[DEBATE] : (Fwd) 'SA is subimperialist'

[Patrick Bond]

"Is South Africa anti-imperialist, subimperialist or just imperialist?"

A roundtable discussion with Ilrig, AIDC and the Centre for Civil Society

23 November, 7:30-9:30pm

Hosted by the International Labour Research and Information Group

Community House, Salt River, Cape Town

***

South African subimperial accumulation

Patrick Bond
(Full footnoted version available at pbond at mail.ngo.za)

One growing concern of political economists interested in the 
accumulation of capital in Southern Africa is whether the transition 
from apartheid to democracy in South Africa fundamentally shifted 
Pretoria’s apartheid-era ‘total strategy’ for dominating regional 
geopolitics and economics. Three positions seem to be emerging:

- First, Thabo Mbeki’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development 
represents a genuine attempt by a ‘middle power’ with good intentions to 
uplift the continent economically and install democratic modes of 
‘governance’.
- Second, Mbeki’s project is outright imperialist, with continental 
ambitions that imply rivalries with competitors in the US, Europe 
(especially France) and East Asia (especially China).
- Third, Mbeki’s project has been to situate South Africa as a 
subimperial partner to the world’s major military and economic powers, 
insofar as this entails lubricating markets and systems of accumulation 
by tying Africa into the institutional framework of global capital, and 
by assisting – as a ‘deputy sheriff’ - in implementing imperial military 
and socio-political strategies.

Taking the latter position, this chapter argues that imperialism, 
subimperialism and anti-imperialism are settling into durable patterns 
and alignments in Africa – in large part because of Pretoria’s emerging 
managerial functions – and the patterns appear consistent with the way 
Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg described the relation between capital, 
society and nature. It begins with ‘primitive accumulation’ and 
continues by establishing systems of class, racial, gender and 
environmental power that facilitate accumulation, relatively unhindered 
by transitions from colonialism and apartheid.
According to Marx,

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, 
enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the 
turning of Africa into a commercial warren for the hunting of black 
skins signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These 
idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On 
their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the 
globe for a theatre.

By 1913, Luxemburg had developed a full-fledged theory of imperialism 
from these insights:

Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any 
attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within 
this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws 
of the economic process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account 
only the former aspect: ‘the realm of peaceful competition’, the marvels 
of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from 
the other aspect: the realm of capital’s blustering violence which is 
regarded as more or less incidental to foreign policy and quite 
independent of the economic sphere of capital.
In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic 
process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the 
organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. 
The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking 
them together. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to 
toe’ characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress 
in the world at every step, arid thus capitalism prepares its own 
downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions…
Militarism fulfils a quite definite function in the history of capital, 
accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation. It plays 
a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the 
period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of 
conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India. 
Later, it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the 
social organisations of primitive societies so that their means of 
production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in 
countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to 
turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages 
in the colonies. It is responsible for the creation and expansion of 
spheres of interest for European capital in non-European regions, for 
extorting railway concessions in backward countries, and for enforcing 
the claims of European capital as international lender. Finally, 
militarism is a weapon in the competitive struggle between capitalist 
countries for areas of non-capitalist civilisation.

In subsequent years, the argument that Northern accumulation occurs in 
part through the underdevelopment of Africa was advanced by African 
analysts, including Claude Ake, Samir Amin, A.M. Babu, Amilcar Cabral, 
Demba Dembele, Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Sara Longwe, Guy Mhone, 
Thandika Mkandawire, Dani Nabudere, Bade Onimode, Mohau Pheko, Walter 
Rodney, Issa Shivji, and Paul Zeleza, amongst others.
If contemporary imperialism necessarily combines neoliberalism and a 
permanent form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in peripheral sites 
like Africa, the next logical step is to locate South Africa’s own 
position as regional subimperial hegemon within the same matrices. That 
requires 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 and in part through the 
independent (though related) logic of private capital.
Does Pretoria qualify as subimperialist? There are certainly indicators 
of naked subimperial relations with the US, such as the permission 
granted by Pretoria for three Iraq-bound warships to dock and refuel in 
Durban, and the sale by state-owned weapons manufacturer Denel of $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. George W. Bush rewarded Thabo Mbeki with an official visit just 
as the dust from the Baghdad invasion had settled, in July 2003. As 
Business Day editorialised, the ‘abiding impression’ left from Bush’s 
Pretoria stopover was ‘of a growing, if not intimate trust’.
But there is much more 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 from 
2001-05) and trade/privatisation minister Alec Erwin. It is in their and 
their cabinet colleagues’ lubrication of neoliberalism that has most 
decisively qualified Pretoria as a subimperial power.

