This double number of Issue grows out of several long-standing concerns of the Committee on Current Issues and, more immediately, out of panels at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Baltimore in November 1978. The articles by MM. Moose, Stockwell, Chetile, Raiford, Klare and Prokosch, and Shepherd and by Ms. Seidman were presented in modified form in Baltimore. Mr. Robinson, another panelist, made his Congressional testimony available, while Mr. Nzongola submitted an overview of Western involvement in Southern Africa. We developed the information presented in Baltimore by three members of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace into an article, and solicited the contribution from Mr. Bratton as a companion and background piece. Station WGBH of Boston made the transcript of their November 9 broadcast available to us; the transcript became the basis for an article linked to the themes of Klare, Prokosch and Shepherd. The “Directory of Current Research on Southern Africa” is a project coordinated by Mr. Crossey and which we have encouraged as a resource for members of the association. Finally, we wanted to publish Mr. Anise’s analysis of recent events in Nigeria, a subject which has received scant attention in American media.

We live in an age when baptisms, bar mitzvahs, tahara, weddings, and other significant rites of passage are being observed with decreasing frequency. Indeed, one of those solemn rites–the legal, political, and social transition into adult status at the magic age of 21–has been battered by custom, by law, and even by a constitutional amendment.

I am proud to be here today because I think that, for the first time in many years, the United States has an Africa policy. Some of you may not agree with all of it, but I believe we have your support for our goals.

No regional policy exists in a vacuum. Our Africa policy forms an integral, and important, part of this Administration’s global policy which includes: respect for human rights, a commitment to work for peace and world prosperity; and a striving, increasingly in a multilateral framework, for the resolution of problems in ways which can be of benefit to all.

After the victories of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) against Portuguese colonialism, the liberation struggle in Southern Africa today consists of the heroic efforts being made by the black and brown peoples of South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to destroy the system of racial oppression established in these countries by white settlers. This system, known in its extreme form of economic explotation and political and cultural oppression as apartheid in South Africa and Namibia, is closely tied to the survival of imperialist interests in Southern Africa. This is why any analysis of the difficulties being faced by the liberation movements of Southern Africa must include a discussion of the specific articulation of imperialism and settler colonialism in this area. For it provides the context in which the African liberation struggle must be understood.

My name is Randall Robinson. I am the Executive Director of TransAfrica.

On September 25, 1976, the Congressional Black Caucus convened The Black Leadership Conference on Africa. The conference, comprising the leadership of virtually every national black civil rights and social organization, accomplished two noteworthy objectives. It authored the African-American Manifesto on Southern Africa which expressed grave concerns with the previous Administration’s negotiation initiatives for a Zimbabwe settlement. Secondly, it mandated a task force, chaired by me, to propose and execute an institutional vehicle through which black Americans could express to the Congress and the Administration their views on United States foreign policy vis-a-vis Africa and the Caribbean.

Following several years of shocking revelations about the United States intelligence service, we now have a unique opportunity to rethink our objectives in the Third World, especially in Africa, and to modify our intelligence activities to complement rather than contradict sound, long term policies. The revelations, and their related publicity, have been a healthy exercise, making the American public aware of what enlightened people throughout the world already knew, that CIA operations had plumbed the depths of assassination, meddlesome covert wars, and the compulsive recruitment of foreign officials to commit treason on our behalf; activities which, if they did not border on international terrorism, certainly impressed their victims as harsh and cruel, whatever their bureaucratic authentication and national security justification in Washington.

Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said that the situation in Southern Africa was the most complex in the world today, and I sometimes wonder which of us has more of a problem dealing with it–we South Africans in trying to solve the sometimes intractable dilemmas of a divided and heterogeneous society, or Americans in trying to work out what on earth is going on down there.

South Africa’s system of apartheid and policy of separate development is unique among nations. Apartheid is the pervasive institutionalization of discrimination by law on the basis of race; separate development would deny South African citizenship to the blacks of South Africa. A central goal of U.S. policy with respect to South Africa is to encourage that country to end apartheid and grant full political participation to all its peoples. This key policy is diametrically opposed to the position of the government of South Africa.

In evaluating the consequences of the $1.7 billion currently invested by U.S. corporations in South Africa, the issue is distinctly not whether or not the U.S. firms involved have adopted the Sullivan Principles. Those principles, purportedly designed to ensure upgrading and equal pay for blacks, are in reality little more than a smokescreen. Behind their rhetoric, U.S. transnational corporations continue to help South Africa build up its military-industry machinery to perpetuate oppression of the majority of black workers.

Although the United States agreed to honor both the 1963 UN embargo on arms deliveries to South Africa and the 1966 arms embargo on Rhodesia, vast quantities of U.S. arms have been supplied to the two countries through a variety of clandestine and semi-legal channels. These deliveries have enabled the minority governments of Pretoria and Salisbury to intensify their control over the black majority and resist what they perceive as half-hearted calls for change on the part of U.S. officials.

There are many prevailing notions and myths about the strategy and objectives of the Socialist powers and their associated socialist states in Southern Africa. A great deal of them are based upon the fears of rival powers and the propaganda of those ruling interests and minorities who suddenly now find themselves face to face, not with the in-effectual guerrilla movements they have discounted, but with real and basic international power.

Adapted from the production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, British Broadcasting Corporation, and WGBH/ Boston.

On November 9, 1978 WBGH of Boston aired on public television the results of research, conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over many months and three continents, into the channels by which South Africa has been receiving sophisticated weapons manufactured in the West, in violation of American and UN arms embargoes. What follows is a narrative based on the November 9 transcript which WGBH generously made available to the Current Issues Committee.

[The designation “Rhodesia” is used to distinguish the colonial state, with which this article is concerned, from the future decolonized “Zimbabwe”. Readers interested in a less theoretical but more closely documented version of the arguments presented in this paper, plus analysis of the options and prospects for the administration of rural development in Zimbabwe, are referred to Beyond Community Development: The Political Economy of Rural Administration in Zimbabwe (London, Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1978, 64 pp.) by the same author.]

Three members of the Rhodesian Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace visited the U.S. in late October and early November 1978. John Deary, Chairman of the Commission, Brother Fidelis Mukonori, S.J., Vice Chairman, and Michael Auret, Organizing Secretary, spoke to interested groups in the U.S. on the current situation in their country. These members of the Commission have had recent views of the situation from inside Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, both in the urban areas and in the operational zones.

This directory is a revision and updating of two earlier publications issued in limited numbers in xerox form, “A Select Register of Current and Recently Completed Research on South Africa in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” (New Haven, CT, 1977) and “Inventory of Current Research on Southern Africa” (2nd Preliminary version. New Haven, CT, 1977. Plus “Supplement,” Jan. 1978).

A social scientist once described Nigerian political behavior and culture in terms of a continual ability to move dangerously closest to the edge of disaster before pulling back just in time to avoid falling into the deep. Nigerians in high and low places have a passion for insisting on the absolute rightness of their positions and claims sometimes with little regard to the consequences for others as well as for themselves. Sometimes groups in the nation act as if they will rather be dead right than heed the political necessity of mutual accommodation and prudent compromise. The Daily Times Opinion of April 29, recalls Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher (1588-1679) when it declared that “Nigerians are brutish and nasty. They are contentious and cantankerous. They are irreverent. And they are ungovernable. . . . [They] are an intensely political people, the more so today, when the promise of a return to civilian government has understandably led to the flexing of muscles by all manner of interest groups.” This is national high-wire politics at its best! But it is also dangerous politics at its worst. It reflects an ingrained political attitude about which more should be learned.