Political Geography 30 (2011) 294297
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Review Essay
Southern Africa: The geopolitical conguration of a lived region
Cold War in Southern Africa: White power, Black Liberation,
Sue Onslow (Ed.). Routledge, London (2009).
Selecting immigrants: National identity and South Africas
immigration policies, 19102008, Sally Peberdy. Wits University
Press, Johannesburg (2009).
Surviving on the move: Migration, poverty and development
in Southern Africa, Jonathan Crush, Bruce Frayne (Eds.). IDASA,
Cape Town (2010).
The southern African region which constitutes the present-day
Southern African Development Community (SADC) was not
a discrete and pre-given unit but was instead profoundly shaped
by various processes and events. Thus, the spatial conguration of
the SADC should be understood in the context of the construction
and production of regions, their uidity, and the multiple meanings
they embody over time. As Jones (2009: 499) noted regions are non-
essentialist entities [but] . are framed by the balance between
different geopolitical, socio-economic, and cultural institutionalizing
forces. that can be activated in strategies, practices and discourses.
Regions can be conceptualized as processes that achieve their
boundaries, symbolisms and institutions in the process of institu-
tionalization (Paasi, 2009: 123). In the case of the SADC, the region
embodies the legacies of the Cold War confrontation which continue
to inuence the fortunes of people there today.
Sue Onslows edited volume provides insights into this confron-
tation and also captures the various threads of the geopolitics of the
Cold War in southern Africa. The volume is part of Routledges Cold
War History Series which seeks to challenge established myths
about the Cold War. And, southern Africa is the only part of Africa
to appear in the series. The volume is used in this review as an entry
point into the construction of southern Africa as a region and as
a background for understanding contemporary survival strategies
for ordinary citizens. The goal of this review is to bring region
formation and the experiences of people in the region into an intel-
ligible analysis of lived spaces. The review suggests that regions are
not only constructed but also constitute lived spaces that should be
understood through the experiences of ordinary people. These
experiences are captured in studies on migration but are often
excluded from debates on regions because of the disjuncture
between migration studies and the study of regions. The starting
point of this essay is that actors who shaped the region for the
reasons that are discussed below have bequeathed a regional space
infested with inequalities and conicting visions for the future of
southern Africa.
It would be nave to think that the SADC was the rst regional
construct in southern Africa as there have been other regional
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.04.001
formations such as the Southern African Customs Union (SACU)
which celebrated its centenary in 2010 (Ramutsindela, 2010).
Nonetheless, the SADC warrants more attention as it offers insight
into elaborate and extensive region formation processes which are
almost unparalleled in the African continent. This is so because of
the contours of the Cold War in southern Africa which reected
the battle of power blocs, systems and ideas which intersected
with notions and practices of race and class (Onslow, 2009). The
reasons why southern Africa became one of the cauldrons of the
Cold War struggle in the Third World include the need to bolster
white minority governments in the region and the creation of
a buffer zone against the spread of communism. The defence for
white minority governments was triggered by decolonization in
the 1960s and was further heightened by the intensity of liberation
struggles in the region in the late 1970s and mid-1980s. For
example, in the early 1960s South Africa was prepared to defend
the Smith government in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) for stra-
tegic, ideological, economic and racial reasons; and Pretoria
entered into a defence arrangement with Sir Roy Welensky, Prime
Minister of the Central African Federation in 19611962 (Onslow,
2009: 12). Furthermore, Portugal, Southern Rhodesia and South
Africa formed an alliance against African nationalism while the
British MI5 set up intelligence networks in Africa in 19641965
with South Africa as key participant in those networks. This
egocentric view of the world, which Moorcraft labels as Ptolemaic
in its conviction that the universe revolved around South Africa and
Southern Rhodesia, was a direct product of cultural insularity and
geographic distance (Onslow, 2009: 13).
The fear of communism profoundly shaped the perspectives of
actors in the region and can be considered a template on which
a regional map was drawn. Communism became a political
grammar through which the white fear of black majority rule was
communicated among white minority governments and between
these governments and the western nations. Local white political
parties manipulated the fear of communism for their own goals.
