'Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique'

This book review was published in Volume 3, Number 2, of International Freedom Review (Winter 1990).

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS IN ANGOLA AND MOZAMBIQUE


Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique 
edited by Richard J. Bloomfield.
(Reference Publications, Inc.: Algonac, Mich., 1988. 261 pp., $24.95 hdcvr, $12.95 ppb)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Sometimes even well-informed Americans have trouble understanding the differences between Angola and Mozambique, despite their location on opposite sides of the southern African continent. The similarities are readily apparent: Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies from the late fifteenth century until 1975. Both are poor. Both are in Africa. Both have had troubled relations with neighboring South Africa. Moreover, both have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties since independence.

However, the similarities do not go much beyond these few points, especially since after independence Angola and Mozambique have followed different paths and have come upon unique problems and opportunities. Each will have a decidedly different future.

The World Peace Foundation, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit foundation based in Boston that conducts studies of international issues,” has collected a number of essays on Angola and Mozambique in Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique, edited by Richard J. Bloomfield, the World Peace Foundation’s executive director. Bloomfield served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1978 to 1982. Strangely enough, considering Portugal’s ongoing (if uneven) ties with its former African colonies, Ambassador Bloomfield confesses In the Introduction to being “a neophyte” in the region, an odd position for a former U.S. envoy to Lisbon to invoke.

The essay contributions to this book vary in quality and substance and there is also a certain imbalance in the collection. For instance, an excellent and comprehensive survey of Mozambican history by Gillian Gunn does not have any counterpart dealing with Angolan history, a lacuna that really should have been addressed by the editor.

Moreover, as a book, this anthology is poorly produced. There are numerous typographical and editing errors, there is inconsistency in the typefaces and type-styles used, the leading (space between lines) on some pages is tighter than on others, and the text on some pages is longer than on others for no apparent reason (such as the beginning of a new section or chapter). Overall, this book gives the impression of being someone’s first effort at desktop publishing.

The contributors, for the most part, represent the best of liberal and center-left thinking on African issues. Their names are recognizable to anyone who deals with these issues frequently:  Gerald Bender, Kurt Campbell, Carlos Gaspar, Kenneth Maxwell, Robert I. Rotberg, Wayne S. Smith, in addition to the previously mentioned Gillian Gunn and Richard J. Bloomfield.

In his opening essay, “The Legacy of Decolonization,” Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World at Columbia University, makes a valid criticism that many analysts of African issues often overlook because they themselves are guilty of the sin he identifies. The literature on decolonization falls into two categories, he says: either it has been “classically Africanist” or it has been “overly concerned with grand strategy—with East-West Issues and foreign interventionism.”

Consequently, the Africanists tend to see all events through the prism of “Africa” (in the abstract), undiluted by other considerations, while the other group focuses “almost exclusively on the actions of the superpowers and their allies.” Since the twain seldom meet, there is little interaction or understanding between the two groups. Rarely, Maxwell asserts, “does either side listen to the other, let alone accept that in both positions there is much truth.”

Certainly, this condition has affected the way American analysts and policymakers have approached Angola and Mozambique. There are some people who refuse to believe, for instance, that the MPLA and Frelimo (the Marxist parties ruling Angola and Mozambique) are driven by anything other than their Marxist ideology and therefore there should be no accommodation with them even in the interests of regional stability. There are others who think that the Marxist nature of the governments of Angola and Mozambique should be no cause for concern at all and that Americans should continue “business as usual.” Still others, wearing the blinders of anti-apartheid activism, think that Washington should ally itself with Luanda and Maputo against the aggressive-imperialist-racist South African state: their feeling is, “Any enemy of Pretoria is a friend of ours.”

Long-Standing Communist Ties
It is nevertheless difficult to set aside superpower considerations when dealing with Mozambique and, especially, Angola. Leaders of the future Marxist governments in Portuguese Africa were active members of the Portuguese Communist party and its allies during Portugal’s fascist period. These included Marcelino dos Santos of Frelimo and the MPLA’s Agostino Neto, who, according to Maxwell, “knew the Portuguese Left from the inside,” a characteristic lacking in rivals Holden Roberto of the FNLA and Jonas Savlmbi of UNITA.

From the beginning, Moscow supported the anti-Portuguese liberation movements. Maxwell reports:

[T]heir support for the MPLA went back to 1958; and despite a cooling of the’ Soviet relationship with Neto during the 1970s, Soviet support went to one or the other of MPLA’s factions throughout the period of armed struggle against the Portuguese.

This Soviet connection was sufficient to stimulate U.S. concern. He cites Helmut Sonnenfeldt’s view that the United States had had “no intrinsic interest In Angola” but that even a remote and unimportant territory acquires American interest once it “becomes a focal point for Soviet, and in this Instance, Soviet-supported Cuban military action.” The derivative U.S. interest that results is something “which we simply cannot avoid.”

Maxwell’s account of Soviet interests in southern Africa differs in tone if not in fact from that of Kurt Campbell, whose essay in this volume has also been published, in slightly different form, as an Adelphi Paper by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Campbell notes from the outset, however, the significant difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the region:

Since its dramatic entrance into southern Africa in 1975 to bolster the MPLA during the fractious Angolan civil war, the Soviet Union has played a central role in the military affairs of the region. While the counsel and pressure of both the United States and Britain have been heeded in various southern African capitals and boardrooms, only the Soviet Union, with Its allies Cuba and East Germany, has made its influence felt and demonstrated its commitment on the battlefield.

Campbell adds that “Angola and Mozambique are the Soviet Union’s oldest surviving allies in black Africa, and have been the primary focus of Moscow’s energies to date.” Nonetheless, over the past three decades, Soviet moral, political, financial, and military support has benefited the African National Congress in South Africa, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, and the South West African People’s Organization. Angola and Mozambique merely represent the Kremlin’s first successes In installing revolutionary governments in southern Africa.