South Africa’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.’ (In the same 
spirit, Mandela took that opportunity to publicly criticise, for the 
first time and at a crucial moment, activists from the Jubilee South 
Africa anti-debt movement and apartheid-victims support groups. Their 
sin was filing lawsuits in New York demanding reparations from 
corporations for their pre-1994 South African profits, along the lines 
of the Nazi-victims ancestors’ banking and slave labour cases. Mandela 
backed Mbeki, who formally opposed the suits on grounds that Pretoria 
had its own reconciliation strategy, and that such litigation would, if 
successful, deter future foreign investors.)
Is the Rhodes comparison apt? We do have much to learn from revisiting 
late 19th-century imperial rule in Africa, in part because no other 
buccaneer did as much damage to the possibilities for peace and 
equitable development in Africa as Cecil Rhodes. As diamond merchant, 
financier and politician (governor of the Cape Colony during the 
1880s-90s), Rhodes received permission from Queen Victoria to plunder 
what are now called Gauteng Province (greater Johannesburg) once gold 
was discovered in 1886, and then Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi; his 
ambition was to paint the map British imperial red, stretching along the 
route from the Cape to Cairo. Rhodes’ two main vehicles were the British 
army, which invented the concentration camp and in the process killed 
14,000 blacks and 25,000 Afrikaner women and children during the 
1899-1902 Anglo Boer South African War, and the British South Africa 
Company (BSAC), a for-profit firm which in 1890 began systematically 
imposing settler colonialism across the region. The BSAC’s charter, 
following the notorious Rudd Concession which Rhodes obtained 
deceitfully from the Ndebele king Lobengula, represented a structural 
switch from informal control of trade, to trade with rule. British 
imperialists assumed that competition for control of Africa would 
continue beyond the 1885 Berlin conference which partitioned Africa, and 
that only BSAC-style ‘imperialism on the cheap’, as it was termed, would 
ensure geographical dominance over the interior of the continent in the 
face of hostile German, Portuguese, and Boer forces. Such a strategy was 
critical, they posited, to the protection of even the Nile Valley, which 
in turn represented the life-line to the prize of India.
But as today, there was also a crucial economic dynamic underway in 
Britain (and much of Europe) ─ beyond the never-ending search for gold ─ 
which undergirded Rhodes’ conquests: chronic overaccumulation of 
capital, especially in the London financial markets, combined with 
social unrest. The easy availability of foreign portfolio funding for 
nascent Southern African stock markets stemmed from a lengthy 
international economic depression, chronic excess financial liquidity (a 
symptom of general overaccumulation), and the global hegemony enjoyed by 
City of London financiers. From the standpoint of British imperialism, 
the main benefit of Rhodes’ role in the region was to ameliorate the 
contradictions of global capitalism by channelling financial surpluses 
into new investments (such as the telegraph, railroad and surveying that 
tamed and commodified the land known as Rhodesia), extracting resources 
(especially gold, even if in tiny amounts compared to the Rand), and 
assuring political allegiance to South African corporate power, which 
was in harmonious unity with the evolving British-run states of the region.
Can Mandela claim he is faithfully following in these footsteps? Today, 
for Victoria, substitute the White House. Instead of the old-fashioned 
power plays of the Rudd Concession and similar BSAC tricks of 
dispossession, read Nepad and its many corporate backers. Likewise, the 
SA National Defense Force stands ready to follow British army conquests, 
what with its invasion of Lesotho in September 1998, justified by 
Pretoria’s desire to protect a controversial, corrupt mega-dam from 
alleged sabotage threat. As Rhodes had his media cheerleaders from Cape 
Town to London, so too do many Western publications regularly promote 
Mandela and Mbeki as Africa’s saviours, and so too does SA Broadcasting 
Corporation screen pro-Pretoria propaganda to the continent’s luxury 
hotels and other satellite broadcast receivers.
Mandela’s less honourable foreign policy intentions were also 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 helped lay the mines in the first place) – the 
first-ever democratic regime in Pretoria recognised 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 sold arms to countries which practiced mass violence, such as 
Algeria, Colombia, Peru and Turkey.
Another moment of ideological confusion was cleared up in 2004. As noted 
above, in mid-2003 the US House of Representatives extended a ban on 
military assistance to 32 countries - including South Africa - which 
agreed to cooperate in future with the International Criminal Court 
against alleged US war criminals. Nevertheless, Washington’s ambassador 
to Pretoria, Cameron Hume, quickly announced that several bilateral 
military deals would go ahead in any case. According to Peter McIntosh 
of African Armed Forces journal, the US ‘had simply re routed military 
funding for South Africa through its European Command in Stuttgart.’ 
Hume reported the Pentagon’s desire ‘to train and equip two additional 
battalions to expand the number of forces the [SA National Defense 
Force] have available for peacekeeping in Africa.’ South African 
newspaper ThisDay commented, in the wake of two successful joint US/SA 
military maneuvres in 2003-04: ‘Operations such as Medflag and Flintlock 
clearly have applications other than humanitarian aid, and as the US 
interventions in Somalia and Liberia have shown, humanitarian aid often 
requires forceful protection.’
The two countries’ military relations were fully ‘normalised’ by July 
2004, in the words of SA deputy minister Aziz Pahad. In partnership with 
General Dynamics Land Systems, State-owned Denel immediately began 
marketing 105 mm artillery alongside a turret and light armoured vehicle 
hull, in support of innovative Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (‘a 
3500-personnel formation that puts infantry, armour and artillery in 
different versions of the same 8x8 light armoured vehicle’). According 
to one report, ‘The turret and gun is entirely proprietary to Denel, 
using only South African technology. At sea level, it can fire 
projectiles as far as 36 km.’ This followed a period of serious problems 
for the SA arms firm and others like it (Armscor and Fuchs), which were 
also allowed full access to the US market in July 2004 after paying 
fines for apartheid-era sanctions-busting.
Given Pretoria’s 1998 decision to invest $6 billion in mainly offensive 
weaponry such as fighter jets and submarines, there are growing fears 
that peacekeeping is a cover for a more expansive geopolitical agenda, 
and that Mbeki is tacitly permitting a far stronger US role in Africa - 
from the oil rich Gulf of Guinea and Horn of Africa, to training bases 
in the South and North - than is necessary. On the surface, Pretoria’s 
senior roles in the mediation of conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic 
Republic of the Congo (DRC) during 2003 appeared positive. However, 
closer to the ground, the agreements more closely resemble the style of 
elite deals which lock in place ‘low-intensity democracy’ and neoliberal 
economic regimes. Moreover, because some of the belligerent forces were 
explicitly left out, the subsequent weeks and months after declarations 
of peace witnessed periodic massacres of civilians in both countries and 
a near-coup in the DRC.