This was clearly the case with the Rhodesian Front which deployed
anti-communism as a political strategy for maintaining white
supremacy in Rhodesia. The Rhodesian Fronts ideology against
communism was also couched as a struggle in defence of tradi-
tional African people against communist-indoctrinated and
externally-based enemy (Lowry, in the volume, p. 101). The
strategy to incorporate sections of the African population into the
defence against communism also manifested itself in the formation
of alliances between local political parties. In Rhodesia, South Africa
and South West Africa, the white minority governments sought to
nurture moderate African political parties to which a gradual trans-
fer of power could be worked out. South Africas vision was that of
a constellation of neutral states that would form a cordon sanitaire
against communism. It was for this reason that Southern Rhodesia
and South Africa supported counter-revolutionary forces in Angola,
 Review Essay / Political Geography 30 (2011) 294297
Mozambique and Namibia (Saunders, in the volume). For example,
South Africa provided R24 000 worth of audio-visual apparatus and
R4, 314, 420 nancial assistance to Abel Muzorewas United African
National Council (UANC) hoping that Marxist-oriented political
parties would be defeated in the 1979 elections in Southern Rhode-
sia (Onslow, 2009).
A signicant contribution of this volume to the literature on the
geopolitics of the Cold War is its refutation of the perspective of the
Cold War in southern Africa as a bipolar contest between Washing-
ton and Moscow (see also Dodds, 2005). It suggests that whereas
external actors such as the United States and the Soviet Union
were drawn into the region for strategic reasons, local actors
drew on the external assistance to pursue their own vision of
modernity (Onslow, 2009: 2). For instance, the Rhodesian Front
sought to combine the notion that white Rhodesians were the
sort of people who once made the great of Britain, while turning
to America as the only remaining champion of the free world
(Lowry, in the volume, 93). South Africa took advantage of the
USs anti-communist stance to pursue its ambition for developing
a nuclear bomb. In other words, Pretoria conceived of a nuclear
bomb as a deterrent that would enhance the prospects of peace
in the southern African region (van Wyk, in volume, 62) and also
a strategy for the survival of apartheid. In response, Zambia wanted
to build nuclear weapons to counter South Africas nuclear pro-
gramme (DeRoche, in the volume). It used its non-aligned foreign
policy to transcend the Cold War divide and to garner support
from China and the US. For example, Zambian President Kenneth
Kaunda sent his delegation to China, the Soviet Union and the US
in his pursuit of economic development. For their part, most African
nationalist movements declared Marxist principles in part as a way
of getting support from Moscow and Beijing.
The communist bloc was characterized by tension, with China,
Cuba and the Soviet Union pursuing different goals and modes of
support and development in the region. Southern Africa was concep-
tualized as a bourgeois world ideal for Marxist revolution (Daniel, in
the volume). For the Soviet Union, South Africas degree of economic
development offered the potential for developing class conscious-
ness in the region and for putting into practice the theory of national
democratic revolution which Moscow and its intelligentsia had
developed. This theory still features in current debates about the
transformation of the South African state. Moscows intervention
in the region took the form of military support and training. It
used Angola as an important site for training liberation movements.
According to the Moscow Institute of Military History, up to January
1991, 10, 985 Soviet military advisors and specialists visited Angola,
including 107 generals and admirals, 7, 211 ofcers, 1, 083 warrant
ofcers and midshipmen, 2, 116 sergeants, non-commissioned of-
cers and privates and 468 civilian employees of the Soviet Army
and Navy (Shubin, in the volume, 167). It should be emphasized
that Angola occupied a key position in the struggle against commu-
nism in the region. South Africas intervention in Angola was based
on the fear that the MPLA victory in Angola would give a platform
for the South West Africa Peoples Organization (SWAPO) (the domi-
nant liberation movement in adjacent Southwest Africa/Namibia)
while the US wanted to destroy the pro-Marxist Peoples Movement
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in order to restore its prestige
which had been shattered by the Vietnam War and Watergate. South
Africas fear was conrmed when the Angolan President Neto used
the MPLA victory to consolidate Angola as the base for liberation
movements; forming a tripartite effort in which the Cubans
provided most of the instructors, the Soviets the weapons, and the
Angolans the land (Gleijeses, in the volume, 204). In contrast to
commonly held views and media propaganda that Cubans in Angola
were Soviet proxies, Cubas commitment to the liberation of the
region was underpinned by a sense of shared historic cultural links
295
and solidarity (Onslow 2009: 26), especially with the Angolan pop-
ulation. Despite sharing common ideological positions with Moscow,
Cuba acted on its own and changed the course of southern African
history by defeating the South African forces in Angola and pressing
for the independence of Namibia. For its part, China developed rela-
tionships with some of the less inuential groups of the liberation
movement and emphasized foreign aid above military support.