Mozambique, however, has not turned out to be quite the success the Soviets had hoped for. Frelimo came to power in 1975, essentially unopposed during its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and in 1977 signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Frelimo promised to become an orthodox “Marxist-Leninist vanguard party” (no small task in a country with no industrial proletariat to speak of) and by 1978 Soviet, East German, and Cuban advisors “were busy shaping Mozambique’s internal political system, assisting in party organization, ideological education, propaganda coordination, and the training of the internal security police.” The Soviets offered substantial military assistance, and Samora Machel, Frelimo’s chief, followed the Moscow line in international forums on all manner of issues unrelated to southern African politics.

Not ten years later, Campbell reports, despite this Soviet assistance:

Mozambique was in a shambles—the result of a concerted South African policy to destabilize the country, combined with a lethally incompetent Marxist economic system.... Currently, the Soviets stationed In Mozambique behave more as prisoners than as protectors of the faltering regime.

What had happened was that the Soviet Union was unable or unwilling to deliver on its promises, particularly in the area of economic assistance. Although Joaquim Chissano, Machel’s successor, has maintained good relations with the Soviets, he “himself appears to look more to the West rather than to the East for economic assistance.”

Indeed, it seems that the Soviets were the exploiters rather than the saviors of Angola and Mozambique. For instance, Campbell points out:

[I]n the late 1980s the Soviet Union was taking 75 percent of the fish catch from the territorial waters of Angola and Mozambique, even while both countries were suffering from serious food shortages.

The Cuban Connection
Wayne S. Smith made a name for himself in 1982 when, as head of the U.S. interests section in Havana, he publicly dissented from Reagan administration policy toward Central America. His essay in this book, “The Cuban Role in Angola,” argues the case that the Cubans are not Soviet puppets but are conscientiously pursuing their own interests in Angola. He blames the United States for “shattering the Alvor agreement” (which was supposed to provide for free and open elections among the three competing liberation movements in Angola upon independence) despite the admissions of Admiral Rosa Coutinho, Portugal’s last colonial governor, that he had himself gone to Havana to get the go-ahead to install the MPLA as the post-independence government in Luanda in direct violation of the Alvor agreement.

The crux of Smith’s argument is this: Fidel Castro wanted to revivify his revolution and strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Smith says:

Castro was -- had always been -- interested in winning political influence, and In that sense Cuba’s intervention was perfectly consistent with the policies and objectives it had pursued in Africa since the early years of the Revolution.. . . Cuba was suddenly—if briefly—seen as a major Third World power to which other progressive but weaker governments could turn in times of trouble…. Thus, Castro doubtless calculated, if Cuba could save the day in Angola, that would strengthen its bargaining power with Moscow. Cuba would have advanced the cause of socialism and thus would be in a strong position to ask for better terms of trade and increased assistance from Moscow.

Smith concludes from this that Castro acted on his own, without Soviet prodding. In a sense, that is probably true. Yet the reason for his action — sending 30,000 troops to Angola between November 8, 1975, and March 1976— was part of his traditional and necessary kowtow to the Kremlin. Interfering in Angola’s internal affairs was Fidel Castro’s way of toadying up to Leonid Brezhnev, so that Cuba could get a better deal on its sugar and gasoline to run its 1955 Buicks.

In defending Cuba’s continued military presence in Angola, Smith castigates the United States and South Africa for prolonging the war by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. “One can hardly imagine greater folly,” Smith writes. “Such an undertaking serves to help South Africa perpetuate the fighting In Angola. It Is a prescription for continuing the turmoil and bloodshed, not for ending them.” He does not seem willing to accept the suggestion that Savimbi and his Angolan supporters have legitimate grievances and a right to participate in a unified Angolan government, free of outside interference. Like other contributors to this volume, Smith believes that the United States should recognize the MPLA regime in Luanda and abandon the UNITA Freedom Fighters, in deference to Cuba’s wish for “a secure Angola. . . at peace with its neighbors, with its civil conflict resolved, and with its doors open to Western economic influence.."


Focus on Mozambique
Easily the best contribution to this collection is Gillian Gunn’s tightly-packed essay on the history of Mozambique, “Learning from Adversity: The Mozambican Experience.” Tracing developments In Mozambique from the early fifteenth century to the present, Gunn demonstrates how a confluence of regional and East-West interests affect Mozambique today.

One important difference between Angola and Mozambique is that in Angola there were three major liberation movements struggling against Portuguese rule (FNLA, MPLA, UNITA), while in Mozambique there was only one, Frelimo. As a result, the transition from colonial rule to independence was much smoother. At the time of independence, there was no organized resistance to Frelimo’s control of the government. It did not take long, however, for a resistance movement to come about, thanks in part to the connivance of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (then fighting its own guerrilla war and fearful of Marxist neighbors). However, Gunn points out, there were internal considerations as well:

Three developments had created the conditions for the growth of an armed dissident movement should Frelimo gain power. First, factional fighting had led a number of middle and low level ex-Frelimo members to feel they had been badly treated. Second, the leaders of the defeated conservative movement stood ready to mobilize this anti-Frelimo sentiment. And third, Rhodesian intelligence had started to formulate the mechanism to organize and arm these elements.

Renamo, as the resistance group came to be known, had fertile ground on which to operate. Frelimo became ideology-ridden and, as a result, Mozambique’s economy and political stability suffered. As Gunn writes:

By the end of 1977 Frelimo was drifting away from the traditions it had developed in the guerrilla war [against Portugal]. Instead of developing ideology from experience, a process which at least ensured some link between policy and reality, it began to impose ideology upon reality.

