News, 11 June 2003.

32 Ian Taylor, ‘Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and

Regional/Global Configurations’, Review of African Political Economy, 95,

2003, p. 49.

33 The major dilemma, here, appears to be the very high level of HIV-positive

members of the armed forces in key countries. See Stefan Elbe, Strategic

Implications of HIV/AIDS, Adelphi Paper 357, International Institute for

Strategic Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 23-44.

34 Vancouver Sun, 11 May 2004.

35 Sapa, 2 July 2003. Other African countries where US war criminals are safe

from ICC prosecutions thanks to military-aid blackmail are the DRC, Gabon,

the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Sierra Leone and Zambia.

36 http://www.epawatch.net/general/text.php.itemID=161&menuID=28;

http://www.twnafrica.org/atn.asp.

37 Patrick Bond, ‘Globalization, Pharmaceutical Pricing and South African

Health Policy: Managing Confrontation with US Firms and Politicians’,

International Journal of Health Services, 29(4) 1999.

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38 Cited in SA Institute for International Affairs e-Africa, May, 2004. These rating

systems follow the examples set in the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act,

which by 2003 applied to 39 countries; the remaining 13 African states were

vetoed by the White House for various reasons. AGOA conditionalities

include adopting neoliberal policies, privatizing state assets, removing subsidies

and price controls, ending incentives for local companies, and endorsing US

foreign policy.

39 See Nancy Alexander, ‘Triage of Low-Income Countries. The Implications

of the IFI’s Debt Sustainability Proposal’, Washington, http://www.

servicesforall.org/ html/otherpubs/ judge_jury_ scorecard.pdf, 2004.

40 Sowetan, 26 August 2003.

41 Peter Vale, Security and Politics in South Africa: The Regional Dimension, Cape

Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2003, p. 133.

42 My own documentation can be found in Patrick Bond, Talk Left, Walk Right:

South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, Pietermaritzburg: University of

KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2003; Against Global Apartheid: South Africa Meets

the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, Second Edition, London:

Zed Books, 2003; Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and

Social Protest, London: Merlin Press, 2003; and ed., Fanon’s Warning: A Civil

Society Reader on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, Trenton:

Africa World Press. See also Ian Taylor, Stuck in Middle Gear: South Africa’s

Post-Apartheid Foreign Relations, Westport: Praeger, 2001.

43 Business Day, 5 February 2001.

44 Deepath Gopinath, ‘Doubt of Africa’, Institutional Investor Magazine, May,

2003.

45 Sunday Times, 30 June 2002; Business Day, 28 June 2002.

46 There is enormous confusion over Mbeki’s role in Zimbabwe, which is

addressed in Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge:

Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, London:

Merlin Press, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press and Harare: Weaver

Press, 2003. For an important critique of Mugabe from an Afro-feminist

standpoint, see Horace Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the

Patriarchal Model of Liberation, Cape Town: David Philip, 2003.

47 Business Day, 28 March 2003.

48 Gopinath, ‘Doubt of Africa’. A few months later, Walter Kansteiner resigned

as assistant secretary of state for Africa, but the sentiment remained.

49 http://www.g7.utoronto.ca/ summit/2003evian/ briefing_apr030601.html.

50 Manuel Castells, The Information Age, Volume III: End of Millennium, Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998, p. 88.

51 For documentation, see Darlene Miller, ‘South African Multinational

Corporations, NEPAD and Competing Claims on Post-Apartheid Southern

Africa’, Institute for Global Dialogue Occasional Paper 40, Johannesburg,

2004; Darlene Miller, ‘SA Multinational Corporations in Africa: Whose

African Renaissance.’, International Labour Research and Information Group

Occasional Paper, Cape Town, 2003; and John Daniel, Vinesha Naidoo and

Sanusha Naidu, ‘The South Africans have Arrived: Post-Apartheid Corporate

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Expansion into Africa’, in J. Daniel, A. Habib and R. Southall, eds., State of

the Nation: South Africa 2003-04, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research

Council, 2003 (although note that this latter chapter does not subscribe to the

argument that Pretoria is subimperialist).

52 Sunday Times, 24 May 2004.

53 Sapa, 30 March 2004.

54 Mail & Guardian, 16 November 2001.

55 Business Day, 2 June 2003.

56 Sunday Times, 24 August 2003.

57 Sunday Times, 13 July 2003.

58 http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs; http://www.red.org.za; http://www.aidc.org.za;

http://southafrica.indymedia.org; http://www.khanyacollege.org.za.

59 For more on the African left, see John Fisher, ‘Africa’, in E. Bircham and J.

Charlton, eds., Anti-Capitalism: A Guide to the Movement, London:

Bookmarks, 2002; Leo Zeilig, ed., Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa,

Cheltenham: New Clarion, 2002; Bond, Talk Left, Walk Right, Chapter

Twelve; and Trevor Ngwane, ‘Sparks in Soweto’, New Left Review, 21, 2003.

60 Council for Development and Social Science Research in Africa, Dakar and

Third World Network-Africa, ‘Declaration on Africa’s Development

Challenges’, Resolution adopted at the ‘Joint Conference on Africa’s

Development Challenges in the Millennium’, Accra, 23-26 April 2002,

reprinted in Bond, Fanon’s Warning.

61 See http://www.codesria.org, for Jimi Adesina, ‘Development and the

Challenge of Poverty: NEPAD, Post-Washington Consensus and Beyond’,

Paper presented to the Codesria/TWN Conference on Africa and the

Challenge of the 21st Century, Accra, 23-26 April 2002; and Dani Nabudere,

‘NEPAD: Historical Background and its Prospects’, in P. Anyang’Nyong’o, et

al., eds., NEPAD: A New Path. Nairobi: Heinrich Böll Foundation 2002.

62 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1963, pp.

152-153.

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