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"Already Spoken For" - Sovereignty, Identity and the Future of Southern Africa's People

Peter Vale
Professor of Southern African Studies, University of the Western Cape,
Visiting Professor of Political Science, University of Stellenbosch

International Studies Association

March 19, 1998

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

-Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian dramatist. Reilling, in The Wild Duck, act 5.

On a quick reading this paper appears to be preoccupied simply with challenging statist interpretations of the Southern African region. This is certainly so: as an elementary understanding of contemporary Southern Africa suggests, traditional state-centered readings of the region and its ways leave much to be desire. As a result, the mis-match between events on the ground and ways to frame them, seemed destined to dog interpretations of Southern Africa well into the new millennium.

A closer reading of this text however, will reveal an emancipatory face. The link between statism and emancipation is the very core of the Critical Theory project in International Relations and, this paper will suggest, in Southern African Studies. I want to use the theory/practice interface which this occasion offers to return to earlier worries and to test whether the emerging transnational and sub-national developments "out in the bush" might not signal a new turn in the history of a region which has produced some remarkable about-turns (to intentionally draw an idiom close to the heart of the region's state system).

The centrality of the theme of emancipation in the unfolding of South and Southern Africa has been identified (Booth and Vale. 1994 ), but inadequately developed at the theoretical level. One aim of this paper is to interrogate the juncture between statism and emancipation in Southern Africa in the hope of pushing out an understanding of the dichotomy between the celebratory side associated with the ending of apartheid, and the declinist perspective which, some now believe, beckons both South Africa and Southern Africa. Good. 1997. 547)

To do this, I critically interrogate some understandings of sovereignty in the region: the unfolding images which these re/present, suggest the singular absence of alternative ideas on Southern Africa's "reality" to those which are offered by states. The search for emancipation, I will suggest, lies beyond understandings grounded in the idea of sovereignty. As the paper unfolds, I have drawn particular attention to the practise of International Relations (note the caps) in both South and Southern Africa. Not surprisingly, my purpose here is to suggest that politics at this discursive level have reinforced statist interpretations of rather than searching for multiple readings of the region and its ways. The purpose of these comments is to finger meta-theories, like Realism, which continue to guide International Relations in its approach to Southern African.

Before setting out some scattered and quite primitive thoughts on ontology 1 . The notion that there is an "objective" entity, a distinctive ontological structure, recognizable by realists and anti-realists alike (to borrow now from a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophical logic) is problematic. But the least that must be said is this: If by 'ontology' we mean what Aristotle meant - the study of Being qua Being - then we mean a thing or structure which was actualized via the workings of formal, material, efficient and final causes. If we do mean this and are not merely playing fast and lose with an ancient term of art that has become fashionable once more in the social sciences, then we must recognise that the ontological structure of which we speak when we speak of Southern Africa is radically unstable. This instability is at the kernel of the paper, and helps account for the turn towards critical theory. Because colonial history and colonizing cartographers have given the notion of Southern Africa a form of sorts - and must thus number among its formal causes - this history and this cartography lives under the continual threat of subversion by the uncovering of our pre-colonial past by Africanist historiographers and by post-colonial experience. In a word, the ontology of Southern Africa is rendered unstable by that which liberates the region or threatens to do so.

o0o

The idea that states are at the heart of conventional perspectives on the ways of Southern Africa seems to have a long and honourable lineage; to be bounded by convention which is legitimized backwards through time. But is this so? Or has this tradition, like thinking about international theory in the region, been haphazard, incidental and mostly flimsy? There is more than a little conceptual game at play here - how we come to know and explain Southern Africa society, as even conventional readings of the region's history suggest, has deadly serious outcomes.

The statist framing of the idea of Southern Africa turns on the enabling concept of sovereignty - the right to exert authority within a geographical space: to put it as a lawyer might; within this space a legitimate political authority exercises order. This of course is the point of Rob Walker's powerful "Inside/Outside" image (Walker. 1993) which problematizes the arbitrary distinction between order (and at times democracy) within states and the unruly, ungovernable realm which is said to be the international. In Southern Africa, this inside/outside dichotomy was magnified a thousand times over: a rudimentary knowledge of the region suggests, for instance, that contestation over the domestic affairs of any of the region's states was the norm, not the exception. As a result, ongoing violence constituted the very sovereignty of the states of Southern Africa.

In this situation, the application of the simple inside/outside binaries much loved by mainstream International Relations scholarship has been unable to make sense of the region and its ways and accounts, I believe, for why the complicity of scholarship in violence is everywhere to be found. Any expectation that the ending of apartheid would end this pattern, is dispelled by the recent collection by Gutteridge and Spence (1997) which unabashedly "privileges" violence in the cause of "uncontested statehood": there are other examples of this, but for now this particular one will do. I intentionally used this observation by purloining an idea from Steve Smith in order to draw this essence of the paper closer to Zygmunt Bauman: violence in Southern Africa has more to say about the state of International Relations than International Relations in its present shape is able to add to our knowledge of Southern Africa.(Bauman. 1989. 3)

Appreciating this ready association between violence and explanation reinforces the now familiar divide between problem-solving theory and critical theory. The former asking whether we going to see ever larger and larger political units in the region? Or pondering as to whether we are to see the break-up of several states into small ones? Or setting questions of war and peace within framings of drugs, migration, and crime. This paper is more attuned to the latter, however. Why is migration the regional norm? Why does the texture of regional history seem to be changing before our very eyes? Why has apartheid become a metaphor for new regional order?

