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Introduction
The first week of July witnessed two important markers of Africa’s geopolitical trajectory. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the African Union (AU) summit, the South African government took major steps to influence the organization, by winning contests to host its parliament and to dominate its peace/security division (the AU’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development is already located near Pretoria). Meanwhile, in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) publicly launched a U.S.-Africa policy blueprint, requested by Colin Powell and the Congress.

The main controversy in Addis was a two-year old report on the Zimbabwean government’s systemic human rights abuses, which Robert Mugabe’s government dubiously denied having seen, although it had been circulating for four months. Harare’s delaying tactics won support from Pretoria’s foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who a year earlier had pronounced, "We will never criticize Zimbabwe." As the disappointed Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, Pious Ncube, concluded of the AU delegates, "All they do is back each other up and drink tea."

The CSIS report on "Rising US Interests in Africa" emphasizes seven interventions: Sudan, whose oil is craved by Washington; Africa’s decrepit capital markets, which could "jump start" Bush’s gimmicky Millennium Challenge Account; energy, especially the "massive future earnings by Nigeria and Angola, among other key West African oil producers;" wildlife conservation; "counter-terrorism" efforts, which include "a Muslim outreach initiative;" peace operations, which can be transferred to African troops thanks to new G8 funding; and AIDS, whose treatment is feared by pharmaceutical corporations because it will require generic drugs. In all but Sudan, South African cooperation will be crucial for the new U.S. imperial agenda.

This is a good time to assess Washington-Pretoria relations. In May, post-apartheid South Africa turned 10 years old. Delight can legitimately be expressed by internationalists and anti-racists, including progressive U.S. activists who supported the African National Congress (ANC) and who pressed the U.S. Congress and the Reagan/Bush administrations to impose sanctions during the crucial 1980s.

The White House and State Department were, of course, weak and compromised when opposing apartheid, even during its death-throes, in the wake of many decades of explicit support. A reminder of the "constructive engagement" legacy was provided by Reagan’s death in June, based on Chester Crocker’s own 1980 assessment of his mandate as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa: "The only thing Ronald Reagan knows about South Africa is that he’s on the side of the whites." However, political amnesia was recommended by South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, who traveled from the Sea Island, Georgia G8 Summit to the funeral and remarked 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 United States government started dealing with the ANC." (The CIA cooperated with the Pretoria regime against the ANC, throughout the Reagan era.)

In the new South Africa, however, a power-sharing compromise deal among a tiny fraction of black nationalist politicians and business cronies created an elite transition that endowed a few Africans with enormous stature and wealth, but impoverished the majority of ANC constituents. Internationally, the new governing elites struck deals with such multilateral institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that recall the subimperial designs of Victorian-era colonialist Cecil Rhodes. The result has been a substitution of class apartheid for racial apartheid. Today, thanks to a blueprint partially designed at the World Bank ranging from macroeconomics issues to policies impacting land, housing, and water, the government’s own statistics agency reports a 19 percent decline in black household income from 1995-2000, while white people increased their income by 15 percent and conditions have deteriorated further subsequently. Although some state resources were redirected from white to black people, the doubling of formal unemployment and the onset of AIDS—ignored by the ANC until protest movements shook government officials into providing medicines this year—have created a huge domestic problem that helps to explain why South Africa’s subimperial project is sometimes veiled with counter hegemonic, and even anti-imperialist, rhetoric.

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