The consequence? “The balance of payments fell from its 1976 surplus of $41 million down to a 1978 deficit of $244 million, and an even more serious $360 million deficit in 1980.” The story observed in nearly every Communist country repeated itself in Mozambique. For example, Gunn writes,

[T]he ideologically motivated emphasis on mechanized state farms. . . was disastrous.... It came to cost more foreign exchange for a state farm to produce a ton of grain than it would have cost simply to import the crop.

In any case, a good many fanners were intelligent enough to by-pass the official, ideology-driven market, for “by 1982 one half of all peasant production was being sold on the black market.”

So the resistance movement had plenty of reasons to gain support in the countryside. Unfortunately, several self-generated factors worked against Renamo’s interests. One was its brutality. Gunn asserts that Renamo’s “behavior hampered the development of true popular support. Rape and severing of breasts, ears, and lips in retaliation for non-cooperation became common.” Perhaps more important, “Renamo’s inability to articulate a coherent political platform, beyond anti-communist rhetoric, also lessened its chances of developing firm grassroots support.” (And, I might add, its chances of acquiring support from democratic countries abroad. The same people who unstintingly support UNITA or the mujahideen in Afghanistan hesitate to do the same for Renamo.)

Gunn concludes that “Mozarnbique is not a classic Marxist state serving Soviet interests” because Frelimo has gradually returned to “its pragmatic habits.” The belief of many (on the American right, for instance) “that continuation of Frelimo in power means expansion of Soviet influence in the region is not supported by the recent factual record.” The character of Renamo—its lack of credentials as an indigenous movement, its brutality—lead to severe questions about its ability to lead. A Renamo-run Mozambique, says Gunn. “has little chance of being more stable than a Frelimo-run Mozambique.”

Gunn makes the case for increasing U.S. economic aid to Mozambique, because without such aid, “Mozambique is more likely to remain chronically unstable, and therefore unable to control ANC guerrilla infiltration into South Africa.” She asserts that “on several issues that really matter to the West,” such as excluding Cuban troops from Africa, “Frelimo has already shown that its definition of national Interest can overlap with the definition by the United States of Western interests.”

The Trouble with Ideology
The title of UCLA Professor Gerald J. Bender’s essay sums up his thesis: “Washington’s Quest for Enemies in Angola.” He argues, for instance, that Angola under the MPLA is more pluralist and freer than pro-Western neighbors.

It would appeal that In Angola under dos Santos there is greater freedom to criticize the party and government without suffering arbitrary arrest, torture, or death than Is the case in the six non-Marxist states [of Gabon, Zaire, Togo, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kenya].

In his conclusion, Bender criticizes U.S. policy toward Angola as confused. “What is clear,” he argues, “is that not only has there been a great divergence of perceptions about whether the Angolan government represents a danger to the United States but there have also been diametrically opposed policies proposed to address the situation.” Various parts of the Executive Branch and Congress have pursued policies “that reflect little, If any, consideration” of the policies pursued by other offices and agencies. He continues,

The result has been a series of confusing, contradictory, and futile policies that have displeased Americans from left to right and that have had almost no impact on engendering change in Angola. Clearly, this state of affairs is good neither for the United States nor for Angola.

Editor Richard Bloomfield takes as his task the distillation of the wisdom imparted by his fellow contributors In a concluding essay, “U. S. Policy: Doctrine Versus Interests.” His views become clear early on when he asks, “Why should normal relations with Angola depend on a Namibia settlement? South Africa is the outlaw in Namibia, not Angola. Why should normal relations with Angola depend on the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola? These forces play a defensive role.”

Bloomfield seems to believe that ideology and political doctrine are opposed to U.S. national interests, rather than elements that inform interests and strategy. If that is the case, then the whole Carterite structure of human rights and democracy opposed to “an inordinate fear of Communism” that informed U.S. strategic interests from 1977 to 1981 comes tumbling down. From the very beginning, American values—political, moral, and economic— have helped to shape the national interest and national strategy.

Bloomfield turns the whole issue of U.S. relations with Angola and Mozambique into a stalking horse for U.S. attitudes toward apartheid in South Africa. He writes:

Let us imagine that the regime in Pretoria were one that accorded political rights to the black majority. If that were the case, it is likely that the guerrilla movements in Angola and Mozambique would be weak, if they existed at all. There would be no Cuban troops in Angola and the Soviet bloc presence in both countries would in all likelihood be minimal and largely civilian.

This is, if nothing else, a non-sequitor. The existence or nonexistence of apartheid in South Africa is irrelevant as far as the political rights of Angolans and Mozambicns go. The dos Santos regime in Luanda does not exclude Jonas Savimbi and his supporters from political participation because whites control the government in South Africa. He excludes Savimbi because he and the MPLA covet their currently held political power and fear losing It. Joaquim Chissano has adjusted his economy and relations with the West not because of apartheid in South Africa, but because his reliance on Soviet assistance and Marxist ideology proved disastrous.

For Bloomfield, U.S. policy toward Angola and Mozambique should be motivated as much by how it will affect American goals for the elimination of apartheid as it is by U.S. relations with the Soviet Union or U.S. disdain for Cuban imperialism in Africa. He argues:

U.S. objectives in each country must be consistent with U.S. interests. This seems obvious, but in the policy debate it is often as not disregarded. Thus, the objective of replacing governments that are ‘Marxist’ and friendly to the Soviet Union with their enemies in these two instances would only lead to governments that would be even less likely to cooperate with U.S. policy vis-à-vis South Africa.

