Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements (review)

Janice Love's analysis of southern African politics is the latest in a series of studies that focus on the challenges and promises of this region of the world. Beginning with Potholm and Dale's edited essays on southern Africa (1974), following with Carter and O'Meara's 1982 study, and then Saul's insightful examination of neocolonial influences in southern Africa (1993), we now have with Love the first general text that explores southern Africa in the aftermath of apartheid and colonial rule. Love's work emerges at the same time that Gretchen Bauer, another leading scholar of southern Africa, has published a summary analysis of the region (in collaboration with Scott D. Taylor).

Love's book differs from others in that it avoids the case-study approach of describing a region country by country, and instead creates a narrative examination of the region as a whole. Although her attempt to explain why southern Africa constitutes a distinctive region is short on specifics, her study should serve as a well-organized and innovative review of the political history of the region, one that will be valuable to any student wishing a comprehensive introduction to southern Africa. Love summarizes the historical context, accounting for why Europeans settled in the region, how Africans resisted these colonial endeavors, why the United States and the Soviet Union came to compete against each other for influence in the region, how African political elites came to power, and how southern Africa fits into the global world economy. She discusses the economic dilemmas facing the region, and the threat posed by the AIDS pandemic.

Love's overview of the region works best when she is describing macro-level interactions between southern Africa and external nodes of power. She offers a thorough explanation of how transnational economic forces have shaped the political development of southern Africa, and how global patterns of financial exchange affect policy options facing current leaders in the region.

When Love attempts to explain the more minute details of microlevel phenomena, the facts frequently get distorted and confusing. For instance, she claims that during the colonial era, "most economic exchange occurred between imperial nations and their colonies" (p. 13). This assertion is not accompanied by evidence, and is contrary to many scholarly studies on the subject of the economics of empire. Also, in a discussion of racist ideology as a type of cultural globalization, Love states that in southern Africa, Africans and whites have only rarely socialized with each other (p. 43). This statement follows a well-developed explanation of how mestizos and the "Coloured" population arose in Portuguese colonies and South Africa respectively (pp. 27–32), and is followed by a description of how Portuguese men intermarried with African women and supported these families during colonial rule (p. 46).

Although Love does an admirable job of describing the major events that are shaping the history of southern Africa, she does so at the near exclusion of any analysis of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Her references to Namibia include several inaccuracies and confounding arguments. For instance, she states that the League of Nations assigned South Africa to hold Namibia as a mandate territory (p. 40); in reality, the League of Nations offered this mandate to Britain, which in turn assigned the administration of its South African dominion. A misspelling appears for Namibian leader Toivo ja Toivo (p. 73) on a chart on which Love argues that North Korea was a primary ally of Namibia during the struggle for independence, overlooking the key role played by Cuba. Love suggests that SWAPO never quite succeeded in its goal of broadening its base beyond the majority Ovambo population, but offers no evidence to support this suggestion. Namibia has already had two prime ministers from the Damara community, a vice president from the Nama ethnic group, and several Hereros in other high positions of government. SWAPO has won considerable votes from all regions of the country in...