Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy: Diplomacy in Africa from Smuts to Mbeki by John Siko (review)

This book, which has received praise from foreign policy experts, practitioners, and scholars, discusses South African foreign policy from the time of Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870–1950) to the time of President Thabo M. Mbeki (b. 1942). Both men were South African statesmen. Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy is seen by those heaping praise on it as being an innovative and perceptive study of key players in South African foreign policy. They regard it as a masterful comparative analysis of apartheid and the new South Africa; to some scholars, it is the finest and most comprehensive account of South African foreign policy to date. Perusal of the book confirms the accolades it has received.

Siko offers two succinct but useful definitions of foreign policy: one by Marijke Breuning, an American academic, who defined it as “the totality of a country’s policies toward and interactions with the environment beyond its borders,” and the other borrowed from Adewale Banjo, a Nigerian scholar, who defined it as a “framework outlining how the country will interact, relate, and do business with other countries and with nonstate actors in mutually beneficial ways and within the context of a country’s national interest and economic prosperity” (p. 1).

Meanwhile, the book’s immediate resourcefulness or importance stems from the fact that South Africa is seen as a major player in African diplomacy, coupled with its economic, diplomatic, and military might, which far surpasses that of most countries in Africa, the second-largest continent. Although Siko painstakingly writes about the old and new South African foreign policies, it has been a fact since 1994, when South Africa started to enjoy democratic dispensation, that the country has taken bold steps to play a leading role in African relations with other nations outside the continent, sometimes in collaboration with other African nations. This was especially so between 1999 and 2008, when Mbeki’s presidency was in high political and economic gear.

The uniqueness of Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy is as a result of the fact that the author over the years has had what is described as an insider’s access to leading players in the field of South Africa’s foreign policy. He was able to approach leading personalities to verify all sorts of information, including why the apartheid nation and, after 1994, why the new South Africa took certain foreign policy actions. He was in a position to point out the individuals who mattered in certain circumstances. To make sure that his work would be comprehensive, he took the time to reexamine the foreign policy process of South Africa over the past century so as to be able to pinpoint the fact that, despite the verbal promises of leaders of the African National Congress, the process toward the country’s foreign policy engagement has seen little change or revision. This is supposed to have been so, not only during the Mbeki period, but since President Nelson Mandela (affably called Madiba) assumed the presidency.

Apart from the acknowledgments and the list of acronyms, Inside South Africa’s Foreign Policy has eleven chapters and an appendix, made up of a list of interviews, copious notes, a bibliography, and an index. Readers will be guided by all these useful sections, especially chapter one, a succinct anecdote titled “Understanding South African Foreign Policymaking” (pp. 1–13), where Siko frames the question for discussion; shows how he selected the actors for examination and dealt with public opinion and civil society; discusses the press; lists think tanks and academic entities he relied upon; and gives overviews of the business community, parliament, the ruling party, government departments, the top national leaders, and the research methodology employed.

A term member of the US Council of Foreign Relations and currently based in the area of Washington, D.C., Siko provides not only theoretical perspectives, but (in chapter two) the essence of the history...