Press exposures of starvation wages paid by British firms in South Africa have prompted an official House of Commons inquiry, but one which was dismissed by a columnist in a leading weekly (the New Statesman) as “an exercise, at the lowest, in hypocrisy and, at the highest, in evading an issue. For the issue is surely not what wages firms pay in South Africa but whether the firms should be there at all.” This robust view apart the case for withdrawal of foreign capital investment or its restriction, or the freezing of further flows, gets short shrift in business circles. Yet faced with growing pressures to disinvest, these circles have been casting around for arguments to placate the total-withdrawal lobby. Two initiatives are most frequently cited as proof that left to itself, business will reform apartheid. These are the Polaroid experiment and the Oppenheimer phenomenon.

I had thought to write a substantive introduction to these papers and proceedings, but have decided that a balanced survey of issues would be superfluous and might detract from the overall impact of this record. Those who follow the course of events in Southern Africa may discern in these pages the result of an attempt to bridge the gap between academic and political discourse. They are less likely to find new information than potentially useful insights arising from the clash of divergent opinions. Readers who are less familiar with conditions in Southern Africa may find that great issues are introduced more clearly through diversity of opinion than by any other method.

African studies has gone through three well-known phases as a field of study. Up until 1950 or thereabouts, those studying Africa — they were not yet called Africanists — tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the capturing (or recapturing) of a description of Africa eternal: Launcelot the ethnographer in search of a holy grail of the past that was written in the present tense and was undefiled by contact and uncorrupted by civilization. What was once a myth is now a fairy tale and it would be silly to waste time tellling each other the obvious truth that fairy tales are modes of the social control and the education of children.

The present political uncertainty in Rhodesia has complex origins. Until 1965 the country was a member of the British Commonwealth. It enjoyed “Responsible Government” (in the constitutional sense) which allowed its politicians much latitude in running affairs to suit their own desires. The black majority of the population had virtually no voice in the government. Britain retained a few residual legal rights arising from the situation when Rhodesia was colonized in 1890. In 1965 the Rhodesian politicians representing the white population of under 250,000 renounced their obligations in terms of these British rights and proclaimed their country a sovereign, independent power. The British government responded to the unilateral declaration of independence (U.D.I.) by imposing an economic blockade on Rhodesia. Rhodesia's financial assets abroad were frozen and its export trade embargoed. Its access to foreign money markets to raise investment capital was blocked.

When I became Assistant Secretary for Africa nearly four and a half years ago it was my hope that, if I could do nothing else, I could help to sustain and increase America's effort in the development of Africa. We cannot be meaningful to Africa unless we respond to its great needs for economic development. That hope has not been fully realized. I have had to say “no” to African requests far more than I have been able to say “yes”. I want to explore with you today why I think this has been so and to suggest some approaches to reverse the present trend.

People of African descent in America occupy a singular position in relation to the race problems faced by Blacks in South Africa. Many Afro-Americans have had firsthand experience with the practice of race discrimination either in its blatant Jim Crow manifestations or in its more covert institutional forms. This common experience with race discrimination in South Africa and the United States makes it possible, for example, to correlate W.E.B. Dubois' description of the warring “double consciousness” of the black American made in 1903 with the expressions of frustration written by Albert Luthuli in 1962. This commonality also establishes a basis from which a meaningful assessment can be made regarding the historical role of black Americans in the race issue of South Africa.

Travel to many parts of Africa is a complicated undertaking — visas and shots, tickets … delays. A trip to Southern Rhodesia, however, is a breeze. No visa is required, just one or two innoculations, a passport and a confirmed onward reservation. Air travel reservations? Drop by a Pan American ticket counter anywhere in the United States and in seconds the computer will confirm space for you on an Air Rhodesia flight from Johannesburg, South Africa to the Rhodesian capital of Salisbury. It is all very convenient. The trouble is that when Pan Am, TWA, and perhaps other American carriers help make the going great, they apparently do it illegally.

Two great changes have been brought by twenty-five years of apartheid rule in South Africa. Its internal contradictions have been sharpened by the simultaneous attempts to divide the country along even more rigid color lines and to stimulate more rapid economic growth; and its external relations have declined to the point where the Republic today has become the “polecat of the world.” These two developments are inextricably linked so that it makes little sense to try and describe the South African situation without focussing on their interrelationship.