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To borrow from Basil Davidson's idea of the curse (of the nation state (Davidson. 1992) is to appreciate the central predicament of the continent's recent history. This is well illustrated in post-apartheid effort to re-engineer Southern Africa: these have rested on the idea that the national borders which are said separate the region's states are fixed: permanent entities which, quite neatly, demarcate and determine the points of entry to, and exit from, participation in a regional state system. Boundary-drawing and -maintenance has been a strong feature - perhaps the only lasting feature - of recent Southern African politics.

Not surprisingly, the process of national re/discovery - including the search for "national interest" to support the ideology of a "rainbow nation" - has been pivotal in the region's newest state, South Africa. As the press and growing army of security pundits have nudge South Africa's new government on the region, ideas on what determines the national (as opposed to the regional) interest are seldom below the surface. As a result, the dominant positions which have emerged in the region are linked to Realist interpretations of international life; accepting of the established "tradition" of a regional state system 2 . There has been very little effort to understand the Gramscian perspective that a state’s (and a regional state system) interests are not immutable but are a function of the particular theory which underpin them. As a result, the states of the region purportedly exercise a closed, and a close, control over their sovereign affairs in collaboration with the policy world’s understandings of the primacy of national interests.

This idea of building the region around the currency offered by national interests is the established tradition of scholarship on the region. The Harvard historian, Robert I. Rotberg, triumphantly recalled its roots by recalling that "Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist, mining entrepreneur, and successful colonial politician, forcefully gave the region its current shape. By thrusting iron tentacles relentlessly northward from Cape Town into what is now Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Zaire, he tied the region's mining centres and population magnets together and bound them to the ports of South Africa, His conquest of Zimbabwe, his tempted conquest of Zaire and Mozambique, his successful assertions of economic suzerainty over Zambia and Malawi also forged links which... endure.. in the administrative, legal and linguistic, educational, cultural, political, and economic structures of the region." (Rotberg. 1995:9) It is certainly true that the region's economic development was rooted in South Africa's mineral wealth and, equally so, that its expansion was forged on the multiple probings which reached outwards not so much from Cape Town - where Rhodes' bust broods over the city's rich Southern Suburbs - but from the mineral-rich Johannesburg, where undoubtedly his ghost watches over Africa's strongest the stock-exchange! But this privileging of South Africa in the grand narrative of history and the central of states rather than people, conveniently misses "the bits in between the borders" - John Ruggie puts these as "problems of...society that...cannot be reduced to territorial solution".(Ruggie. 1993. 164) To capture the old Heineken Beer advert: These are the bits that Westphalia never touched! Or, to put it more accurately, the bits that Westphalia helped create.

In South African policy circles, a region charted by the tested precepts of sovereign power is infinitely preferable to the sheer unknown; for the neighbours, this is not as easy. For one thing, the mantra "ending colonialism and apartheid" was integral to the national interest of each of South Africa's neighbours. With this goal achieved, how are these states now to defend their respective national interests in a region which entirely dominated by South Africa? The search for an answer has been complicated by crippled economies in the case of all but one of these states, Botswana 3 , and by the crisis in their national political systems which were highlighted in the unfulfilled promise of democracy in the early-1990s.

Given this, there is no prospect for a regional balance (to intentionally use the old dictum) except in Vattel's view that a strong South Africa will "lay down the law to others". The experience of this, the politics of sovereignty, has however been disastrous for Southern Africa: it has rendered the region unsafe and, from the mid-1970s until February 1990s, permitted apartheid South Africa to cut a swath of destruction through the region with a forward-defence strategy. This fatal period paralyzed the prospects for sustaining regional institutions which might well have been capable of meeting the challenge to the region presented by the more recent discourses of globalisation. The regional paralysis represented by the continuity of South Africa's power, notwithstanding the ending of apartheid, is the central problematique of this paper. Put in the form of a question which mimics the title of the paper - if South Africa dominates the region, who will speaks for Southern Africa's people?

The answer to the question lies in understanding the place of sovereignty in the "creation" of Southern Africa, both the old and the new. Ideally, this calls for something between Bradley Klein's states as strategic subject (Klein. .1994) and as a regional version of Jens Bartleson's recent book (Bartleson. 1995): I shall not do this, however. What I will do is set down a fragmentary set of ideas about thinking on sovereignty in Southern Africa in the form of rough genealogy. The aim is to highlight mutations in the understanding of sovereignty at key moments: my purpose is to explore how we got from the there-of-then to the here-of-now.

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The first genealogical fragment on the power of knowledge is drawn from the Cape Town-based academic David Chidester (Chidester. 1996) who argues "on southern African frontiers, comparative religion was a discourse and practice that produced knowledge about religion and religions, and thereby reconfigured knowledge about the human, within the power relations of specific colonial situations. For European travelers, missionaries, settlers and colonial agents, all who operated at one time or another, as comparative religionists, this human science was a powerful knowledge to the extent that it contributed to establishing local control. In this respect. frontier comparative religion was a "rhetoric of control", a discourse about others that reinforced colonial containment" (Chidester. 1996. 2)

When this idea is super-imposed upon the processes of European occupation continuously underway in Southern Africa from the mid-Sixteenth Century, a three-fold process of boundary creation is emerges. The first frames knowledge in the service of H/higher power, in order to exercise inclusion and exclusion; this has many facets. Patrick Harries, for instance, suggests that linguistic "barriers were erected in order to restructure the African world in a way that would make it more comprehensible to European" (Dubow. 1995. 77) The second uses knowledge and its production - supported of course by superior fire-power - in the service of the proverbial king and country; this is the excavation and use of discourses over and on sovereignty to exercise both surveillance, administrative control and to fight the "kings war." (Ruggie. ibid. 151) While the last uses both to establish codified practices of "in/out" which both arise from, and reinforce, narrow Hobbesian interpretations of the human condition.