Pretoria’s legitimation of global neoliberalism
Once the South African government showed its willingness to put 
self-interest above principles, the international political power 
centres invested increasing trust in Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel and Erwin, 
giving them insider access to many international elite fora. As 
global-establishment institutions came under attack, they sometimes 
attempted to reinvent themselves with a dose of New South African 
legitimacy; witness Mandela’s 1998 caressing of the IMF during the East 
Asian crisis, and of Clinton during the Lewinsky sex scandal. Indeed, 
Pretoria’s lead 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 important 
global and continental bodies. Simultaneously taking Third World 
leadership, Pretoria also headed the Non-Aligned Movement, the 
Organisation of African Unity and the Southern African Development 
Community.
But this was just the warm up period. During a frenetic four years 
beginning in September 2001, Mbeki and his colleagues hosted, led, or 
played instrumental roles at the following major international 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 Organisation (November 2001); the 
UN’s Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico (March 
2002); G8 summits in Kananaskis, Canada (June 2002), Evian, France (June 
2003), Sea Island, Georgia (June 2004) and Gleneagles, Scotland (July 
2005); 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 and occasionally 
thereafter); George W. Bush’s first trip to Africa (July 2003); the 
Cancun WTO ministerial (September 2003); World Bank/IMF annual meetings 
in Dubai (September 2003) and Washington (September 2004 and 2005); the 
UN Millennium Development Summit (September 2005); and the Hong Kong WTO 
ministerial (December 2005).
Virtually nothing was actually accomplished through the 2001-05 
opportunities:

