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Reviewed by:
  • South Africa in Africa: the post-apartheid era
  • Jeremy Grest (bio)
Adekeye Adebajo, Adebayo Adediji and Chris Landsberg (eds) (2007) South Africa in Africa: the post-apartheid era. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

This volume emerged from workshops held in 2004, organised by the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Conflict Resolution in collaboration with the Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, and the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies, Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. Its three editors are Directors of the Institutions involved in this collaborative venture, which aims ‘to disseminate Pan-African perspectives on this and other important issues related to Africa’s international relations’ (12). The impetus for the current book is derived in part from earlier initiatives from the eminent Nigerian-based editor, Adebayo Adediji, in the form of workshops in Windhoek and Johannesburg and their outcome, a 1996 publication South Africa and Africa: within or apart?1 where the general consensus was that more time was needed to see the outlines of South African policy before any definitive judgements could be made. The lapse of time since then makes it appropriate, in the editors’ view, for a more considered and comprehensive assessment. The authors contributing to the present volume are mainly South African-based, but not necessarily all of South African nationality, as the introduction is careful to note.

The book is 339 pages long, counting the index. It contains an introduction by the three authors, and thirteen chapters which are divided into three themes: three chapters on ‘Context’, five on ‘Challenges’ and five on ‘Case Studies’. In their introduction the authors set out to frame the project by asking the following questions: [End Page 141]

Can a country that has brutalised and exploited its own people, and those of surrounding countries, go on to become a credible champion of human rights, democracy and sustainable development on the African continent, even after a remarkable political transformation? To what extent has South Africa been liberated to play a leading role in Africa, and to what extent is it still crippled not only by the past, but by the widely varying priorities of its 47 million people? How have these dynamics played out in the years since the ‘rainbow’ nation stepped out of its own shadow in 1994?

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The editors comment that South Africa’s room to manoeuvre in Africa will be severely limited unless ways are found to address the inherited structural inequalities and distortions which stand in the way of long term economic development and political stability. The introduction argues that a process of ‘deconstruction’ of institutions inherited from the apartheid era is necessary if South Africa is to shed its ‘dual heritage’ of the ‘skyscraper economy’ coexisting with the ‘subsistence economy’ (20) and that a reconstruction must follow. Whilst there can be no fundamental quarrel with such general assertions, since they are made almost in passing as part of a focus on external relations, it seems as though the complexity of this process and its contingency on a complex range of variables may have escaped their attention momentarily. Reconstruction is not guaranteed from Deconstruction. Further, institutional reconstruction, growth and state capacity are all linked, and have profound effects on the abilities of a state to project itself internationally. That being said, however, South Africa’s credentials for candidacy as Africa’s leading power are listed as including its role in the establishment of NEPAD and the African Union and its peace-building efforts in Burundi, the DRC and Ivory Coast, all of which clearly show that South Africa since 1994 is not only in Africa, but also for it in a way that it never was in the past.

The editors also allude to the debates over the terms of South Africa’s re-integration into Africa as hegemon or partner, concluding that it is becoming an African power which aspires to middle-level power status globally through collaboration with key African allies and other regional powers such as Brazil and India, in international fora. The introduction discusses South Africa’s African Renaissance agenda, focusing on its peacemaking efforts and the caution exercised to avoid being perceived as domineering, and ends...

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