Ideology and Reality in Africa

...Large parts of the continent are on their way back to a household economy...

...South Africa's Oxwagon Sentinels (OB) produced one type of ideology: a religiously sanctioned form of Nazism that proclaimed the supremacy of Afrikaners and justified the economic slavery of blacks...

...As reasonable men, neither of these compassionate authors is sure...

...Rather too easily, Minter dismisses the belief of Harry Oppenheimer, Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, and Leon Sullivan that progressive capitalism, increased foreign investment, assurances of racial equity, and a heightened pace of economic development could erode apartheid...

...401 pp...

...He lauded Mozambique's willingness to adopt the "principles of self-sufficiency as in China...

...Industrialization as a short-cut to welfare and prestige has turned out to be a failure...

...Apartheid, he contends, is not the recent product of Afrikaner ideology but rather an outcome of world capitalism...

...King Solomon's Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa By William Minter Basic...

...William Minter and Per Wastberg brilliantly describe the descent of South Africa into its present political and economic quagmire...

...They resemble sectarians selling God on the promise or threat of the coming Day of Judgment— just like that revolution that is to happen tomorrow, shortly, soon...

...As these admirable books demonstrate, sometimes inadvertently, the exact opposite is true: Ideology, not pragmatism, has ravaged a continent that has the largest reserves of untapped natural resources in the world and enough fertile land to provide 130 times what it did in 1979...

...There are strong hints that he engaged in smuggling African revolutionaries from Zambia to Zimbabwe...

...author, "Paths to Progress: Bread and Freedom in Developing Societies" "The greatest danger threatening Africa," Frantz Fanon once wrote, "is the absence of ideology...

...Reviewed by William McCord Professor of sociology, City University of New York...

...As cofound-er of Sweden's Amnesty International and the Swedish Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa, he has remained in constant touch with the continent...

...Minter's presentation of the facts of racial domination is careful, lucid, even eloquent...

...21.95...

...He made these observations, alas, just before the economic collapse of these Socialist countries became fully apparent, Somolia changed its political allegiance, and Deng Xiaoping exposed the tyranny of Mao...

...King Solomon's Mines Revisited traces the history of Southern Africa beginning with the discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1860s, the battles between the British, the Boers and the (equally imperialistic) Zulus, and the eventual rather absent-minded emergence of English colonialism...

...These valuable, if disillusioning, books underline again that simple formulas for ending poverty, making justice conceivable, and spreading liberty do not work with Utopian simplicity in Southern Africa...

...In 1976, Wastberg apparently found the greatest hope for Africa in Tanzania, the People's Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Guinea-Bissau...

...The ascendancy of Vorster's National Party in 1948 ended the debate...

...Arguing for the right of African home ownership in urban areas, United Party leader Sir de Villiers Graaff urged that detribalized Africans should have representation in Parliament...

...His interpretation of the evidence, however, is open to debate...

...White workers vehemently opposed these measures...

...Thus, although hardly motivated by pure altruism, capitalists in South Africa have not presented a monolithic front on racial issues...

...Wastberg first visited Africa in 1959, and subsequently became the editor of Sweden's major morning newspaper...

...In Southern Africa, this clash of ideologues has overwhelmed the advocates of principled reform—Alan Paton, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Afrikaner Jan Hofmeyer...

...Inthel940sand 1950s, South African manufacturers sought a lifting of all restrictions on African mobility, an end to the color bar that limited certain jobs to whites, and the recognition of African trade unions...

...Like Joseph Conrad— who, at nine years old, put his finger on a map of Africa and declared his intention of going there—the authors, both Westerners, felt an irresistible attraction to Africa at an early age...

...Aslateasl936,someAfricanshad the right to vote in English regions such as the Cape, but not in those dominated by the Boers...

...In recent years, delegations of white businessmen have taken the lead in meeting with the banned African National Congress in a desperate search for domestic tranquillity...

...The solid, scholarly, yet still spirited history by political sociologist William Minter offers a useful background for understanding the current African morass...

...The Liberal party argued for a universal franchise...

...These are humane men linked by a romantic attachment to the mysteries of Africa and a deep concern with the struggle against racism...

...Attempts by political liberals or businessmen like Ernst Oppenheim-er to oppose racial oppression were meaningless, since they did not attack the underlying system of capitalism...

...The British had to detain OB saboteurs during the War against Hitler, but that did not prevent the OB leader, Johannes Vorster, from leading his storm troopers to eventual political triumph...

...Minter concludes that the end of apartheid "will be only the opportunity to plant the tree of freedom...

...Contradictions between the interests of various groups—manufacturers and mine-owners, white workers and black workers, the English and the Boers—often resulted in the richest (and usually English) capitalists being in the vanguard of those who opposed apartheid...

...At the opposite extreme, as Per Wastberg observed in Tanzania, African ideologists of a Socialist persuasion are "unable to differentiate between wistful dreams and reality...

...Banned from South Africa, he carried out unspecified secret "assignments...

...But, as Minter himself concedes at times, the pattern of Western involvement in Southern Africa cannot be explained by a simple theory of capitalist exploitation...

...He argues that white minority rule was a natural result of an economic system that mobilized cheap labor for "King Solomon's mines...

...Minter, now a contributing editor of Africa News Services, went to Nigeria in 1961 as a young exchange student, and later taught in Tanzania and Mozambique...

...The belief in total revolution is such that doubters have to be eliminated...

...Missionary zeal and the English opposition to slavery, contradictory capitalist motives, and the racism of white workers have all played their part in the evolution of the continent: Early British missionaries laid the base for mass African education, and it was these educated Africans who later challenged white supremacy...

...It has also shattered the hopes of Nelson Mandela expressed when he was sentenced for life in 1964: "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities...

...Can this approach ensure that "racial domination, like slavery a century ago, will be thrown onto the scrapheap of history...

...He acknowledges, somewhat sadly, that the complexity of the situation "makes detailed prediction futile.' Wastberg is more despairing...

...As Wastberg observes, "None of the great tasks have an end—that is the starting point...

...In 1960, after the Sharpeville massacre, the four major business associations of South Africa called for a relaxation in the pass laws and job obstacles...

...The author ably chronicles the gradual rise of pass laws and "reserves" in South Africa, the use of forced labor in Portuguese territories, and the raw brutalities of the Belgian Congo...

...Originally published in Sweden a decadeago, his book recounts an intimate spiritual journey through Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland, and Mozambique...

...In a brief 1986 Preface to his 1976 book, he abandons his original commitment to the ideology of African revolution: "Neither socialist nor capitalist theories seem to provide a solution...

...Instead, Minter argues for the at present fashionable policy of disengagement from the existing white and capitalistic power structure of South Africa...

...Wastberg, a poet and novelist in addition to being a journalist, writes sensitively about African individuals, the beauty of Africa's countryside, and the hopelessness of its cities...