Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation (review)

This book, the latest in Routledge’s Cold War History series, offers a range of contributions explicating the role of the Cold War in influencing political change in southern Africa. Sue Onslow’s introduction offers a convincing rationale for the Cold War’s importance in guiding political transformations in ways that continue to affect contemporary political structures and possibilities within the region. In the field of Cold War studies, the contributors offer important perspectives that successfully complicate overly glib interpretations of the Cold War’s role in regional political change.

The first section of the book is primarily focused on politics within southern Africa. Two of the initial chapters, from John Daniel and Donal Lowry, analyze the relationship between racism and anti-Communism within the political philosophies of the white minority regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. Lowry’s argument aims to establish that anti-Communism was not a peripheral concern to the Rhodesian regime, although he does not consider how this political posture was related to more visceral concerns of economic, social, and racial control. In contrast, Daniel’s chapter more carefully studies the interplay between these factors. Onslow’s chapter also remains firmly grounded within regional political dynamics, offering a detailed account of South African foreign policy toward the ongoing conflict in Rhodesia. The chapter presents important insights into Pretoria’s broader regional aims and the impact Robert Mugabe’s unexpected election victory had on South Africa’s future approach to regional affairs.

Later chapters are more concerned with relations between southern Africa and the Cold War’s main combatants, the Soviet Union and the United States. Anna-Mart van Wyk’s narrative traces, in considerable detail, the role the United States played in assisting South Africa’s nuclear weapons program during its initial stages of development. Vladimir Shubin offers a similar wealth of information regarding the Soviet presence in southern Africa and Moscow’s links to regional liberation movements. The argument presented in Shubin’s contribution is somewhat vague. In addition to forceful corrections of the mangled information offered by Western analysts writing in the 1980s, he offers a range of small insights into the particulars of Soviet involvement but not necessarily the larger picture. Andy DeRoche provides a different and welcome perspective by investigating the relationship between the United States and Zambia during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, thus expanding the book’s perspective beyond the view from Salisbury, Pretoria, Washington, and Moscow. Nancy Mitchell’s chapter is a fascinating account of Jimmy Carter’s rejection of the flawed Rhodesian elections won by the Western-friendly Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Accepting this outcome would have been the most expedient decision from the perspective of domestic politics, but Carter refused to do so, a decision that Mitchell persuasively argues was grounded in views on U.S. race relations that he had developed during his formative years. This is followed by a correspondingly thought-provoking exploration of the policy implications that could result from the use of American race relations as an imperfect lens through which to analyze political transformation in southern Africa.

The final two chapters, by Piero Gleijeses and Chris Saunders, concern the enduringly controversial process that brought a simultaneous end to the South African occupation of Namibia and the presence of Cuban troops in Angola. The sharp military clashes between Cuban and South African troops that immediately preceded the final stage of the protracted negotiations have produced a wide range of analyses regarding the role that Cuban pressure played in producing the outcome. Gleijeses’s chapter, based on work in the Cuban archives, offers an essential perspective to this historiography, which future scholars will have to consider even if they disagree with aspects of his interpretations. Saunders offers a similarly valuable retelling of this history, one that reaches more nuanced but equally well-taken conclusions about the importance of Cuban intervention.

Onslow’s introduction and conclusion do an excellent job of synthesizing the individual contributions and placing their importance within...