This may be true with Renamo, but it certainly is not true with UNITA. Jonas Savimbi has long been on record in opposition to apartheid and even, at one time, supported the African National Congress. His acceptance of military and financial assistance from South Africa was a prudential move designed to advance his interests in Angola. Similarly, the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to defeat Hitler; that alliance did not imply approval for Stalin’s purges or any Marxist policy. A truly democratic government in Angola featuring Savimbi’s participation would probably support U.S. goals in South Africa without the baggage of ties with the Kremlin and an ideological need to undermine liberal democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.


The Quickening Pace of Events
Events in southern Africa have caught up with, and, in some cases, passed by the analysis presented in this book. The independence of Namibia is just around the corner. Election results announced in November 1989 indicated that SWAPO garnered just 57 per cent of the vote in elections for a constituent assembly; 67 per cent was needed to bulldoze through its own constitution. The peaceful transition to independence in Namibia is supposed to be accompanied by the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. There may be good reason to adopt a policy of “watchful waiting” as far as that goes. Castro does not especially want to take back these troops, some of whom have contracted the AIDS virus, and may send them on some other mischievous adventure In Africa or elsewhere before he throws them a ticker-tape parade in Havana. American policymakers should beware of any Cuban adventurism in the future.

There is some hope for a negotiated settlement in Angola, too. Savimbi and dos Santos shook hands at a meeting of African heads of state and government in Gbadolite, Zaire, in mid-1989. Though a disagreement arose over just what transpired at Gbadolite*, pressure from the United States and its friends in Africa may just force dos Santos to agree to meet Savimbi at the bargaining table.

In Mozambique, the Chissano government continues to seek and receive Western economic, and even military, aid. Despite Renamo’s lack of ideological bearings, it has had some military successes that are worrisome for the Frelimo regime. David Hoile reports (in The World & I, December 1989) that Renamo “now probably controls more than 50 per cent of Mozambique and operates in some 80 per cent of the country,” adding that “factions within Frelimo itself have conceded the legitimacy of negotiating with Renamo.” So there is plenty to watch in Mozambique as well.

Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique is not the best book on the region. Neither is it the worst. The essays by Kurt Campbell and Gillian Gunn may be, as they say, worth the price of the volume But except for those with a die-hard interest in southern African affairs this is probably a book that can be passed up.

* See 1FF publication Angola Peace Monitor, Volume 1, Number 2—Ed.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).

'A History of South Africa' by Leonard Thompson

This review appeared in Volume 1, Number 1, of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Is Past Really Prologue? South Africa’s New Era
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
A History of South Africaby Leonard Thompson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 288 pp., illustrated, $29.95 cloth.

The apartheid era of South African history has ended and the post-apartheid era has begun. It remains for future historians, however, to assign a date to the point of demarcation.

Was it June 16, 1976, when black students in Soweto rioted over Afrikaans-language instruction in their schools, leaving dozens dead and forcing hundreds of others into exile, many linking up with external anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress (ANC)?

Was it September 1983, when white voters approved a new constitution calling for a multiracial parliament, simultaneously unleashing unprecedented reform and revitalized unrest and activism among blacks, who remained excluded from the political structures?

Was it August 1989, when F. W. De Klerk replaced an ailing P. W. Botha as president, visibly signifying the start of a new era in white politics?

Was it February 2, 1990, when De Klerk announced the legalization of the long-banned ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, revivifying moribund political discussions? Or was it ten days later, February 12, 1990, when Nelson Mandela, more myth than man, was released from prison after serving twenty-seven years of a life sentence for conspiracy to commit sabotage?

Was it June 17, 1991, when the Population Registration Act, the last pillar of apartheid, was repealed by South Africa’s parliament, ending generations of classifying people by their skin color and ethnicity?

As the accelerating pace of the foregoing dates indicates, South African history is moving at a rate undreamed of fifteen years ago. After years— decades—of laconic acceptance of the doomed apartheid system, a groundswell of energy from both the rulers and the ruled has stimulated movement toward fuller democracy. This energy brings in its wake both breathtaking political debate (of a peaceful and intellectual sort) and bloody black-on-black violence, with threats of white-on-white violence looming ever closer.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his much-discussed article “The End of History” in The National Interest two summers ago, he had in mind mostly the historical struggle between East and West, between Marxist totalitarians and liberal democrats. However, his thesis can also be applied, with modifications, to South African history. There, too, an ultimately unworkable ideology—apartheid—is being discarded. It is unclear, and unfortunately so, whether this ideology will be replaced by liberal democracy or by the discredited Marxist communism now rejected by the people of Eastern Europe. Thus Leonard Thompson’s most recent book, A History of South Africa, could hardly come at a more appropriate time.

Seldom in the history of any country can one observe what has come before and say that it points inexorably to a specific event or set of events that will come. Yet in South Africa’s case, despite backsliding and suffering, despite incompetent and intransigent leaders (both black and white), it has seemed for a long time that apartheid must end and that it must be replaced by a better system. This has not been simply a normative question; the injustices of apartheid were clear from the outset. It has been a pragmatic, practical question as well: the internal contradictions of apartheid, its uncompromising worldview, its non-adaptable interface with demographic and economic realities—all these ensured its demise.

In this book, his second comprehensive history of his native land (the first was the Oxford History of South Africa, published in 1976), Thompson, director of the Yale University Southern African Research Program, traces historical developments from pre-history through the earliest European explorations of the long-isolated subcontinent of southern Africa, and further through the 17th century Dutch settlement and subsequent conquests and colonizations by the British. This colonial era ended in 1910 when the Union of South Africa was formed by an act of the British Parliament.

The next eighty years make up the history of South Africa most familiar to Americans. This is the history that resonates with the American civil rights movement. It is the history that led to intense American involvement in South African affairs, culminating in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour of the United States during the summer of 1990. in which they raised more than $7 million for the ANC.