When Kaunda was looking for alternative transport routes that
would save Zambias economy from the political turmoil in Southern
Rhodesia, China constructed the railway linking Zambia and
Tanzania, the TAZARA (DePoche, in the volume). In the 21st century
China has exploited these initial links to develop and expand its
empire in Africa.
In the capitalist bloc the US Department of Defence regarded
South Africa as having an excellent strategic location, excellent
port facilities and experienced military forces all factors that
made [the country] an important ally in the Cold War (van Wyk,
in the volume, 55). The CIA viewed South Africa as presenting
the possibility for Soviet manipulation of African nationalism and
decolonization (van Wyk, in the volume, 56). This view was shared
by South Africa and Rhodesia and accounts for the alliance that
emerged between these two countries and western nations, espe-
cially the US. Thus, the fear of communism not only created a strong
alliance between white southern African states and Western
nations, but also signicantly shaped the perspectives of, and
responses by each member of this alliance. In South Africa, the
racist view of colonial overlordship that shaped the South African
Defence Forces thinking and strategies merged into that of the
Cold War and blinded the military establishment and the National
Party government to the point that they misjudged the aspirations
of the marginalized majority (Daniel, in the volume). The Rhode-
sian Front also committed the same mistake by conating commu-
nism and African nationalism, thereby ignoring the legitimate
aspirations for freedom by the African population. As a result of
this misjudgement, white nationalists in Rhodesia and South Africa
responded to the demands for freedom by adopting an over-
whelming military response, especially in the 1970s. Following
the coup in Portugal by left-wing military ofcers in 1974, Pretoria
calculated that the result would be the overthrow of colonial
governments in Angola and Mozambique and the inux of commu-
nism in these countries (Onslow, 2009). In defence of white power,
South African Prime Minister P.W. Bothas total strategy trans-
formed the South African state into a hybrid military-politico state
by the 1980s.
Onslows edited volume correctly concludes that the militariza-
tion of the struggle in southern Africa on the basis of the threat of
communism sidelined socio-economic change. The destruction
unleashed by pro- and anti-communist forces in southern Africa
and the programmes to support white minority rule in countries
in the region has left behind abject poverty and the unequal distri-
bution of resources to which millions of ordinary people are trying
to respond through migration. In the context of this essay, migra-
tion patterns do not simply represent how people move from one
place to another but signify ways of living which can be understood
by recourse to the history of the places involved. Migration is, by
and large, a response to development or underdevelopment, and
also contributes to these processes. For the poor it is surviving by
moving as the title of Crush and Fraynes edited volume suggests.
The content of Crush and Fraynes edited volume appeared in
a special issue of Development Southern Africa (Volume 24, Issue 1)
in 2007. The material of the book is not new to the audience and
most of the tables (54 in total) are based on data collected in late
1998 and early 2000. I found some of the discussions on this data
intellectually dry. The volume nevertheless refreshes our mind on
how migration circuits constitute a process of regionalization while
296 Review Essay / Political Geography 30 (2011) 294297
at the same time representing peoples resourcefulness in a region
that was brutalized by the Cold War confrontation discussed above.
It is also useful in rethinking about the connections between migra-
tion and development. Proceeding from the premise that the rela-
tionship between migration and development cannot be
generalized, the volume argues for the need to link these two in
order to develop appropriate policy responses. It is critical of the
current established tendency to treat migration and development
as separate issues when they are in fact integrated in thought and
practice.
In theory, there are three perspectives on the migration-
development nexus. The rst is that migration improves develop-
ment and can therefore lead to the reduction of poverty. Research
on the role of remittances in the livelihoods of households is
supportive of this perspective. It is estimated that remittance
receipts in developing countries are equivalent to 6.7 per cent of
imports and 7.5 per cent of domestic investment . In several Asian
countries they are larger than the earnings from any single
commodity export (Crush and Frayne, 2009: 5). Maphosa (in the
volume) has shown that households in the southern districts of
Zimbabwe rely on remittances from South Africa. Zimbabwe has
in fact developed a facility, the Homelink (Kumusha/Ekhaya), to
assist Zimbabweans in the diaspora to repatriate remittances
home. By July 2004, a total of US$23.6 million had been trans-
mitted through the Homelink facility (Maphosa in the volume,
142). In keeping with the developmentalist view of migration,
Maphosa calls for the creation of an environment that would
enhance migrants contribution to their home countries. These
remittances, like all other assets, have a differentiated impact on
recipient villages, towns, cities and sub-national regions. The case
of Mozambique illustrates this point. Rural southern Mozambique
is more developed than other regions in that country because of
the transfer of signicant volumes of remittances and the region
has experienced a much higher degree of differentiation than pre-
vailed from the mid-1800s to 1990 (de Vletter, in the volume, 146).
