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14 MONTROSE VOICE / SEPTEMBER 20, 1985
The Unholy Alliance Between the
U.S. and the Apartheid Economy
Feature
By Anne Seidman
Pacific News Service
Special to the Montrose Voice
For decades, the South African economy
has been built up with foreign investments and technologies which the white
South African minority has used not only
to make apartheid work but to dominate
southern Africa.
The limited sanctions proposed by President Reagan hardly begin to chip away at
this unholy alliance of international capital and the apartheid state.
In southern Africa, a land nearly as
large as the continental United States, the
white South African minority has developed its military-industrial might to
enrich its own members while systematically impoverishing 24 million South African blacks and seeking to dominate some
60 million people in neighboring countries.
The apartheid state does not simply
deny South African blacks the right to
vote. It forces them to work for below-
poverty wages in white-owned mines, factories and farms, or starve.
Apartheid has also meant record profits
for the transnational corporations that in
the 1960s and 1970s multiplied their
investments in South African mines and
factories.
In that period, U.S. firms tripled their
direct and indirect investments to a total
of almost $15 billion by the early 1980s.
The United States became South Africa's
leading trade partner, and U.S. firms now
dominate the manufacture of vehicles and
transport equipment and the refining and
distribution of South African oil, essential
for its modern industry and military
mobility.
They also provide sophisticated electronic equipment, especially computers,
facilitating minority control over the
black 80% of the population. And they
mobilize international finance for the
nation's military and industrial expansion.
For blacks the apartheid system has
spelled worsening poverty. A recent Carnegie Corporation study reported that four
out of five people in Soweto, the large
black township Bprawling on the outskirts
of modern, white Johannesburg, earn less
than subsistence incomes.
In the 1970s, growing military spending
required to maintain minority rule
spurred the government to raise rents and
bus fares in black townships, further
reducing real incomes. Whole communities demonstrated in protest. Rebelling
against an apartheid education system
designed to prepare them only for
unskilled labor, tens of thousands of
young blacks boycotted classes.
Meanwhile corporations were ploughing their profits back into increasingly
computerized machinery to reduce their
dependence on black workers.
In the 1980s, as the international recession spread to southern Africa, 30%, some
say 40%, of the country's black labor force
became unemployed. The state forced
those not working for whites to live in ban-
tustans, the "homelands' that comprise
only 13% of South Africa's land area.
Today almost half of the black population, especially women, children and old
folks, struggle to survive in these fragments of rocky desert-like soil. Unless
their fathers, husbands, and brothers
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have found work hundreds of miles away,
whole families face slow starvation. Malnutrition is chornic. Half of the children
die before they reach the age of five, others
suffer irreversible brain damage.
The impact of apartheid does not stop at
the country's borders. Most of the neighboring states—Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesu-
thu, Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique
and Angola—had won political independence by 1980. But thse new governments
bound a century of colonial rule had left
national economies dominated by South
Arrican corporate interests. For example,
Anglo American, South Africa's largest
mining finance company, still employs
more Zimbabweans than any other private firm.
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Trade ties also chain them to South
Africa. Their economies depend on the
sale of low-price crude agricultural and
mineral products, sometimes to South
African factories, more often through
South African ports to world markets.
Hundreds of thousands of their workers
migrate to work on South African mines
and farms.
In the 1980s, South Africa embarked on
a deliberate program to destabilize its
neighbors. It exercised economic blackmail through its control of regional trasn-
port networks and sources of supplies,
especially oil. It also provided funds and
arms for its own version of the Contras—
guerillas fighting the independent
governments—who blew up transport
lines, destroyed crops and food storage,
and disrupted grass roots development
efforts.
The Southern African Development
Coordination Conference estimates that
from 1980 to 1985 these destabilization
tactics cost the nine independent neighboring governments over $10 billion, far
more than all the foreign aid channeled
into the region since they attained inde
pendence.
During those five years the Reagan
Administration sought to persuade the
South African minority to reform through
constructive engagement. That policy
failed.
Now peoples of southern Africa, and
governments throughout the world, are
pressing for interantional sanctions to
support their demand for fundamental
change in South Africa. President Reagan's sanctions may be a nod to these
pressures. But far more will be needed to
make a dent on the mighty apartheid economy.
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