The Mandela tour and subsequent events would no doubt have surprised Thompson even as he completed his book, which ends on a warily optimistic note. He reports De Kierk’s accession to the presidency, his freeing of ANC leaders who had been imprisoned at the same time as Mandela, and his diplomatic efforts that included trips to Britain, West Germany, Portugal, and Zambia. He casts doubt, however, on De Klerk’s intentions to negotiate a democratic system with his ANC interlocutors. De Klerk, Thompson writes, “intended to maintain white ascendancy in South Africa by using fixed racial categories and group rights.” He ends this sweeping look at the past by asking two questions about the future:

“Was a process starting that would lead to negotiations and the relatively peaceful elimination of racism? Or would the deadlock continue until, some day, revolutionary forces would overwhelm the apartheid state?” Despite continued threats of violence, it appears to most observers that the answer to the second question is, fortunately, no, while the answer to the first is a qualified yes. A process of negotiation has begun, even as it is tainted by unrest and violence. The basic laws that have undergirded the apartheid system—the Land Acts, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act—have been repealed. Urban areas are in the process of establishing multiracial, regional governments that will end generations of separation, acknowledging the fundamental unity of places like Johannesburg and Soweto.

On the international scene, economic sanctions have begun to be lifted— first the European Community, then even some African nations. De Klerk has started a diplomatic initiative to reinvigorate the African continent through South African involvement with its neighbors. His initiative features four countries as keystones: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. These four, he believes, representing the four points of the compass and the strongest economic powers on the continent, can together bring Africa into the 21st century.

It seems clear—despite the pessimism of so many in the past and the cautious optimism of Leonard Thompson—that a long period of deadlock and isolation has ended; the post-apartheid era has haltingly but manifestly begun.

Mr. Sincere, author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa,is Director of African Affairs at IFF and Books Editor of terra nova.

Book Notes 1

For about one year – mid-1991 through early 1992 – I was books editor of terra nova, a quarterly journal published by the International Freedom Foundation. (I later became editor-in-chief, succeeding Mark Franz.) One of the recurring features in the books section of terra nova was “Book Notes,” short blurbs about (then) current books. I contributed several of these over the short period that terra nova was published.

These “notes” appeared in Volume 1, Number 1 of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Book Notes
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions by Doug Porter, Bryant Allen, and Gaye Thompson. (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, April 1991). 247 pages, $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
Three Australian researchers looked at a major aid project in Kenya funded by the Australian government over a period of thirteen years. The authors note that “the failure of a great many development projects to achieve even their most fundamental objectives is due to a reluctance on the part of development practitioners to appreciate the significance of history. Projects are frequently designed as if time began with the project implementation schedule. Past lessons are seldom examined and still fewer professionals bother to inquire into the historical circumstances of the people their interventions seek to assist.” To fully explain the failure of this project—the Magarini Settlement Project in Kenya’s Coast Province— the authors look at the 70 years of social, political, and economic history among the Giriama people that preceded the launch of the initiative. They examine the project’s implementation, its review and accountability back home (in Australia), and the effects of the project’s failure on Australian development aid policy.

Foreign Aid in Practice by Stephen Browne. (New York: Columbia University Press, July 1990). 283 pages, $60.00 cloth.
Attempting both to explain and justify current foreign aid programs and practices, Foreign Aid in Practice is in many ways a primer for readers unfamiliar with the wider literature on development. As such, it is a trap for the uninitiated, for it accepts as a given that development aid actually works, contrary to the findings of economists and other experts. To the extent that the volume explains the inner workings of the World Bank, IMF, and various countries’ development agencies, it is useful, but its overly rosy view of the purposes and potential of foreign aid renders it a dubious source of critical insights.


The Political Economy of Senegal Under Structural Adjustment, edited by Christopher L. Delgado and Sidi Jammeh. (Westport. Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991), 232 pages, $45.00 cloth.
Twelve essays by African, American, and European experts on the political economy of West Africa comprise this volume, an examination of one of Africa’s few multiparty democracies. The essays look at external economic forces affecting Senegal’s economic performance, internal political events and trends that influence economic decisionmaking, and the role of international development agencies. The editors note in the introduction that “if it is correct to characterize Senegalese nation-building from colonial days to the end of the 1970s as using economic strategies to address complex political issues, it would be equally correct to characterize the period since then as using political strategies to address nearly insoluble economic dilemmas.” This book uses that conceptualization to examine a transitional phase in the development of Senegal’s political economy.

Effective Sanctions on South Africa: The Cutting Edge of Economic Intervention, edited by George W. Shepherd, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991). 160 pages, $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.
The editor of this volume contends that, unlike sanctions strategies in the past, which have had a consistent record of failure, economic sanctions against South Africa have been effective in promoting change in that country. While he notes that there has been a continuing debate about the effectiveness of sanctions and whether they will actually hurt the cause they are meant to help, he brushes aside the objections and states baldly that even in the wake of substantial reform and the opening up of the South African political process since February 1990, “the case for ongoing, effective sanctions seems clear.” The contributors contend that “the movement for racial equality in the world is not spent,” which leads them to offer the South African sanctions as a model for policy elsewhere in the world, a prospect that should make wary anyone who supports unfettered commercial intercourse and non-coercive political relations between sovereign states.

'South Africa’s War Against Capitalism'

This article originally appeared in Volume 3, Number 3, of International Freedom Review (Spring 1990).