Countries which see migration as a resource have developed appro-
priate policies to attract the best available talent and conceive of
skills migration as necessary for industrial development. The Crush
and Frayne book, as a whole, revolves around this perspective, and,
while the focus on remittances highlights one crucial outcome of
migration, the books emphasis on remittances as a tool for devel-
opment reproduces a narrow view of development and also
ignores contributions that migrants make in the cultural and polit-
ical spheres.
The second perspective on migration is that it can lead to under-
development as a result of the loss of skills and talent, loss of tax
revenue and the possibility of crippling certain sectors of the
economy which demand high skills. As Chikanda (in the volume)
notes, African countries pay a high premium for losing the skills
they have invested in and for hiring expatriate professionals from
the West at a higher cost than that of their locals. The negative
consequences of migration also include the spread of diseases
such HIV/AIDS although Banaki (in this volume) cautions that the
relationship between migration and HIV/AIDS is not unidirectional.
Instead, it should be contextualized in terms of the unique environ-
ments migrants come from and to which they arrive.
Third, the migrationdevelopment relationship is country-
specic. Whereas countries with strong economies are less likely
to experience loss of skills through out-migration, the weaker econ-
omies tend to suffer from emigration. This trend is also true for
migration within a particular country where, for example, rural
areas are depleted of their skills as professionals and the youth
move to urban areas. In most cases, though, the rural-urban linkages
are maintained in what has been called multi-spatial livelihoods or
social reciprocity between urban and rural areas (Owuor, in the
volume). The specic circumstances of a country could either
conrm or challenge standard migration trends. For example, while
the end of apartheid has been accompanied by an increase in immi-
gration, the country has also experienced brain drain. And, South
African students in higher education are potential emigrants, pref-
erably to Europe (Mattes and Mniki, in the volume), despite the
shortage of skills in the country and the fact that South Africa has
a strong economy. Though the motivations and decisions related
to migration are made at the level of the individual or family they
are practically mediated by the policies of destination countries.
Thus, migration policies play a signicant role in shaping migration
trends and in sifting the migrants. As Peberdy (2009: 1) has opined,
the ability of people to move is powerfully constrained by the gates
that may be opened or closed to them. Unless they are embarking on
an existence as an undocumented migrant, which merely lays out
another set of fences to be crossed and negotiated, the ultimate
decision about their entry and residence is made by the state appa-
ratus of the intended destination and not by the individual migrant.
The closing and opening of borders for immigrants is a reminder of
the multiple ways in which borders affect peoples lives. It is at the
border post that both the image and the thesis of a borderless world
are shattered. This way, immigration policies contribute to our
understanding of borders as institutions and as symbols of power
and privilege.
Immigration policies are immersed in, and also reect, the poli-
tics of the state. In the context of South Africa, Peberdys book shows
that there is synergy between state (trans)formation and immigra-
tion policies: the practices of immigrant inclusion and exclusion act
as a lens through which the changing constructions of nationhood
and national identity by the South African state can be explored
(Peberdy, 2009: 3). Following the formation of a racially exclusive
Union of South Africa in 1910, the Smuts government adopted an
expansive immigration policy which favoured the migration of
whites into the Union. Smuts pointed out that, the whole meaning
of the Union is this: we are going to create a nation a nation which
will be of a composite character, including Dutch, German, English
and Jew, and whatever white nationality seeks refuge in this land
all can combine. All will be welcome (cited in Peberdy, 2009:
92). This immigration policy reected the attempt by the Union
government to create an exclusive white state. Incidentally, the
Immigrants Regulation Act was promulgated in 1913, the same
year in which the Natives Land Act was passed. The Natives Land
Act supported the creation of a white minority state by designating
native reserves into which Africans were expected to live and own
land communally. These reserves served as the seed for the bantu-
stans which became a political reality following the ascendancy of
the National Party into power in 1948.
It follows that the Immigrants Regulation Act of 1913 dened
whiteness and sought to protect that whiteness from contamina-
tion by means of immigration policies. Non-white immigrants
were considered people who would contaminate the metaphorical
national body by carrying the wrong blood or the wrong race
(Peberdy, 2009). It was for this reason that there were attempts
to exclude Indian immigrants and to prevent Jewish immigration.