• at the UN racism conference, Mbeki colluded with the EU to reject the 
demand of NGOs and African leaders for slavery/colonialism/apartheid 
reparations;
• Nepad provided merely a homegrown version of the Washington Consensus;
• at Doha, trade minister Alec 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;
• at Monterrey, Manuel was summit co-leader (with former IMF managing 
director Michel Camdessus and disgraced Mexican ex-president Ernesto 
Zedillo), and legitimised all ongoing IMF/Bank strategies;
• from Kananaskis, Mbeki departed with only an additional $1 billion 
commitment for Africa (aside from funds already pledged at Monterrey), 
and none of the subsequent G8 Summits – Evian, Sea Island and Gleneagles 
– represented genuine progress;
• the African Union supported both Nepad and the Zimbabwean regime of 
president Robert Mugabe, hence further delegitimising the self-defensive 
political project of Africa’s elite;
• at the Johannesburg WSSD, Mbeki undermined UN democratic procedure, 
facilitated the privatisation of nature, and did nothing to address the 
plight of the world’s poor majority;
• in Davos, global elites ignored Africa, in 2003 and subsequently;
• for hosting a leg of Bush’s Africa trip, Mbeki merely became the US 
‘point man’ on Zimbabwe, and he avoided any conflict over Iraq’s 
recolonisation;
• in Cancun, the collapse of trade negotiations – again, catalysed by a 
walkout by Africans – left Erwin ‘disappointed’;
• at World Bank and IMF annual meetings from 2001-05, with Manuel 
leading the Development Committee, there was no Bretton Woods 
democratisation, new debt relief or Post-Washington policy reform; and
• the UN Millennium Review Summit provided Mbeki grounds for 
heart-break, leaving him to bemoan, ‘We should not be surprised when 
these billions do not acclaim us as heroes and heroines’.

Elsewhere I have recounted these consistent defeats for African 
interests, with attention to South Africa’s own complicity. Further 
failures can be reasonably anticipated in 2006 when Pretoria hosts the 
‘Progressive Governance Summit’ (with very unprogressive leaders such as 
Tony Blair and Meles Zenawi) and the G77 group of Third World countries. 
Notwithstanding periodic ‘talk left’ gripes such as Mbeki’s in New York, 
Pretoria’s failures left it slotted into place as a subimperial partner 
of Washington and the European Union. Although such a relationship dates 
to the apartheid and colonial eras, the ongoing conquest of Africa – in 
political, military and ideological terms - and the reproduction of 
neoliberalism together require a coherent new strategy: Nepad.

Staking claims through Nepad
The origins of the Nepad plan are revealing. Mbeki had embarked upon a 
late 1990s’ ‘African Renaissance’ branding exercise, which he endowed 
with poignant poetics but not much else. The contentless form was 
somewhat remedied in a powerpoint skeleton unveiled during 2000 during 
Mbeki’s meetings with Clinton in May, the Okinawa G-8 meeting in July, 
the UN Millennium Summit in September, and a subsequent European Union 
gathering in Portugal. The skeleton was fleshed out in November 2000 
with the assistance of several economists and was immediately ratified 
during a special South African visit by World Bank president James 
Wolfensohn ‘at an undisclosed location,’ due to fears of the disruptive 
protests which had soured a Johannesburg trip by IMF managing director 
Horst Koehler a few months earlier. By this stage, Mbeki managed to sign 
on as partners two additional rulers from the crucial North and West of 
the continent: Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Nigeria’s Olusegun 
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!’ 
International capital would benefit from large infrastructure 
construction opportunities on the public-private partnership model, 
privatised state services, ongoing structural adjustment, intensified 
rule of international property law and various of Nepad’s sectoral 
plans, all coordinated from a South African office staffed with 
neoliberals and open to economic and geopolitical gatekeeping.
The African left has expressed deep scepticism over Nepad’s main 
strategies. A succinct critique emerged from a conference of the Council 
for Development and Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) and 
Third World Network-Africa in April 2002. According to the meeting’s 
resolution:

The most fundamental flaws of Nepad, which reproduce the central 
elements of the World Bank’s Can Africa Claim the Twenty-first Century? 
and the UN Economic Commission on Africa’s Compact for African Recovery, 
include:
(a) the neoliberal economic policy framework at the heart of the plan, 
and which repeats the structural adjustment policy packages of the 
preceding two decades and overlooks the disastrous effects of those 
policies;
(b) the fact that in spite of its proclaimed recognition of the central 
role of the African people to the plan, the African people have not 
played any part in the conception, design and formulation of the Nepad;
(c) notwithstanding its stated concerns for social and gender equity, it 
adopts the social and economic measures that have contributed to the 
marginalisation of women;
(d) that in spite of claims of African origins, its main targets are 
foreign donors, particularly in the G8;
(e) its vision of democracy is defined by the needs of creating a 
functional market;
(f) it under-emphasises the external conditions fundamental to Africa’s 
developmental crisis, and thereby does not promote any meaningful 
measure to manage and restrict the effects of this environment on Africa 
development efforts. On the contrary, the engagement that is seeks with 
institutions and processes like the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the 
United States Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the Cotonou Agreement, 
will further lock Africa’s economies disadvantageously into this 
environment;
(g) the means for mobilisation of resources will further the 
disintegration of African economies that we have witnessed at the hands 
of structural adjustment and WTO rules.

Given Nepad’s purely destructive role in Zimbabwe, Mbeki and Obasanjo 
apparently did not even take good governance seriously beyond platitudes 
designed for G8 governments. Those governments need Nepad, as Camdessus’ 
comment indicates, partly because it reinforces their capacity to 
manipulate African countries through the aid mechanism; Nepad helps sell 
their own taxpayers on the myth that Africa is ‘reforming’.
There was, nevertheless, hope that the good-governance rhetoric in the 
Nepad base document might do some good: ‘With Nepad, Africa undertakes 
to respect the global standards of democracy, which core components 
include … fair, open, free and democratic elections periodically 
organised to enable the populace choose their leaders freely.’ South 
Africa under Mbeki’s rule permits free and fair elections (after all, 
the ANC wins easily, with 70 percent of the vote in the 2004 elections, 
due to the lack of a credible alternative), but Obasanjo does not, 
judging by an April 2003 ‘victory’ which strained democratic 
credibility, notwithstanding Mbeki’s strong endorsement.

Johannesburg business interests
What of the subimperial part of the equation? The most important new 
factor in that incorporation is the exploitative role of Johannesburg 
business. For example, in 2002, the UN Security Council accused a dozen 
South African companies of illegally ‘looting’ the DRC during late 1990s 
turmoil which left an estimated three million citizens dead, a problem 
that went unpunished by Pretoria. Other SA companies had collaborated 
with the corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in looting then-Zaire.
But such roles did not stop officials from Pretoria, Kinshasa and the 
IMF from arranging, in mid-2002, what the South African cabinet 
described as ‘a bridge loan to the DRC of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) 
75 million (about R760 million). This will help clear the DRC’s overdue 
obligations with the IMF and allow that country to draw resources under 
the IMF Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility.’ What this represented 
was a shocking display of financial power, with the earlier generation 
of IMF loans to Mobutu now codified by South Africa, which under 
apartheid maintained a strong alliance with the then Zaire.
Moreover, IMF staff would be allowed back into Kinshasa with their own 
new loans, and with neoliberal conditionalities (disguised by ‘poverty 
reduction’ rhetoric) again applied to the old victims of Mobuto’s fierce 
rule. In the same statement, the South African Cabinet recorded its 
payment to the World Bank of R83 million for replenishment of its 
African loan fund, to ‘benefit our private sector, which would be 
eligible to bid for contracts financed from these resources.’ Within 
eighteen months, Mbeki won $10 billion in promised DRC trade and 
investment deals, and gained access to $4 billion worth of World Bank 
tenders for South African companies.
The relationship between Pretoria, Johannesburg capital, Kinshasa and 
the IMF was merely an extreme case of a typical situation, in which 
state power is required to lubricate otherwise difficult markets. South 
African capital was already advancing rapidly into the region during the 
late 1990s, supported by special exchange control exemptions. By 2001, a 
researcher of the SA Institute of International Affairs warned that then 
trade minister Alec Erwin’s self-serving trade strategy ‘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.’ 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, which in Seattle and Cancun put Erwin in 
direct opposition to the bulk of the lowest-income countries, whose 
beleaguered trade ministers were responsible for derailing both summits.
On the one hand, officials in Pretoria regularly claimed to be advancing 
regional projects in part so as to steer the investment path of (and 
also regulate) Johannesburg capital, with Nepad the main example. 
Capital was not so malleable, however, and (pro-Nepad) Business Day 
newspaper admitted in mid-2004 that, ‘The private sector’s reluctance to 
get involved threatens to derail Nepad’s ambitions.’ Hence the prospect 
that Johannesburg-based corporations will be ‘new imperialists’ was of 
‘great concern,’ according to Pretoria’s then public enterprises 
minister Jeff Radebe in early 2004: ‘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 business communities, work seekers and even governments.’
But Radebe could also have been describing his Cabinet colleagues Erwin 
and Mbeki. In August 2003, the Sunday Times remarked on Southern African 
Development Community delegates’ sentiments at a Dar es Salaam regional 
summit: ‘Pretoria was “too defensive and protective” in trade 
negotiations [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.’ More generally, the same paper 
reported from the AU meeting in Maputo the previous month, 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 neighbourhood and using his financial and military muscle 
to further his own agenda.