ENDING APARTHEID, ENDING SOCIALISM
South Africa’s War Against Capitalism by Walter E. Williams
[New York: Praeger (A Cato Institute Book), 1989, 159 pp., $19.95, cloth]
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

The mythology of African liberation movements asserts that the struggle against apartheid is inherently a struggle against capitalism. The apartheid system, according to the African National Congress and its allied groups, was designed to benefit rich white capitalists at the expense of poor black workers. American economist Walter Williams demonstrates conclusively in his book, South Africa’s War Against Capitalism, that the opposite is the case: apartheid is an inherently socialist system designed to benefit (formerly) poor white workers at the expense of the entrepreneurial classes and of poor blacks. Simply, apartheid is South Africa’s war against capitalism. As Williams puts it, if capitalism can be described as the unfettered operation of the market in the allocation of society’s scarce resources, then apartheid is the antithesis of capitalism.”

South Africa’s War Against Capitalism covers much the same ground as did an earlier study by Merle Lipton, Capitalism and Apartheid, but Williams, well-known In American conservative and libertarian circles for his unabashed willingness to speak the truth as he sees it, regardless of whom might be offended, puts his own special gloss on the subject. It is this combativeness that makes his new book a lively read that will get people to think more deeply and more precisely about the complex social and economic system we call “apartheid.”

Although the term apartheid did not appear until the 1940s, it had its genesis in laws passed by the South African parliament in the 1910s and ‘20s. These were the first laws limiting the economic freedom of black South Africans by barring them from certain occupations, forcing them to carry identity documents, and forbidding them from owning farmland or business establishments. These laws were demanded by white-controlled labor unions and the South African Communist Party, as well as by white farmers, and were passed despite the protests of white manufacturers, mine owners, and other employers.

The reason for this legislation—which, in some cases, such as minimum wage laws, had the appearance of being non-racist, colorblind, and equitable—was to exclude blacks from competition for jobs in industry and agriculture. White farmers feared black farmers because the blacks were more productive and more willing to take risks than the whites. White workers in the mines disliked the fact that blacks were willing to work for lower wages than the whites, thus being more attractive to employers, especially when filling unskilled or semi-skilled positions. And because white workers disliked the blacks, the Communist Party campaigned on the slogan “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.”

The capitalists—i.e., white entrepreneurs and business owners—opposed this legislation vehemently. Contrary to what anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and abroad have said, white businessmen and financiers are not the bulwarks of the apartheid system, because it puts them at a disadvantage. Apartheid laws interfere with their freedom to operate their businesses as they see fit. The existence of apartheid laws that restrict the rights of white employers to hire black workers is itself evidence that business interests opposed (and oppose) racial discrimination. After all, if white employers did not want to hire blacks in the first place, why should the state legislate against such activity?

In fact, in the early part of this century, white employers preferred to hire blacks not only because they worked for less money than their white counterparts, but because they worked harder and better. Williams cites a government commission report from 1908:

We have been impressed with the frequency with which it has been stated in evidence that unskilled labour was “kaffir’s work” and as such is not the kind of work which a white man should perform. [The poor white’s] inefficiency as an unskilled labourer and the higher wage he requires, have had the natural result that coloured labour, inefficient though it is, is cheaper to the employer for unskilled work than white labour... It is essential to realize the importance of the practical monopoly of the unskilled labour market possessed by the native.

Williams reports that in 1916, the South African prime minister travelled around the country “urging white farmers to fire their black workers and replace them with poor whites. This admonishment fell on deaf ears because farmers had little incentive to do so. First of all, black workers were cheaper and more reliable; and second, many poor whites were unwilling to do kaffirwerk (the American translation would be ‘nigger work’).”

Labor unions in South Africa and the United States at this time were both calling for racially-based discriminatory legislation against non-white workers. Samuel Gompers, one of the founders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), called for immigration restrictions against Asians because he thought “the maintenance of the nation depended upon the maintenance of racial purity and strength.” Labor leaders demanded equal pay for equal work, which although it sounds altruistic and virtuous, was essentially a means to price black labor—often illiterate and mostly unskilled —out of the market. When that didn’t work, they called instead for outright discrimination by law. This was opposed by employers.

For instance, the South African Chamber of Mines argued that the color bar “should be abolished because it is irrational and immoral.” It was irrational because it stifled the most effective utilization of labor by management, making allocation of resources difficult and uneconomical. That it was immoral is self-evident.

A turning point in South African history was the “Rand Rebellion” of 1922, also known as the “Red Revolt.” Twenty thousand white miners went on strike in the area around Johannesburg, in an action described by Williams as “a Marxist revolution organized by white workers to prevent the Chamber of Mines from hiring black semiskilled workers.” In the strike, more than 200 people were killed—mostly whites—and several hundred more were wounded. It precipitated a political crisis that led to the collapse of the South African Party government led by Jan Smuts and the formation of a new government by National Party leader J. B. M. Hertzog.

Another result was the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924, which because it was opposed by the Smuts government and favored by the white workers and Hertzog’s National Party, led to Hertzog’s accession to power. Smuts’ South African Party opposed this legislation, which statutorily limited the economic rights of blacks, for several reasons that still ring true today. Williams writes:

The South African party opposed statutory discrimination for several reasons: (1) It would embarrass South Africa in the eyes of the world; (2) it would earn whites the hatred of all the other communities; and (3) it was redundant since racial domination—the party felt—had already been achieved de facto. Some members of Parliament also advanced practical arguments against statutory provisions for discrimination. They said that: (1) the bill would create hate and agitation among the black population, and (2) this artificial protection to poor whites would lead to failure since the only real job protection was in efficiency and hard work.