For a moment, I want to locate the third within the racial discourses which, with time, were to dominate the ebb and flow of the everyday politics of Southern Africa. The South African philosopher Tony Holiday, records that "the first Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 took place one year after Hobbes had published Leviathan...". (Holiday: 1993. 6) Using this to locate the world-view of those Europeans who made the fateful decision to settle in Southern Africa, our purpose is to suggest that those who intruded upon the region brought to the place distinct understandings of their own superiority and a particular hostility to any world other then their own. As they located themselves, their own cultural and knowledge practices - including the capacity to violence - was privileged over that of the "brute other". (Holiday: 1993: 8)

What organised form this privilege was finally to take, I want to suggest, is obvious by the parallel observation that the settlement at the Cape of Good Hope took place four years after the Treaty of Westphalia. It is however important to point out that Jan van Riebeeck (the servant of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) who established the first foreign mission on South African soil) proclaimed his goal to be one in which "in which the name of Christ may be extended, (and) the interests of the Company promoted". (Chidester. ibid. 9). This certainly suggests that multiple objectives were woven into the single project of settlement, although those two words "nation" or "state" are hidden immediately behind the idea of sovereignty to be exercised both by successively Christ and the DEIC. The techniques of administrative control which were brought to bear in the Cape of Good Hope under the suzerainty of the DEIC were, I want to suggest, no different to those which were to operate under the Dutch during their brief occupation.

The subsequent history of Southern Africa is phrased and rephrased by the lore of Westphalia and the allure which Westphalia represented for those in with political and economic power. The preoccupation with Westphalia which commenced in The Cape Colony, opened a the particular sovereign formation which regional relations were eventually to follow, by locating the conceptual seeds of the state that was to become South Africa - the state, as we shall come to see, which to all intents came to define the region and its state system. This explains further why inclusion of the bearers of superior culture and ways, and the concomitant exclusion of the indigenous and peripheral, was a constant thread in the history of South and Southern Africa. It was central to the development of racist ideology with its sharp dichotomies and the practice of social relations with ritualised ideas about white/non-white, European/non-European; state/non-state.

Unlike other notions of sovereignty which were emerged in the wake of Westphalia, the nascent ones in South/Southern Africa were not contingent on any notion of reciprocity. The indigenous people (of South Africa and later of the region) were, as innumerable accounts suggest, regard (at best) as children, at worst, as savages. They could enjoy none of the rights of insiders because, quiet simply, they were outside of the experience of those who carried the mandate of successively Christ, the DEIC, the Dutch government. They could not enjoy no sovereignty, quite simply, because they had (certainly initially) no state. It remains an open question whether the absence of reciprocal sovereignty in Southern Africa - certainly until the independence movement of the 1960s - accounts for the subsequent absence of international order. (see Ruggie. ibid., 162) But here, too, is a sting in the proverbial tail in the unfolding idea of sovereignty. Systems of European/white administrations dispensed both their legitimacy and sovereignty through a series of "savage" codes which, first in South Africa and later in the region would developed into an array of brutal administrative systems - commando, magisterial, location, reserve: each of which reinforced the ritualised power of insiders, and excluded the rights of outsiders.

Further artifacts in this crude genealogy are drawn from interpretations of frontier and boundary in Southern African historiography. The production and reproduction of images of the "opening up" of South/ern Africa along the lines of the United States has been a well explored technique in comparative history 4 : again, however, I don’t want to use this. Our particular case is more productively served by a discussion of the transmogrification of the idea of sovereignty by the control (and eventual closure) of frontiers by successively empire and state. With comparative historians however, this approach recognizes that the very creation of borders/frontiers were at all times contingent, and conceptual settlement, if it came at all, was seldom permanent.

The idea of rough neighbourhoods rounded out and eventually brought into motion the Westphalian system in Southern Africa. To understand this move, we must draw closer to Herman Gilomee who, building on a notion developed by Martin Legassick, advanced the idea that frontiers (certainly in the Eighteen Century Cape but later elsewhere in Southern Africa) were neither entirely open nor completely closed: they did however come to experience an 'open' moment and a closing one. The latter act, I want to suggest, was a Westphalian-type process - creating lines of demarcation by establishing sovereign borders.

Open borders were characterised by the absence of a single source of coercive authority, by relatively low population densities, by a fluidity in group (read: race) relations, by pragmatic resort to policies of cooperation and mutual accommodation and by clientage rather than bondage as the basis of labour relations (Keegan. 1997. 27) In this unsettled environment there was very little to establish identity, and Legassick suggests that Trekboers (as these settlers were known) were assisted in their adaptation to the environment by the knowledge, skills and labour of locals. The open frontier was, to all intents and purposes, a cultural melting-pot across which trade, ideas, and marriage continued. For David Chidester, "a frontier zone opens with contact between two or more previously distinct societies and remains open as long as power relations are unstable and contested, with no group or coalition able to establish dominance. A frontier zone closes when a single political authority succeeds in establishing hegemony over the area" (Chidester. 20-21) This was a moment of profound violence "...as colonists, with the government at their backs, imposed hegemony over indigenous peoples and exerted a growing monopoly on productive resources, and as coercion increasingly became the basis of group relations and the organisation of labour. On the closing frontier, too, stratification within the ranks of the colonialists sharpened, with decreasing proportion being landowners, and growing numbers becoming propertyless and dependent."(Keegan. ibid). This impulse towards to closure was rooted in a number of pressures: the personal ambition of administrators (local or distant), the interests of capital and of course frontier violence. But in the process, "insiders and outsiders" were created at two levels: in the drawing of the sovereign borders, across the international frontier; the second in the consolidation and incorporation of power and wealth at home.