Indeed, the pumping up of Pretoria’s post-apartheid military muscle has 
been rather revealing. Thanks especially to former international banker 
Terry Crawford-Brown of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction, much more 
is known about the invidious ways that French, German and British 
governments (as well as even Swedish trade unions) corrupted African 
National Congress leaders through a multibillion dollar arms deal.

Conclusion: The resistance continues
Given South Africa’s subimperial posture, it is fitting that some of the 
most exciting anti-imperial initiatives being advanced in the 
contemporary world are emanating from the most proletarianised and 
arguably organised country in Africa, South Africa. Critique and 
practical opposition to neoliberalism in South Africa are stronger than 
in any other African country, perhaps with the exception of Ghana. 
(Indeed, in 2005 the long-standing Campaign Against Privatisation in 
Ghana sent staff to South Africa’s major cities to meet water activists, 
as Johannesburg’s Rand Water won a commercialisation joint venture 
concession for Accra’s water arranged by the World Bank. Rand moved into 
Accra under the rhetorical cover of Nepad and the Millennium Development 
Goals, sparking strong critical reactions by the Anti-Privatisation 
Forum in Johannesburg.)
To do South Africa’s grassroots protest movement justice, a full-length 
work on its internationalist orientation awaits publication. From the 
World Conference Against Racism to the World Summit on Sustainable 
Development to the Iraq War and on various other occasions, South 
Africa’s independent, progressive movement has successfully contested 
Pretoria. The highest-profile social and political struggles in South 
Africa against talking left while walking right on the international 
stage remain the anti-war movement, the campaign for access to generic 
medicines, solidarity struggles (e.g. with Palestine, Burma, Zimbabwe 
and Swaziland), advocacy for reparations and debt-cancellation, anti-WTO 
and unfair trade activism, the anti-privatisation movement, and various 
environmental battles.
As noted at the outset, the context remains the failure of any of 
Mbeki’s main initiatives to bear fruit. As noted, Mbeki and some 
colleagues have begun to express reservations about sites of struggle 
including the UN, WTO and Bretton Woods Institutions. They still haven’t 
reached the point of realigning political relationships so as to build – 
instead of destroy – fledgling progressive projects of the independent 
left. With internecine squabbling added to the mix, the initiatives 
noted just above are only in their formative stages. But they have much 
better prospects for long-term success, so long as the more reformist 
international NGO projects – such as Make Poverty History and even the 
Global Call for Action Against Poverty in 2005 – don’t prove too 
distracting in coming months and years.
In addition to building the popular movement at home in a more general 
way, intense challenges remain in the linkage of issues between often 
fractious movements across the sectors and transnationally, in venues 
such as the African Social Forum and its affiliates. Notwithstanding the 
steep climb ahead, in all these cases, it is evident where the antidote 
to imperialism and subimperialism is to be found. It is because of these 
activists’ work that society and the environment have a chance of 
survival, and we must be especially grateful that they are beginning to 
undo the damage done so consistently by the ruling crew in Pretoria.