Europeans came to the area that is now Zambia in small numbers during the first four decades of the twentieth century primarily as missionaries, administrators, farmers, or employees of the copper or lead and zinc mines. The most extensive period of European immigration, however, was the decade and a half following World War II. In 1946 there were 22,000 Europeans in the country, while in 1962 the European population reached a peak of 77,000. The overwhelming majority of Europeans came from South Africa, the Rhodesias (Zambia was then Northern Rhodesia), or Britain— in that order of frequency. Most of those born in the Rhodesias had British and/or South African ancestry. In the immediate preindependence period slightly more than a third of the Europeans were citizens of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, into which Northern Rhodesia was incorporated from 1953 to 1963; most of the rest were approximately evenly divided between British and South African citizenship.

To make a case for greater American involvement in Africa is to take cognizance of what has gone before — eclectic embrace followed by selective disengagement. The Nixon Administration has opted for a policy of designating certain target countries for bilateral assistance and political cultivation. The itineraries of American public figures from the Vice President and Secretary of State to the astronauts and Mrs. Nixon tell us where the emphases are being placed: on the two long-standing areas of concern, Liberia and Ethiopia; on Africa's most populous state, Nigeria; on one of its larger states, Zaire, and on the home of one of Africa's senior pragmatic statesmen, Kenya. Somewhat more peripheral interest is maintained in Ghana, which has moved into the column of “reasonable” regimes. Most recently the situation in Sudan has dazzled U.S. policymakers with visions of picking up chips from the Soviets and conjuring up the type of Cold War determinant of involvement popular in the 1960s.

There is very wide agreement, with which I fully concur, regarding the abhorrent and unacceptable character of apartheid and regarding the inevitable demise of minority rule in South Africa. There is, however, honest disagreement regarding the best way for Americans and others to assist in effecting change. Differing motives for recommending disengagement may also sometimes confuse the issue. Disengagement can reflect such diverse policies as neutralism, non-cooperation, dissociation, intervention, or withdrawal. It can reflect a desire to induce change by positive steps or an acceptance that little can be done, but that the disengager will at least not be implicated or involved in a detested situation. To some it is the isolation of the disengager that is the goal; others appear to be propounding as-full-as-possible isolation of South Africa.

Africa's participation in the international system, by whatever measures it is gauged, skyrocketed during the 1960s from a level close to zero to its present extensity, intensity, and complexity. The difficulty of analyzing the American response to Africa's participation arises from at least two intellectual — but not merely intellectual — problems: First, there have been many different — and differentiated — American responses rather than a single one. Second, much of what is often described as American responses actually may have been triggered by American initiatives to which Africans responded, setting off a kind of chain reaction of reciprocal interactions, which have neither a clearly discernible beginning nor a definable end in time.

Southern Africa is now witnessing the struggle of the black majority for independence and majority rule. The growing revolt against white minority rule has taken different forms in each country.

The current era of man's history is characterized by the struggle of peoples for their full emancipation from colonialism, imperialism, racism and all other forms of domination and oppression hampering human development and dignity, peace and progress.

Events which took place in June 1967 constitute the focal point of this article. Biafra had proclaimed its existence as an entity separate and independent from Nigeria on May 30; another five weeks were to pass, however, before fighting between General Gowon's forces in Nigeria and Colonel Ojukwu's in Biafra broke out. On reflection, the civil war in Nigeria evokes the fated air of a Greek tragedy; but from the vantage of those June days the probable outcome was much cloudier. Perhaps some accommodation was still possible by which war could be avoided, or if a confrontation did take shape perhaps Biafra would win, or there would be a stalemate.

China's foreign policy toward Africa has been of major concern to the great powers ever since the time that China embarked on an active policy in the African continent. By its action, China presented a direct challenge to Soviet leadership in the Third World, and at the same time put an end to the seclusion the United States had tried to impose on the Communist regime.

In 1976 we will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the formal birth of our country. In our protracted war for independence, the freedom loving people of the United States were engaged in a bitter struggle against the greatest world power of that time. The war was not over at the time of independence. But that declaration symbolized both the beginning of the end of colonialism in America and the coming into the world community of a new state, the United States of America. The British neither recognized our right to self-determination, nor the declaration of independence, nor did they voluntarily hand over power to us. We seized it because it was our inalienable right.

When the American electorate opted for withdrawal from Vietnam in 1968, the United States crossed an international policy watershed whose dimensions have not yet been fully assessed. The outlines of this policy have since been given the rubric of the Nixon Doctrine. In 1968, however, a substantial number of American citizens (including many vociferous critics of our presence in Vietnam) failed to grasp the significance of the change in Administration thinking as they energetically and often from the purest of motives sought American intervention through humanitarian actions in the Nigerian civil war. To point out to these Americans the contradictions in their behavior only served to irritate them. Other important segments of the public had long held a distorted image of American actions abroad. They continued to view America as the conscience of the world, exercising a kind of police power where such power might be safely exercised.