This was not however the only understanding of sovereignty. Another, some call it Calvinist interpretation of sovereignty, was not tied-bound to geography; this carries, as we shall see, important insights into the continuing ambiguities around the regional state system. The historian Rodney Davenport in a forthcoming essay on the life of Paul Kruger, the Boer leader and statesman, recalls the early influences on his life. "The Calvinism believed and practiced by the Trekboers, along the southern watershed on the Orange River, was valued as a shield against the threat of "rebarbarisation", latent in frontier life. In its uncompromising adherence to biblical precepts, it provided a moral stiffening against danger and temptation. The sovereignty of the divine will, and its identification in the combined will of the faithful community, excluded the need for sentimentality in religion and gave a sobering legitimacy to whatever needed to be done for the nation of believers to survive as migrants in rough neighbourhoods." (Davenport. 1998) 5 .

I want to use this passage to build towards locating the very separateness (understandings of sovereignty, certainly) of South Africa’s Afrikaner people. Given their forty year hold on the politics of the region, the desirability of this dedicated attention is obvious. A central thread of Afrikaner history is the desire for a unity based on an understanding of "volks-eie" sovereignty which drew all Afrikaners - irrespective of their geographical location - together and reached upwards to God. The work of another historian, Leonard Thompson (1985), suggests that the late-1870s spawned pivotal moments in encouraging Afrikaners, scattered as they were by then throughout southern Africa, to think of themselves as a distinct sovereign people with a common destiny. By the 1890s, "Afrikaner clergy and intellectuals in various parts of southern Africa were responding to the pressures of British Imperialism and mining capitalism by propagating knowledge of the historical achievements of their people and the virtues of their culture."(ibid., 173) This decisive moment in the creation of Afrikaner sovereignty is linked to the influential work of the Neo-Calvinist Abraham Kuyper - founder of the Free University of Amsterdam and later Prime Minister of The Netherlands - who substituted Congregationalist patterns of church government for an all-powerful national church, each community and each corporate body to be "sovereign in its own sphere" (Elphick and Davenport. 1979. 56) "soewereiniteit in eie kring". This suggests a unity (certainly an identity) which was not tied-bound to territory. In her powerful deconstruction of apartheid discourse/s. Aletta Norval, casts the net of the development of Afrikaner sovereignty wider and more ambiguously than that offered by Kuyper - she also locates the influence of romantic nationalism and national socialism (Norval, 1966. 93)suggesting that the interplay of these which brought Afrikaner nationalism to power, accounts for the obdurate use of state power to further the cause of Afrikaners. This latter point, I do not want to pursue in this occasion. The central point is simply that the co-incidence between sovereignty and territoriality even in South Africa is not absolute. Indeed, this prevalent, no ambiguity, within Afrikaner circles on the idea of sovereignty persist: witness the settlement of pockets of Afrikaner farmers throughout Southern Africa on the eve of the 21st Century.

The turning point for the region came with the establishment of the region's first manquˇ-Westphalian state, the Union of South Africa in 1910. This followed upon the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902: a war which was superficially about identity but was really about the ambition of the Imperial project. The very Act of Union, however,

perpetuated the ambiguities associated with sovereignty; rather than closing the issue by defining borders, the Act conveyed the conditionalities which might apply on the possible incorporation of the three territories - then known as Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland - and left, almost entirely open, the possibility of the Union's relations was then called the Rhodesias, South and North. Not surprisingly, therefore, many thought that the Act of Union laid the foundations for the ambitions of Greater South Africa. I want to insist that the ambiguities over sovereignty in the Act of Union reflected the fact that the frontier remained to all intents and purposes an open one.

Jan Smuts, twice South African Prime Minister and until Nelson Mandela regarded as the country's greatest statesman. was entirely ambiguous about the transposition of South and Southern Africa - throughout the 1920s and 1930s his speeches interpose one with the other. There is a need to add just this tad more: the impulse to close the frontier may well have taken formal shape between 1914 and 1918 with South Africa's participation (on the orders of the British Crown) in the First World War - an event which, like no other before, was about the durability of the Westphalian system. From 1929, when South Africa began to conduct its own foreign policy, the frontier was to all intents and purposes closed. By this time however, German South West Africa had been, thought the spoils of war, all but formally included in the Union and Southern Rhodesia had, with the aid of a Referendum, declined the invitation to join with South Africa.

It took more than thirty years for the next Westphalian-type state in the region, Tanyanika in 1962, to emerge. By this time the patrolling of South Africa borders - in all its meanings - had reached an advanced state as this clip from a picture caption in a propaganda journal suggests. "the phenomenal expansion of economic activity since the last war has made South Africa the most advanced state in Africa. The vast wealth of her natural resources, developed with enterprise and initiative, has raised her living standards above those of any other African country and paced her among the industrialized nations of the world. (Andrews, et al. 1962. 128-29) Drawing upon clichˇ to reinforce the point: all the region's maps were charted upon and, indeed, around South Africa, the wealth of its interests and the interests of its wealth.

