Preventing the Vacuum: Determinants of the Namibia Settlement
This paper examines the political, military and economic factors behind the diplomatic agreements which led to the withdrawal of South Africa's colonial occupation of Namibia in 1989–90, and it identifies some of the major constraints which Pretoria placed upon the independence of the new Namibian state. The view that the South African government withdrew from Namibia — but not Walvis Bay — because of military defeats in Angola during 1988 is rejected. It is argued that explanations for the settlement given by US diplomats, Chester Crocker and Charles Freeman, do not take into account key variables such as the underlying economic imperatives, South Africa's state and party building strategy in Namibia, and the political actions of the Namibian people themselves. Such determinants have also been ignored or obscured by most of the radical literature on South Africa's destabilisation of the sub‐region. It is argued here that Pretoria's attempts to consolidate stable conditions for a semi‐colonial state on it...
The Political Economy of Namibia: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, New and Enlarged Edition
This highly acclaimed bibliography contains more than 2,100 entries, of which over 1,000 are annotated, including books, articles, unpublished reports, conference papers, official publications and ...
Capital restructuring and the modification of the racial division of labour in South Africa
Recent months have seen a number of signs that a process of restructuring involving certain modifications to the racial division of labour and job colour bar regulations is currently under way in South Africa. In December 1977, for example, a number of statutory job reservation determinations were scrapped by the Minister of Labour. In June of this year an agreement between the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation (SEIFSA) and the white trade union bureaucracies abolished previous closed shop agreements which had the effect of barring Africans from certain grades of work; and similar agreements have also been entered into in other industries, notably furniture making.1 But the most significant moves in this direction are expected to follow the publication of the report of the Wiehahn Commission of Inquiry into industrial legislation later this year. Informed guesses suggest that the Commission will, in addition to recommending a strategy aiming at the incorporation of the African trade union movement into a bureaucratic and rigidly controlled 'industrial relations' system, also recommend the repeal of all statutory job reservation legislation and the prohibition of closed shop agreements which have the effect of restricting certain places in the division of labour to members of particular racial groups. 2 Although these moves in no way foreshadow the final end of the job colour bar in South Africa (the alternative forms of 'protection of minority rights' -which the Commission will recommend will probably amount in practice to a more concealed and less comprehensive but none the less real job colour bar), they are important moves in the class struggle with potentially significant effects on the class structure and future trajectory of class struggle. Furthermore, it is quite clear that this particular aspect of the restructuring of capitalist social relations in South Africa will figure prominently in resurgent reformist ideologies directed both inside the