More than twenty years passed between the introduction of this legislation and the election in 1948 of the National Party government that campaigned on a platform of apartheid. In that twenty years, South Africa suffered the effects of the worldwide Great Depression. Rural Afrikaners, like Africans throughout the continent, migrated to the cities in search of work. The Second World War precipitated political organizing for both Afrikaners and black Africans. Within both groups were supporters and opponents of the war effort, but whatever the case, political organizing skills were strengthened and the groundwork for later social and political events was laid. Because the market acted non-racially, those who wanted to uphold white privilege increasingly turned to the political arena to achieve their goals. Not only did they pass discriminatory laws, they moved to acquire more property for the state, to the extent that by the mid- 1980s, 55 per cent of South African industry was state-owned or -controlled. By this means, the government could grant patronage positions and sinecures to white workers who preferred not to compete in a market that granted the same status to black Africans as it did to white Africans.

Under Daniel F. Malan and his successors J. M. Strijdom and Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid—or separate development—was developed to its zenith. Under their plans, blacks and whites would do everything separately: live, work, go to school, vote, travel. Separate black republics would be established to satisfy the longing of blacks for political rights. Of course, In the long run, none of these grand schemes succeeded. The events of 1989 and 1990 show that quite clearly. As Williams explains thoroughly in this book, however, the collapse of apartheid under its own weight was inevitable.

In a chapter that has lessons for all countries where the state is tempted to intervene in the economy, Williams explains how market manipulation supported apartheid and can be used to enforce malevolent ideas almost anywhere. He discusses minimum- and equal-wage legislation at length, noting that such legislation:

is an effective tool in a racist’s arsenal. Wage regulation is effective because it enjoys the benefit of at least four powerful forces: (1) It evokes voluntary cooperation with the racist goals; (2) it gives the appearance of being racially neutral; (3) it is relatively cheap to enforce; and (4) it sometimes enjoys the political support of the people whom it is intended to victimize, as well as their benefactors.

Why is such legislation so bad? Simply because it works to price out of the market the least advantaged (or most disadvantaged, depending on one’s perspective) laborers. Williams writes: "Virtually all scholarly studies conclude that minimum wage laws discriminate against employment of the less preferred worker.” Thus, if black workers face discrimination because of their race, but employers are willing to overlook their irrational dislike of blacks if blacks also work for lower wages, the discrimination is mitigated. However, if the law forces employers to pay the same wage to workers regardless of irrational prejudices, the employer is more likely to yield to his prejudice and discriminate against the black worker. “No doubt there were white supremacists in private industry,” Williams comments, “but their sense of loyalty to white workers was not sufficient enough to withstand the voluntary forces of the marketplace.”

Williams culls examples from both American and South African history to support his argument. He recalls:

In 1909, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen called a strike against the Georgia Railroad. One of their demands called for the complete elimination of blacks from the employment rolls. Instead of eliminating blacks, however, the arbitration board decided that black firemen, hostlers, and hostlers’ helpers should be paid wages equal to the wages of white men doing the same job. The white unionists were delighted with the decision; they said, “If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain.”

Similar demands were made by South African unions. Williams explains that both American and South African labor leaders

recognized the power of wage regulation as a means to accomplishing racist goals. They both saw that setting a floor on wages could be more effective and politically cheaper than the Imposition of quotas and color bars, in part because a legislated minimum wage is seldom seen as racially discriminatory and is hence more politically acceptable among decent people (even those victimized by it) and less subject to constitutional challenge.

Williams believes that all South Africans have suffered because of the apartheid system, not only blacks who are its most visible victims. This is because apartheid distorts the market, its enforcement absorbs a disproportionate amount of national income, and all South African citizens have to pay. Because race rather than the market determines the allocation of scarce resources, apartheid—which Williams terms “inefficient resource allocation”— “clearly reduces South Africa’s overall material wealth from what it otherwise might be.”

The curious problem that we face today is that organized anti-apartheid groups argue—incorrectly—that apartheid and capitalism are allies and must both be opposed with equal vehemence. Bishop Desmond Tutu, for instance, wrote in the black South African magazine Frontline in 1980:

At the outset I must say that I am opposed to capitalism it is due to abhorrence at what I believe to be an essentially exploitative economic order.... What I have seen of capitalism in my 48 years, and all over the world, has convinced me that no amount of plastic surgery can alter its basically ugly face.

Archbishop Tutu has not changed his opinion in ten years. Neither, for that matter, have Nelson Mandela or the African National Congress, who continue their insistence that in the new South Africa, banks, mines, and other basic industries must be expropriated by the state. (They use the term “nationalized,” which implies giving the nation or the people some role to play, but in fact they intend to take these industries away from the people and put them in the hands of an impersonal leviathan, the State.)

Perhaps after seeing the concrete rejection of socialism by the people of Central Europe and the at least nominal rejection of it by African rulers, the ANC, Mandela, and Tutu may change their views. But so far their minds seem closed to the logical conclusion drawn by Walter Williams:

South Africa’s apartheid is not the corollary of free-market or capitalistic forces. Apartheid is the result of anticapitalistic or socialistic efforts to subvert the operation of market (capitalistic) forces. Indeed, it is the free play of market forces—with no intervention by political forces—that has always been seen as the enemy of white privilege and that apartheid ideology has always sought to defeat.

Indeed, the South African Conservative Party and other right-wing groups that seek to return to unreconstructed apartheid and racial discrimination speak bluntly of their disdain for capitalism and the entrepreneurial classes because the free-market system subverts the ethnic solidarity and Afrikaner nationalism they hold so dear.

Walter E. Williams

The bottom line is this: While the new South Africa is undergoing its long-awaited reshaping through negotiations and civic conversation, those who support the free-market must make a frontal assault on the incorrect beliefs that apartheid and capitalism are allies. The case for the free market must be made clear and accessible to all South Africans. It must be explained, as Williams explains, that “the mere existence of South Africa’s racial regulatory laws is evidence enough that racial privilege is difficult [to sustain] through free market forces.” It must be emphasized that “the business pursuit of profits—which caused employers to be less ardent supporters of the white supremacist doctrine—has always been the enemy of white privilege.”