Drawing on David Campbell's idea on the mutually constitutive character of state formation, South African understandings set the conditions for membership of the "state system"; put differently, and drawing from historical sociology 6 , the other states in the region were defined not so much by an interaction of internal forces but by their external setting towards the state called South Africa. As the self-image of the state called South Africa mutated through its regional policy, particularly during the apartheid years, it is certainly true that primordial feelings of superiority were transferred from a domestic location onto the immediate neighbourhood. It is easy to provide examples; the following two will do. The independence movement in Southern Africa which was seen as a moment of hope for the region was viewed, by South Africa's government, as a moment of extreme hostility. And the intrusion into the region of Marxism - at the independence of Mozambique and Angola - were regarded as deeply threatening by the same government even though on the region's streets and in its furthest villages, it may have judged to be the dawn of a new age.

The theories which served mainstream International Relations in Southern Africa never offered interpretation on the sheer contingency of region's claims on sovereignty. It may seem inappropriate, given South Africa's now intense obsession with reconciling, to name names. But for these purposes - because probably truth will elude us - we need to note that the main carriers of received understandings were closed epistemic communities 7 - whose interests were either in maintaining South Africa’s apartheid situation or in returning to some kind of colonial status quo ante.

It was certainly true, as these scholars came to assert, that apartheid South Africa's capacity to exercise her sovereignty within the international community was restricted. With time and international sanctions over apartheid, South Africa international profile dipped, but few suggested that within its own region, South Africa was not able to exercise its "sovereign" options. This amnesia to the multiple forms of sovereignty, interestingly, was parallel by a debate about South Africa's desire - in pursuance of her domestic goals - to carve out (and set free) separate sovereign states with her own territory - the goal was that these should recognised as sovereign and independent by other states. The latter, I believe, must be seen as a particular strain of the "volkseie" sovereignty of mainstream Afrikaners since its ostensible purpose was to enable the free association of what were seen to be ethnic groupings within the country. Incidentally, the propensity to create small states, to cater for "difference", has returned to haunt the New South Africa, as Afrikaner-centric groupings have entreated the post-apartheid government for some form of separate sovereign identity.

If the closing of the frontier, which was to culminated in a place called South Africa, teaches anything, it is that the theory and practice of international relations is vastly different. Three stories from the region's Twentieth Century history suggests why. Analysing the notorious practise of "black-birding" 8 at "Crooks' Corner" in what is now South Africa's Northern Province, Martin Murray writes, by the 1910s, “..competition had forced freelance poachers to push their illicit recruiting activities hundreds of miles northward... Gangs of labour thieves staked out territorial claims to recognised labour routes, took up arms to protect business operations, and assumed virtual carte blanche sovereignty over large tracts of land (Murray. 1995: 383) Then writing about the 1960s, the Botswana citizen Michael Dingake who served a fifteen-year sentence on Robben Island for furthering the aims of the African National Congress - drew attention to a kind of regional community below that defended by the sovereignty claims either colonialism and apartheid. Before political independence we depended very much on our South African brothers when we earned a livelihood in their economy. We were never subjected to subtle discrimination...except by the common enemy - the colour bar/apartheid state...our black brothers taught us how to survive, how to cheat the pass laws...we were welcome...in the ghettos, in the factories, in the schools...(our success is the product)...of the hospitality and magnanimity of our black brothers across the border. (Dingake. 1987: 241) Finally, Allister Sparks, the South African journalist, in 1996 describes a small corner of the region's biggest city, writes there is a whole community of (then) Zairians living in Johannesburg where French is the only language you hear on the streets. (The Star) In all three cases, the fact of borders and understandings of sovereignty appear to be palpably different. This explains why the region's maps (to deliberately return to the clichˇ) seem unable to hold the organisational dimensions of time and space which sovereignty once confidently promised in Southern Africa.

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It is a short step from the triumphalist sovereignty associated with South Africa's "place amongst industrialized nations" to the country's transition and the continuation of the violence which patrol its borders. Bradley Klein might well capture the conjuncture like this: the strategic violence which defined apartheid South Africa continues to constitute the new South Africa - "defining the state boundaries, excluding that which differs from its domain, and punishing those who would challenge it". (Klein. ibid., 7) What accounts for this continuity?

Sovereignty, I want to suggest, is carried by the tales told by those who were (to deliberately borrow Acheson's phrase) "present at the creation"; this, as our genealogy suggested, is what makes the notion simultaneously both absolute and unstable. This same tension provides for the continuity between South Africa's past and its present. Perhaps the best, the tallest, the broadest, the longest (lasting) on the issues of sovereignty in the new South/Southern Africa was told by the US Ambassador to South Africa, Princeton Lyman. It bears repeating here and, I hope to suggest elsewhere someday, whenever the theory and practice of international relations are brought together because it not only confirms the ready association between diplomatic practice and violence but the readiness of US diplomacy, like its I/international R/relations, to stress the continuities represented by over the change represented by sacrifice. "On May 10, 1994", the Ambassador writes, " something happened that few people, even those most committed to the struggle against apartheid, ever thought could. Nelson Mandela, flanked by outgoing president F.W. de Klerk and the top generals of the South African Defense Force, took the oath as president of South Africa. Tens of thousands of South Africans mostly black, but of all races, cheered. At that moment, airplanes of the South African Air Force flew overhead, the colors of the new flag streaming behind. There was an initial moment of apprehension as the planes came in sight. Then the crowd broke into cheers. One black man in the crown turned to his neighbour and said, "They're ours now".(Lyman, 1996. 105)

