This chapter considers the relationship between solidarity and revolution by exploring the internal and international politics of the African National Congress (ANC). In the 1960s, the ANC operated internationally but there was little consensus on how the party should wage its struggle against apartheid South Africa. Taking inspiration from Cuba, young Tricontinental radicals challenged the diplomatic strategy of ANC elders like Oliver Tambo and launched an unsuccessful invasion of nearby Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Tambo responded by appropriating parts of this message and situating the ANC as part of an anti-capitalist revolt aimed at the United States. Tambo also opened the ANC to non-Africans who supported his leadership, which increased the influence of the South African Communist Party and fought off Cuban-inspired militancy by collapsing the distinctions between revolutionary action and international solidarity. Because the Vietnamese and Portuguese revolutions confirmed the inevitability of apartheid’s demise, the ANC prioritized international collaboration over guerrilla warfare as part of a strategy that positioned the party as the legitimate alternative to the apartheid state.

This chapter gives an overview of the structure of the book, detailing how it is organized around a series of contests over the expressions of sovereignty made by these four pseudo-states. In identifying the similarities in how these contests over sovereignty played out, inside and outside Africa, this chapter lays the foundation for the argument that Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana can be usefully seen as linked parts in a larger story. In this formulation, their individual quests for diplomatic recognition and international acceptance were all in pursuit of a common ideological project, one born out of a reaction to the rapid decolonization of the African continent and the triumph of anti-colonial African nationalism. All four of them harnessed important transnational right-wing networks across Africa, Europe, and North America that were energized by the dissolution of the European empires, the rise of the Afro-Asian Bloc, postcolonial migrations, and the international civil rights movements. Each of these aspirant states ultimately failed to achieve international acceptance and faced collective nonrecognition, which reflected the larger regional and global importance of these challenges to the postcolonial African state system.

This chapter examines contemporary anti-immigrant practices around the globe. We argue that apartheid as an ideology that distributes resources and privileges according to place of birth, race, and ethnicity of immigrants, persists. We also demonstrate how, under this new global organization, immigrants are vulnerable in their own countries due to the neoliberal practices imposed by unfair relations between the Global North and the Global South. We illustrate how, as a result of unequal relations between north and south and restrictive migration policies, immigrants are highly vulnerable during their journey and when they eventually arrive at their destinations. Global apartheid promotes racial inequities and violates basic norms of justice, human rights, democracy, and racial equality. These practices create islands of wealth where only certain groups can enjoy privileges and rights. This paradigm is based on the presumption that privileges and resources can be allocated according to place of birth, race, and ethnicity.

By providing for civil/political rights alongside a plethora of social/economic rights, the 1996 Constitution signified a commitment and a bold statement to making this dream a reality. Yet, to the millions who are still confronted with endemic hunger, the constitutionally guaranteed rights remain a pipedream. This chapter observes that the state’s intervention to address poverty and food insecurity has mainly been through policy actions. Also, the state has enacted a plethora of sectorial legislations which in one way or another are merely related to food production rather than access or distribution. These interventions, even though somewhat well crafted and commendable, have been unable to adequately tackle the issue. Policies have, until recently not only been poorly operationalised and uncoordinated, but also fragmented. The problem is exacerbated by the lack of, or poor, communication between relevant government departments responsible for food security. It is against this backdrop that the chapter seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of these problems and interrogate possible remedies for addressing these burning issues.

The new apartheid government under D. F. Malan proved adept at using science for its own purposes. The 1949 ‘African Charter’ promoted science and technology as a means to secure regional domination and South Africa’s position as a bulwark of anti-communism. South Africa’s Antarctic research programme regained momentum in the context of the Cold War. The IDC sponsored SASOL, based on an oil-from-coal chemical process, and phosphate-based fertilisers by means of a new parastatal, FOSKOR. Platinum, discovered by Hans Merensky, came of age in the 1970s. Uranium was enriched at a secret plant at Valindaba. The apartheid state also invested heavily in dam construction, hydro-electric power, and irrigation. Agricultural ‘Betterment’ schemes were imposed in the black homelands or Bantustans. From the mid-1970s, state resources were devoted to support weapon production and develop a nuclear capability, and optical astronomy was consolidated under the South African Astronomical Organisation at Sutherland. A major scientific achievement was the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967. Botany, agronomy and biodiversity were major areas of research, as was wildlife conservation. It is therefore possible to distinguish between science under apartheid and apartheid science designed to underpin white supremacy.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s overall contribution – its examination of white workers’ experience and negotiation of the dismantling of the racial state and the transition to majority rule, thereby inserting white workers into the historiography on late and post-apartheid South Africa; its demonstration of the analytical value of class in gaining new interpretative and chronological insights into South Africa’s long transition and current politics; and its demonstration of how this contributes a white working-class perspective from the Global South to current debates on the insecurities, subjectivities and politics produced by longer processes in the changing relationship between the state, capital, and labour, as they emerge at the current historical juncture.

In 1977, the NP appointed the Wiehahn Commission to investigate the reform of the apartheid labour legislation. This chapter represents the first extensive utilisation of the Commission’s documentation for historical research, providing new insights into issues of race, labour, and citizenship in the late apartheid state. It shows that white organised labour was at the forefront of the investigation, with unions testifying before and workers’ representatives serving on the Commission. Exposing the limitations of existing race-focused scholarship which views white labour as homogeneous and reform as a ‘scheme’ to safeguard white supremacy, it shows that reform was not in the interest of lesser-skilled whites whose position relied on the rightlessness of black labour. Granting industrial citizenship to Africans undermined the established convergence between rights and race. While the redesign of labour relations had little impact on middle-class and elite whites, for white workers it marked the beginning of the long transition: more than a decade before the end of apartheid, labour reform amounted to the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness and initiated the dismantling of white workers’ racially privileged citizenship.

This chapter argues for a reinterpretation of the nature of white working-class privilege in twentieth-century South Africa. Presenting the structural and subjective formation of the white working class in the context of South Africa’s industrial and political development since the late nineteenth century, it shows that, rather than a labour aristocracy, white workers represented a privileged precariat – benefiting from the advantages bestowed by their white skin, but remaining precariously dependent on state benevolence to protect them from black labour competition. Challenging simplistic understandings of white embourgeoisement, it shows that, on the eve of the 1970s’ crisis of capital accumulation and liberation struggle, there remained a materially more vulnerable group of whites in South Africa. Their social position and political priorities were defined by their class position. The chapter introduces the whites-only Mineworkers’ Union, whose members exemplified this position of labour vulnerability concealed by race-based status. With this argument, the chapter lays the foundation for this book’s assertion that the shape and legacy of white working-class formation are crucial for understanding white workers’ responses to reform efforts from the 1970s and the subsequent dismantling of the racial state, presented in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of how the Israeli regime is classified, addressing two fundamental issues in the debate over its suitable classification: the definition of democracy and the parameters of the unit of analysis. In providing a detailed description of the local dispute among students of Israel, it shows that very few local scholars or studies have provided explicit descriptions of the assumptions and premises on which their arguments are based. Rather than seeking to understand the Israeli regime from a theory-driven, comparative perspective and contextualizing it within the field of regimes and democratization, their primary goal appears to be determining whether Israel is, in fact, a democracy. This chapter also examines how Israel is categorized in cross-national regime indexes, demonstrating that such indexes cannot be exploited to bypass the local dispute. In so doing, it exposes the limits of restricting the focus to the classification of the Israel regime, arguing that this debate can never be conclusively resolved. Finally, it lays the foundation for the alternative approach to describing the Israeli case.