So it shall be in a post-apartheid South Africa. If black South Africans really want to see a fairer distribution of wealth, they must insist not that property be taken over by the state, but that state-owned enterprises be turned over to the people. The current South African government has already begun an extensive program of privatization, and it is only a matter of time before the big state-owned industries—steel, electricity, communications— become the property of the people. Anti-apartheid activists should not allow their anti-capitalist ideology to scuttle that process. A complete elimination of racist laws and practices in South Africa can only be achieved under a market system that permits maximum freedom for the individual to engage in whatever economic enterprise he or she wishes.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa, published in 1990 by the International Freedom Foundation.

'Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays'

This article appeared originally in the International Freedom Review, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1991. This is the first time it has been made available on line or in digital format.

Book Review
LIFE IN FREEDOM
Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays 
by Stanislaw Baranczak
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 258 pages; cloth, no price given.)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What follows is a sort of trompe d’oeil of a book review, as Stanislaw Baranczak’s Breathing Under Wateris essentially a collection of book reviews. Perhaps if this present essay is someday published in a collection, and another reviewer tries his hand at a critique... but enough! The mind boggles, which is precisely the effect Baranczak achieves in his description of life in Eastern Europe under totalitarian communism.

Baranczak is a remarkably fluid writer in English, considering that he only came to the United States in 1982, in the aftermath of Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s martial law crackdown on the Solidarity trade union. In this he shares a heritage with other Central Europeans who chose to express themselves in English, such as the Pole, Joseph Conrad, and the Czech, Tom Stoppard.

Baranczak is a finely-honed and witty stylist who writes with a clear understanding of his audience. He can make an obscure Polish essayist of the early twentieth century come alive for American readers who have never encountered a single one of the books under discussion. This is a rare talent.

Baranczak is at his best in the first few essays in this collection, in which he describes the culture shock that awaits Eastern Europeans (“E.E.”) who arrive in the West. Given current circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe—where not only travel but emigration is easier than ever before—these chapters are especially pertinent today.

His biting wit targets both East and West. He lists some “things American which E.E. will never be able to come to terms with” like Barbara Walters, Wonder Bread, stand-up parties, baseball, and small talk, among others. Ms. Walters, he says, reminds E.E. “of the superficiality and pretentious blah-blah of Eastern Europe’s own TV anchors” and television commercials, which “though basically unknown as a genre in the Communist bloc, have much in common with the general mindlessness and bad taste of what serves as mass culture there.”

Baranczak is not always lighthearted In his approach. The themes and subjects he takes up include some that are quite serious. He reviews biographies of Lech Walesa and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski; he analyzes the prison letters of Václav Havel; and he searches the collected poems and plays of Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) for an underlying philosophy currently guiding the Pontiff. He takes on important but neglected Polish writers who perished during the Holocaust or who spent their entire careers in exile, avoiding Nazi and communist persecution. He reveals the secrets of totalitarian censorship and how the oppressed are able to be creative and truthful despite it all.

In the book’s title essay, originally delivered as an address in Boston in 1982, he points out that in totalitarian countries, “the so-called dissidents. . . may of course constitute a minority, and they usually do; but on the other hand, they are the only normal people around.”

More precisely, he writes, the dissidents are the people who most actively seek to “live like human beings.” Poland, he said, though it may be a country under occupation (this was the period of martial law, when totalitarian repression was brought out in the open), is a country “of free people who know exactly what they want and who most certainly will continue their struggle to achieve it.”

Despite the efforts of apologists and merely ignorant people in the West who try to understand the totalitarian regime or explain away its oppression using Western paradigms, “the only people who still behave abnormally and who constitute the minority — in other words, the only real dissidents in today’s Poland—are its Communist rulers.”

This lesson must be learned and remembered by all of us. It is too early to take for granted the emerging democracies of Central Europe. Ethnic tensions simmer beneath the surface. Yugoslavia is ready to fall apart. Romania and Bulgaria, despite changes in regime, still suffer under communist rule. In Poland itself, Solidarity’s once indivisible solidarity was riven by disputes between Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, representatives of just two of many factions.

In Hungary, the free-market-oriented ruling party has lost seats to the (former) Communists in a number of local election contests. Only in Czechoslovakia and what used to be East Germany do the transitions to democracy seem to be going relatively smoothly. Yet in Czechoslovakia there have been disputes over what the name of the country should be — “the Czech and Slovak Federated Republic” seems to have won the battle for compromises, seeking to satisfy the historically dissatisfied Slovaks in a federation dominated by Czechs — while In eastern Germany, strikes among the industrial proletariat began soon after reunification, a signal of the deep-felt fears of economic upheaval after years of impoverished certainty.

The bottom line is that we have not yet reached Fukuyama’s proclaimed “End of History.” Communism is not yet a museum piece. It still exists in Albania, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and in nascent forms in various so-called Third World countries. It still earns the allegiance of a few recalcitrant American academics who continue to plead, “True Marxism has simply never been tried.” We must, therefore, still worry about totalitarianism and its effects on the human soul.

In this collection of essays, devoted primarily to explorations of the human spirit, Stanislaw Baranczak ultimately spins a cautionary tale of many threads, warning us to be aware that our own human frailties too often lead to the totalitarian temptation. Baranczak uses two terms to praise another author that apply equally to himself: “perspicacity of vision” and “lucidity of prose.” These make Breathing Under Water a compelling read.

Richard Sincere is author of several books, including Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (Washington: International Freedom Foundation, 1990) and a frequent contributor to the book pages of the International Freedom Review. Currently, Mr. Sincere is editor of CSIS News at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.