This account is emblematic of international response for post-apartheid South Africa, a state whose continuities have come to enjoy the accolades in the search for a new world order. The intercession of the authority of the United States in the "creation" of the new South Africa remains, at one level, quite puzzling. Removed from the daily struggles of South Africa's majority for decades, the United States was the target of the ire of influential anti-apartheid activists for close on three decades. Increasing evidence suggests the deep complicity of the United States in support for successive moments of the apartheid project: Nelson Mandela for instance suggests that he was shopped by the CIA (Mandela. 1994. 306/70) There is also evidence to suggest that the US was deeply involved in the early development of South Africa's nuclear capacity. This is perspective, of course, could be entirely theorised within the matrix provided by orthodox interpretations of the Cold War. The revolutionary and pro-Communist uncertainties of South Africa liberation movements, set against the stability offered by a legitimate and sovereign government with strong anti-Soviet policies. Through these connections, apartheid South Africa was incorporated into the Cold War frontier.

Certainly, South Africa's determined forward defense programme, known as destablisation, which nearly destroyed much of Southern Africa and was modeled on the behavior of the US on its own frontier in Central America. Moreover, South Africa's obsessional concern with the threat of terrorism and its demonisation of the Soviet Union had striking parallels with Cold War rhetoric in the United States. This, too, abuts Campbell's notion of turning geography into eschatology: the transposition of ambiguous notions of sovereignty into statist ones in regions which were (to borrow from Chester Crocker, Reagan's Africa Secretary and to recapture Davenport) "rough neighbourhoods". It also helps to explain why the effort by apartheid South Africa to manage the deepening domestic turmoil of the 1980s by drawing on the thoughts of influential Cold War theorists - including Samuel P. Huntington and J.J.McCuen. When US engagement with change in South Africa came, it was as controversial as what had gone before. The diplomatic strategy of Constructive Engagement which aimed to sustain white power and encourage slow peaceful change away from dogmatism unlocked considerable anger from all sides in South and Southern Africa. For our purposes, it is clear that (certainly in the initial stages) Constructive Engagement encouraged apartheid South Africa to use its sovereign power as a lever in the region. The controversial Nkomati Accord of 1981 proves the point.

The ending of the Cold War has painfully taught that movement and making are not quite the same things; recognising this, explains why the search for "a new world order" in Africa appears to be bedeviled by a the familiar range of late-20th century problems: porous borders, recalcitrant tribalisms, failing states. The idea that Africa is a continent in permanent decline is endemic in opinion-making circles throughout the world. For many of these, Southern Africa represents a beacon of hope on the otherwise troubled continent. This is why the idea of building a strong Southern Africa which will act as an anchor for a continent in despair seems to be a priority in the thinking of many in what some still call the North. The anchor's anchor - as it were - is of course South Africa with its successful transition, free-up economy and strategic location. (Chase, Hill and Kennedy. 1996). In this vision, South Africa is as much a new frontier for the idea of a new world order, as the region was once South Africa's frontier.

This explains the haste by which South Africa was ushered, by the United States, into accepting a role in international peace-keeping efforts. The surveillance implicit in the idea of international peace-keeping has, I believe, been inadequately explored, although feminist scholars, like Sandra Whitworth, are able to point to its profound limitations. It is worth recalling the course of events around South Africa emergence into the peace-keeping community because it reinforces the idea that the policing dimensions of sovereignty were indecently transferred from the old South Africa to the new. Suggestions that a post-apartheid South Africa would be drawn into peace-keeping occurred almost immediately after the Inauguration of Nelson Mandela as South Africa's President. In a very public display of pressure (it happened on national television!) Al Gore, the US Vice-President, raised the issue of South African support for the Rwandan crisis which was then breaking.

These urgings played into the hands of South Africa's military which, at the time, remained uncertain of the long-term role that they were to played in the new South Africa. The (then) small conservative think-tank, the Institute for Defence Policy (now the Institute for Strategic Studies), had been anxiously pursuing a small programme (sponsored by the conservative German Foundation named for Hans Seidel) which sought to discover a role for the South African Defence Force beyond the one which it enjoyed during the apartheid years. Other state-makers, like the South African Institute for International Affairs, were quickly crossing the divide between their traditional interest in diplomacy towards a new focus on strategic issues. Acting together, and drawing funds from foreign governments, they swiftly consolidated what Ludwig Fleck calls a scientific thought collective: a community who members share questions, assumptions and ways of working. This process of "branching off of scholarly disciplines" (Bauman. ibid. x) has considerably weakened international relations scholarship in South Africa with more and more people believing that its sole purpose is to serve (at best) the utilitarian functions of liberal internationalism and, at worst, Neo-realism. Through this, the location of the military - both in the transitional process and in the affairs of the region - was secured under the rubric of Neo-realism which was entirely unconcerned with deeper processes of transition underway within the region itself; regional policy was driven by experts whose only wish, in their service of security managers, was to return Southern Africa to sovereign-business-as-usual.

