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Arrogant, disrespectful, aloof and careless - South African corporations in Africa
Patrick Bond and Tapera Kapuya
Extracted from OSISA Openspace Vol 1, No. 4
July 16, 2006

http://www.osisa.org/files/openspace/1_4_p27_patrick_bond_tapera_kapuya.pdf

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Introduction: Rhodes redux?
‘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,’ said Nelson Mandela in August 2003, during a talk to business and social elites at Rhodes House in Cape Town.¹

Is this chilling historical comparison apt? We do have much to learn about today’s conditions if we revisit late 19th-century Africa, in part because no other buccaneer did as much damage to the possibilities for peace and equitable development as Cecil Rhodes. First a diamond merchant, then a 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) after 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 an estimated 14,000 black people 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 followed the notorious Rudd Concession which Rhodes obtained deceitfully from the Ndebele king, Lobengula.²

Beyond the never-ending search for gold, two crucial dynamics were underway in Britain (and much of Europe) undergirded Rhodes’ conquests: chronic ‘overaccumulation’ of capital and social unrest. The ready availability of foreign financing for Southern African investments was due to the lengthy European economic depression, chronic excess financial liquidity, and the global hegemony enjoyed by City of London financiers.³

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 the 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 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 sold arms to countries which practiced mass violence, such as Algeria, Colombia, Peru and Turkey.

Should concerned citizens of Africa worry about Pretoria in the way that Mandela suggests?

Deputy sheriff for the USA
One reason to fear a new Rhodes rising is Pretoria’s friendly relationship to Washington, the regime most responsible for the last few decades of increased state terrorism and imperial looting. The two countries’ military relations were fully ‘normalized’ by July 2004, in the words of SA deputy minister Aziz Pahad, after a somewhat difficult period associated with Washington’s support for apartheid. (The CIA had a role in Nelson Mandela’s capture, for example.) In the mid-1990s, the current intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils was the victim of a US government scam – a trap based on his forged signature - aimed at outing some pro-ANC spies within the Pentagon.

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.⁴

Normalisation involves military cooperation as well as technological partnerships. The now-deceased 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.⁵ In partnership with General Dynamics Land Systems, Pretoria’s notorious Denel corporation – guilty of bribery in India, and a huge drain on the SA taxpayer - immediately began marketing 105 mm artillery alongside a turret and light armoured vehicle hull, in support of innovative Stryker Brigade Combat Teams. Those teams are ‘a 3500-personnel formation that puts infantry, armour and artillery in different versions of the same 8x8 light armoured vehicle’.⁶

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.⁷ According to John Daniel and Jessica Lutchman of the SA government’s Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria’s oil deals with dictatorships in Sudan and Equatorial Guinea mean, ‘The ANC government has abandoned any regard to those ethical and human rights principles which it once proclaimed would form the basis of its foreign policy.’⁸

Mbeki himself downplayed Sudan’s Darfur crisis, even when sending peace-keeping troops, because, as he said after a meeting with Bush in mid-2005, ‘If you denounce Sudan as genocidal, what next? Don't you have to arrest the president? The solution doesn’t lie in making radical solutions - not for us in Africa.’⁹ Pretoria’s national oil company, PetroSA, had five months earlier signed a deal to share its technicians with Sudan’s Sudapet, so as to conduct explorations in Block 14, where it enjoyed exclusive oil concession rights. ¹⁰

As for Pretoria’s senior roles in the mediation of conflicts in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during 2003, at first blush they 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.

By mid-2004, the highly-regarded intellectual and leader of the Rassemblement Congolais la Democratic, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, was publicly critical of Pretoria’s interference:

When a [transition process] takes off on a wrong footing, unless a real readjustment takes place on the way, the end cannot be good... Some feel like South Africa has actively put us in the situation we are in. They had a lot of
leverage to make sure that certain structural problems were anticipated and solutions proposed. They seem to have fallen in the Western logic of thinking that mediocrity is a less evil for Congolese, if it stops the war. They also have a lot of leverage to get a clear on‑going commitment to resolve the contradictory fears of both the DRC and Rwanda; they do not seem to use it. This is why some feel that South Africa is too close to Rwanda.¹¹

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1. South African Press Association (2003), ‘Mandela Criticises Apartheid Lawsuits,’ 25 August. 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.
2. Loney, M. (1975), Rhodesia: White Racism and Imperial Response, Harmondsworth, Penguin, pp.31-32.
3. Phimister, I. (1992), ‘Unscrambling the Scramble: Africa’s Partition Reconsidered,’ Paper presented to the African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 17 August.
4. Batchelor, P. and S. Willett (1998), Disarmament and Defence Industrial Adjustment in South Africa, Oxford, Oxford University Press; Crawford-Browne, T. (2004), ‘The Arms Deal Scandal,’ Review of African Political Economy, 31.
5. Schmidt, M. (2004), ‘US offers to Train and Equip Battalions,’ ThisDay, 19 July.
6. South African Press Association (2004), ‘Denel to Benefit from US Defence Trade’, 21 July.
7. Black, D. (2004), ‘Democracy, Development, Security and South Africa’s “Arms Deal”‘, in P.Nel and J. van der Westhuizen (Eds), Democratizing Foreign Policy? Lessons from South Africa, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.
8. Daniel, J. and J.Lutchman (2005), ‘South Africa in Africa’, Presentation to the SA Association of Political Studies Colloquium, Pietermaritzburg, 22 September.
9.Becker, E. and D.Sanger (2005), ‘Opposition to Doubling Aid for Africa’, GreenLeft Weekly, 2 June.
10. Fabricius, P. (2005), ‘PetroSA to send Technicians to Explore Oil Possibilities in the
Sudan’, The Star, 5 January.
11. Majavu, M. (2004), ‘Interview with Ernest Wamba dia Wamba,’ http://www.zmag.org/ , 22 June.

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