John Saul’s last book revisits the global solidarity movement with southern Africa’s liberation struggle in the period between the 1960s to the 1990s. It provides a left analysis of this history by a veteran scholar and activist who was himself a participant in this movement – through the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s Colonies, the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa and the Southern Africa Report magazine (which continued to be published until 2000, in spite of the general dissolution of the solidarity movement in Canada, as in other countries, by the time of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994).
While much of the literature on international solidarity with southern Africa has centred on South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, Saul takes a broad sweep at the region’s struggles against colonialism and white minority rule and the worldwide movement that they inspired. At the same time, his focus is squarely on capital, which is what makes his analysis distinctive and, at the same time, limits our understanding of solidarity, along with any evaluation of its successes and failures. Many activists will share Saul’s ‘expansive’ definition of liberation (55) and agree that the struggle for socio-economic rights in southern Africa does indeed continue. But whether anti-capitalism/imperialism was or should have been the primary goal of international solidarity has long been a subject of ideological debate, both within liberation movements and those acting in solidarity with them. It was also a major cause of division, as for example in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and the Revolutionary Communist Group-influenced City of London Anti-Apartheid Group. Although not explicitly mentioned, Saul’s harsh comments about the AAM as ‘cruelly centralized – top-down and intolerant’ (75) appear to be an indirect reference to the political contestations within the AAM which ultimately led to City Group’s derecognition as a local AAM group in 1985.1
Saul brings into one analytical frame his work on southern Africa’s ‘false decolonisation’ (citing Fanon and Cabral) or ‘recolonisation’ by global capital in the aftermath of liberation, with overviews of the region’s struggles and how these linked in turn with a range of actors on the continent itself, as well as in the global South (then the Non-Aligned Movement), the Eastern Bloc/Cuba/China and western Europe. His core focus, however, is on North America, with two chapters dedicated to Canada and the United States, both ‘explicitly and aggressively capitalist countries’ (135) and NATO members.2 In the Canadian case, it was Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence which ‘had begun to stir the pot of protest’ (94) in the second half of the 1960s. Initially involving liberal voices in the academy, churches, the media and independent citizens, in the next decade this grew into a ‘loose-limbed Canadian movement of diverse and relatively unintegrated local initiatives’ (106). By the 1980s these group and activities, which included anti-corporate assertions through boycott and direct action, had built up into a national movement ‘that was growing organically from the bottom up rather than by fiat from on high’ (121). This, spearheaded by the escalation of internal resistance in South Africa itself, Saul contends, led to a shift in corporate mind towards deracialisation, paving the way for its recolonisation of the region while the Canadian movement largely evaporated.
In the US, African Americans and the radical left were among the first to campaign for southern Africa’s freedom, notably through the Council on African Affairs, whose members included W. E. B. Du Bois as well as the communist singer and actor Paul Robeson. McCarthyite repression suppressed these early assertions of solidarity, and ‘the anti-apartheid movement [that] regrouped for action in the 1960s […] did so on an ever more congealed Cold War terrain and in the context of an ascendant capitalism’ (142). As in Canada, the movement came to comprise a diverse range of players and initiatives with varying reach from local to national, some of which had a ‘self-consciously anti-imperialist’ focus (151). By the 1980s they were inflicting ‘considerable embarrassment upon corporate America’ (171), pressuring Congress to adopt the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. But far from challenging the structures of capitalist exploitation, ‘the stage was now set for capital, freed from its longstanding and once quite profitable partnership with apartheid, to win, together with its new ally the ANC, South Africa’s future’ (185). While global capital undoubtedly emerged as a major beneficiary in the story of southern Africa’s liberation, Saul does not discuss any other factors in explaining the outcome of South Africa’s negotiated settlement – notable among these the collapse of the Soviet Union/Eastern Europe, which also impacted on the region, where countries that had struggled to create socialist alternatives – for all their mistakes and contradictions – were also forced to capitulate to neoliberal capitalism.
The closing chapters reflect on the resonance of the support for southern Africa’s liberation in terms of ‘other apartheids’, where the term has been used both rhetorically and as a conceptual tool to describe the current context of global inequality, and, increasingly, by Palestinians and their supporters in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement as an indictment against Israel. Saul ends with a call to action to support the ‘“next liberation struggle” that may eventually emerge in southern Africa’ (232) and, with this book, Saul makes an important contribution towards the building of an emancipatory future.