South Africa's military have been at pains to stress that their declared goal in the region is peaceful. In so doing they have conveniently ignored a fundamental point that their own understandings of international conflict were, throughout the 1970s and 1980s mis-guided and ill-directed: they singularly failed (as others of course) to anticipate the collapse of Soviet Communism and mis-read the nature of the changes within their primary domestic/international adversary, the exiled African National Congress. This has not, though it should have, prompted a question who follows Baudrillard: "If their culture was so mistaken about others, it must also be mistaken about itself?" Their current reliance on the framing input provided by think-tanks draws one to Hannah Arendt's telling indictment of this kind of activity: "[t]here are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble is not that they cold-blooded enough to 'think the unthinkable', but that they do not think." 9

Looking back, South Africa’s transition will be judged as a lost opportunity for those who wish/ed for an alternative discourse over the future of Southern Africa. At the very moment when creative energy should have been geared at re-thinking the role of sovereignty, the South African discourse fell back on the cherished values associated with the power and might; with the recreation of frontiers. The idealism and hope associated with South Africa's transition was lost: regional and international relations were recast as an instrument of South African strategic purpose.

The discourse quickly moved between the celebration associated with endings - the cold war and apartheid - and the triumphs associated with new beginnings - an order of " regional realities" in which peace and prosperity hinge on unquestioned assumptions associated with the preservation sovereignty associated with market economics. Through these, the country and Southern Africa were said to be in sync with the "modern international system...[which is}...dominated by realism and the market" (Arias. 1996. 13) At no time was there an opportunity to rethink assumptions, to probe long-held truisms, or to debunk some obvious myths. There was, however, all the time (borrowing again from Oscar Arias) to ignore "the people whose well-being must be he most important goal of our time"; the very people who has sacrificed the most to liberate Southern Africa. As a result, notwithstanding the ending of apartheid, the discourses of peace- and of war-making in the region are caught within the limited and limiting explanatory range offered by mainstream theory - in security questions, Neo-realism; in economics, neo-liberalism. Because both reflect "extraordinary impoverished mind-sets", both place profound upon limits the potential for understanding the region in terms of its people.

***

There is a unique dimension to what has happened in southern Africa. The ending of apartheid has closed a desperately unhappy chapter in the history of mankind. Multiracial Zimbabwe, independent Namibia and the "new" South Africa all attest to an elasticity in racial questions in a part of the world in which this was the single most important determining factor of politics. (Booth and Vale. 1994) Race and its twin, ethnicity, remain however potent forces in international politics. The conflict in the Balkans was a reminder of their bloody power. And in Africa, as Rwanda has tragically shown (and Burundi surely will), politics cannot be freed from considerations of colour, cast or creed. But these reservations, important though they undoubtedly are, do not detract from the fact that in helping to turn the proverbial corner on race, Southern Africa has delivered to the world an immeasurable gift.

The lasting achievement of the region's struggle for liberal democracy is less certain. There is some evidence that movement in this direction is steady, if not spectacular. The idea of a "wave of democratisation" in Africa (Michael Cowen and Liisa Laakso. 1997. 717-744) which followed upon the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, has been a constant thread in Southern Africa's efforts to rechart its course in the aftermath of apartheid. But there are profound limits to discourses over democracy which believe that there can only be a single authoritative voice in public affairs. As Craig Calhoun reminds us these "attempt to settle in advance a question which is inextricable part of the democratic process itself'. (Turner. 1996. 459)

The notion of a single authoritative voice in public affairs has its equivalent at the regional level. The ending of apartheid (and the search for democracy) have spawned intense discussion on the creation of a range of new institutional arrangements to underwrite the idea of Southern Africa. As we have noted, these have turned on the notion that change, if anything, has legitimized the region's existing assumptions about the permanence of states and the concomitant power of sovereignty. Nevertheless, utilitarian frameworks which these have suggested have offered opportunities for limited engagement in the cause of building a common region. So, when Lesotho experienced a constitutional crisis in August, 1994, swift action by three Presidents - South Africa's Nelson Mandela, Botswana's Quett Masire and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe - agreed a course of action which helped to return the elected government to power. However, the longer-term problems of Lesotho, as Khabela Matlosa has so faithfully argued (Matlosa. 1998), are less to do with the tide of daily politics, and more to do with the existential crisis which the country's faces because its sovereignty has been entirely eroded by the power of South Africa. Nevertheless, the "success" of the Lesotho case encouraged an engagement with a similar peace process in the other enclave state, Swaziland. Ironically however, success in the Swazi case was more a function of the communality of regional elites than it was to do with a peace-resolution mechanism based on the region's state system. (In the this case, Mandela used his family links with the Swazi Royal House (his daughter is married to a Swazi prince) to press for an easing of restrictions on political activity.)

Elementary questioning suggests the paradox which stalks approaches, like these, which rely in a concerting of the states of the region. There is very little formal sense of community between the states of Southern Africa beyond the rituals associated with SADC (The Southern African Development Community), the core regional organisation.) One central reason is the absence of any attempt to share sovereignty in the cause of building the community. The reasons for this are clear: the organization's predecessor, SADCC (the Southern African Development Co-ordinating Community) was developed to protect the sovereignty of individual members from the predatory ambitions of South Africa's destablisation. As that organisation mutated into SADC, with the ending of apartheid, the founding compact over the formal sharing of sovereignty the common cause did not materialize; instead, its purported reformation and reformulation was smuggled in under the guise that the member country's were caught in a wave liberal democracy and that this would, with time, lead to the democratization of SADC and its institutions. One problem with this approach is that democracy rarely travels from the national to the regional.

