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Southern Africa has become exceedingly important to the western
powers, both as a market and as a source of raw materials. Adequate
figures of its quantitative importance as a market are not available. But the South African "market" alone is very large because
the white community has an exceedingly high per capita income. And
foreign investors see important potential in the urban African
"market". Thus, foreign investment in manufacturing facilities is
expanding rapidly. In 1950 the U.S. had only $44 million in direct
manufacturing investment in South Africa. By 1970, the value of these
investments had increased tenfold. The value of investment in "mining
had increased very little. There is a further reason for the growing
importance of investment in manufacturing by overseas companies.
South Africa has a highly developed industrial system, and the infrastructure to go v/ith it. It is used by the multinational corporations
as a base for exporting to many other African countries.
Recent investigations have shown increasing dependence of western
countries on supplies of minerals from Southern Africa. The countries
of the subcontinent now produce very high proportions of the v/orld
supply of more than ten important minerals, many of v/hich are of
critical importance to metallurgical, machinery, and electrical
industries. The reserves of minerals already in production and of
other minerals, including petroleum, are very high and constitute
an important part of world reserves in many cases. The U.S., U.K.,
West Germany, and Japan all import substantial proportions of their
total domestic consumption of certain minerals from Southern Africa.
The joint dependence of these countries on Southern African minerals
is of a very high degree, and is likely to increase.
The drive for markets and for sources of raw materials in
Southern Africa has created an economic system which functions
as an appendage of the western industrial system. The economy
of the region is highly unbalanced. It produces primary commodities
for export, manufactured goods for the wealthy few, or, again, for
export. All these goods are produced at exceedingly low cost under
a system of forced labor, or very nearly that. The peculiarity of
Southern Africa is that it contains an enclave of several million
wealthy whites who function as well-paid overseers in.a kind of
world plantation system. The poor, the laborers, the vast mass of
the population, have little or no prospect of escaping the harshest
kind of poverty. The economy has little capacity for self-sustained
grov/th and development. This situation is the outcome of the dynamics
of "commerce", of the way in v/hich relations between the rich and
the poor have developed.
This outv/ard expansion of the capitalist industrial economies
cannot easily be halted. It is part of the intrinsic dynamic of such
systems. They must grow in order to function. The consequences of
their expansion are to block progress, at least for the poor.
Southern Africa is completely enmeshed in this web of economic
relationships and is likely to become more and more important to the
neo-colonial system....Thus economic stagnation will continue and
the plight of the peoples of the area will become more serious.
Neo-Colonialism and Political Stability
To understand the present crisis in Southern Africa, however,
one must look beyond the purely economic facts. The economic facts
have inevitable political consequences. The "world economy" consists of a core of highly develoioed and wealthy countries and of a
periphery of poor countries. The economies at the core, being