The Indians already living in the Union were treated as a separate
category in the rst Union census of 1911 (Christopher, 2010). Atti-
tudes towards Indian and Jewish immigrants reected the debate
on who was white. Consequently, the Aliens Act of 1937 was
designed to curtail Jewish immigration (notwithstanding Smuts
original designation of Jews as white in the proclamation cited
above). By March 1937, over 2000 German Jewish applicants
were denied permanent residence in the Union (Peberdy, 2009).
African immigration was not even part of the debate as their dark
skin placed them far away from anything that could be deemed
white. Their status was that of labour migrant, hence Africans in
 Review Essay / Political Geography 30 (2011) 294297
the British Protectorates (Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland) moved
freely as labourers in South Africa till 1963 (Peberdy, 2009). It
should be noted that these three countries formed part of the space
economy of the Union and that there were attempts to incorporate
them into a greater South Africa.
The rise of Afrikaner nationalism was accompanied by a narrow
view of whiteness. Afrikaner nationalists played a double standard
in the construction of Afrikaner identity: they invoked language to
separate themselves from the English who were/are a white race.
Language in this case served as an agreed code to communicate
a sense of national identity and the personality of a nation.
However the use of language was not sufcient to delineate Afri-
kaner identity because Afrikaans was not pure enough as it was
used by the coloured community. February (1991) has argued
that natives contributed to the making of Afrikaners language
(Afrikaans) and family. Afrikaner nationalists invoked racial purity
to separate themselves from the coloured community with whom
they shared the same Afrikaans language. The immigration policy
in the 1950s therefore reected the redenition of whiteness and
was concerned with the preservation and protection of Afrikaner
nationhood while justifying its exclusionary provisions through
reference to the absorptive capacity of the ctive national body
(Peberdy, 2009: 7). The onset of decolonization in the 1960s and
the consequent fear of African nationalisms branded as commu-
nism (see Onslow, 2009) resulted in the expansion of immigration
policies to strengthen white solidarity.
Meanwhile, the dawn of democracy in South Africa in 1994
provided a new platform on which to develop immigration policies
in line with the new state. The invention of a rainbow nation and its
expected expansive policy in favour of African immigrants was
soon confronted by attacks on African immigrants by locals; a xeno-
phobic attitude that resulted in the widely-televised burning of an
African immigrant by locals in 2008 to the shame of most South
Africans. The event showed that the sifting of immigrants is not
the preserve of immigration policies and ofcial controls but can
be performed by ordinary citizens some of whom see immigrants
as a threat to their livelihoods and welfare. Conservative groups
in various parts of the world seem to share this negative attitude
towards immigrants.
297
The three books reviewed in this essay were written for
different audiences Onslow for historians, Crush and Frayne for
policy makers, and Peperdy for an interdisciplinary scholarship.
They also differ in their spatio-temporal milieus, yet they collec-
tively offer insight into southern Africa as a region. They also reveal
how researchers are also involved in the construction of regions.
Crush and Frayne have curiously included Kenya as part of southern
Africa while the southern Africa referred to in Onslow (2009) and
Crush and Frayne (2009) are saturated by discussions on South
Africa and Zimbabwe. Incidentally these two countries represented
the frontline of the Cold War in southern Africa (Onslow, 2009: 10).
I have yet to see a book on southern Africa without South Africa!
This hegemony of South Africa in scholarly writing has the potential
to continue to construct the region through the lens of South Africa.
Put together, the three books demonstrate the need to go beyond
constructionist talks in the study of regions to include the ways
in which regional spaces are understood and acted upon on the
ground. Peberdys book in particular promotes a productive dia-
logue between political geography and migration studies.
References
Christopher, A. J. (2010). A South African doomsday book: the rst Union census of
2011. South African Geographical Journal, 92(1), 2234.
Dodds, K. (2005). Global geopolitics: A critical introduction. New York: Pearson Pren-
tice Hall.
February, V. (1991). The Afrikaners of South Africa. London: Kegan Paul.
Jones, M. (2009). Phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond. Progress
in Human Geography, 33(4), 487506.
Paasi, A. (2009). The resurgence of the region and regional identity: theoretical
perspectives and empirical observations on regional dynamics in Europe.
Review of International Studies, 35, 121146.
Ramutsindela, M. (2010). The SAGJ and 2010 (Editorial). South African Geographical
Journal, 92(2), 9195.
Maano Ramutsindela*
Department of Environmental & Geographical Science,
University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3,
Rondebosch 7701, South Africa
* Tel.: 27 21 6502873.
E-mail address: maano.ramutsindela@uct.ac.za