South Africa in Our Future

When guerrilla warfare begins on South Africa’s borders it will not be another one of those liberation wars that have passed by in rapid succession over the last thirty years. All those conflicts, from Indonesia’s independence struggle (1945-48) to Mozambique’s (1964-1974), were but stations on the way toward the overthrow of five centuries of white Western rule in Asia and Africa. The struggle for South Africa will be the end of that line. It will not resemble previous liberation wars where an irrepressible drive met a movable object. Nor will it be like the Middle Eastern cauldron, which appears now to have been contained and cooled by the agreement of both superpowers to recognize the right of Israel to an independent existence. The struggle for South Africa will pit an irrepressible drive against an object with an immovable core, black freedom against white freedom. Here there is no hint of superpower agreement. Here, for the first time, a situation seems destined to arise in which a nuclear power is backed against the wall.

South Africa is Africa’s richest and most powerful country, heavily industrialized, far more developed than are some of the smaller countries of Europe. It is the world’s chief producer of gold and diamonds. It has vast coal and iron ore reserves, steel and chemical industries, and the world’s largest oil-from-coal extraction complex. Together with the disputed territory of South West Africa (Namibia), which it controls at present, it possesses 20 per cent of the world’s economically usable uranium.

LS

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Laurence Salomon

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When guerrilla warfare begins on South Africa’s borders it will not be another one of those liberation wars that have passed by in rapid succession over the last thirty years. All those conflicts, from Indonesia’s independence struggle (1945-48) to Mozambique’s (1964-1974), were but stations on the way toward the overthrow of five centuries of white Western rule in Asia and Africa. The struggle for South Africa will be the end of that line. It will not resemble previous liberation wars where an irrepressible drive met a movable object. Nor will it be like the Middle Eastern cauldron, which appears now to have been contained and cooled by the agreement of both superpowers to recognize the right of Israel to an independent existence. The struggle for South Africa will pit an irrepressible drive against an object with an immovable core, black freedom against white freedom. Here there is no hint of superpower agreement. Here, for the first time, a situation seems destined to arise in which a nuclear power is backed against the wall.

South Africa is Africa’s richest and most powerful country, heavily industrialized, far more developed than are some of the smaller countries of Europe. It is the world’s chief producer of gold and diamonds. It has vast coal and iron ore reserves, steel and chemical industries, and the world’s largest oil-from-coal extraction complex. Together with the disputed territory of South West Africa (Namibia), which it controls at present, it possesses 20 per cent of the world’s economically usable uranium.