Another was that the closing of the region's frontiers, as a result of apartheid, fed a deep-seated understanding that Southern Africa's had to rely on conflict, and preparing for it, as central vehicle for regional intercourse. So, the very idea of regional peace, was associated with the use of force. Apartheid South Africa use of force throughout the 1970s and 1980s was premised on the idea that they c/would return the region to peace and prosperity: the same sentiments accompanied earlier efforts to fight insurgency in a slew of other countries: Rhodesia, South West Africa and Portuguese East Africa. In addition, the idea that the core national interest of the states of the region were to overthrow apartheid and colonialism suggests, if anything, that conflict was also the modus operandi of the majority-ruled states of the region.

It is not that perspectives over the region have remained static; again, quite the opposite seems true. Thinking about Southern Africa has certainly sought to re-cast itself with the changing times. So, for instance, thinking about security has shifted away from traditional concerns with inter-state conflict towards the "new security agenda". In the now familiar pattern associated with the early work of the Copenhagen School, eight clusters of conflict have been isolated in Southern Africa: those associated with war termination and reconciliation as in Mozambique and Angola; those associated with political participation as in Lesotho and Swaziland; those over the distribution of resources which have been acutely affected by efforts to restructure economies; those over identity whether local, national or regional; those which spill-over borders like refugees, arms smuggling or drugs; interdependency conflicts associated with the spread of disease or water shortages and; asymmetry conflicts - particularly South Africa's domination of the region; those over land claims like the one between Botswana and Namibia over an islet in the Chobe River 10 . Of these, only the latter directly involves the strategic perspectives associated with the inter-state conflict which was the region's over-riding concern in the 1980s.

Understanding this however, prompts questions around the national interests of a country like Botswana. Although considered by many to be the quintessential model of liberal democracy, it is in the processes of building its military forces. The army is said to be increasing from about 7 500 to more than 10 000 soldiers, and it has recently purchased second-hand fighter planes from Canada. Can these developments buy security for Botswana and assure its neighbours? Or are the feeding a new phase of the famous anarchy/security dilemma in Southern Africa? Despite elaborate arguments to the contrary, the answer to the first seems no; the answer to the first, yes.

It was always unlikely that simple act of ending apartheid would create a new regional order; this is why significant corners of the region are still at war. Decades of strife, structured around understandings of sovereignty, have left a legacy of deep mistrust and crippling misunderstanding: as economic circumstances deteriorate and small arms are readily at hand, prolonged - indeed, renewed - conflict appears inevitable throughout the sub-continent. Why these conflicts persist are central questions for the region's long-term prospects. But ending them is difficult, if not impossible, within the discourse offered by the nation-state-as-chief-actor framing.

But paradox stalks this argument, too. As we have seen, prospects for the region have been strengthened because change came to South Africa. However, the region seems weakened by the international attention given to South Africa's own settlement. For better, rather than worse, South Africa not only occupies a central position in the affairs but fills a pivotal position in its international relations. Despite South Africa's understanding that "regional order should be developed by the people of the region - not imposed by a "regional power'", the pressure for South Africa to lead the regional processes are overwhelming. The debate over South Africa's potential role in peace-keeping has simply reinforced the sense of her domination of the region.

***

If it is to lead the region, how is South Africa to deal with its past behavior? There is no formal effort to establish routines of inquiry into the largely untold - quite simply, unrecorded - story of South Africa's destablisation of Southern Africa in the 1980s; like the US experience in Vietnam, this will increasingly be lost to public consciousness. Indeed, as questions have been raised on South Africa's position in the region in the aftermath of political change, Neo-realism has stressed the relative comfort of continuity rather than the challenge of change. The one mechanism which might have been used to come clean, as it were, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has largely bypassed the challenge of dealing with South Africa's past in the region. The issue here is plain: the government of the new South Africa believes it was no less a victim of apartheid then the people of the region were. There is therefore no reason for it to atone for the damage which apartheid visited upon the region and its people. But it may also be linked to the two haunting questions raised by Zygmunt Bauman in discussion of another holocaust. How was such a horror possible? How could this happen from the heart of the most civilised and chistian country in the region? (Bauman. ibid. xi) In work which compliments this paper, I intend to argue (drawing again from Bauman) that South Africa destablisation of its neighbours was "a legitimate resident in the house of (regional) modernity; indeed, one...which...would not be at home in any other house". (Bauman. ibid. 17) On this occasion let this single bit of evidence support the point I will make on that particular occasion. On the morning of 4 May, 1978, apartheid's defence force first strafed and then invaded a SWAPO camp at Cassinga in Southern Angola; when the morning's work was done, 612 were killed - two-thirds of which were women and children.

As things now stand, debate on the region can only be conducted only within the confines of the limited understandings offered by Westphalia's adaptation to Southern Africa. South Africa, as the region's strongest power, will continue to determine what is in the interests of the region. The region's peace, it follows, can only be a peace which supports the interests of its hegemon. There is no place in this occasion to rehearse the argument around the power of South Africa's armaments industry and assess the reportage that South African arms help to fuel the conflicts in both Rwanda and Burundi, and that the country is supplying surveillance equipment to Algeria. .But we must draw a tighter analytical circle around the central idea, the region's peace can only be the peace determined by the power discourses within South Africa; one of which is the residual power of South Africa's armaments industry. This accounts of the (re) -emergence of what constitutes South Africa's national interests in Southern Africa.

However welcome and celebrated South Africa's transition might be; it is not the end of history in the region. It has opened only another phase of struggle and, as the increasing tide of migration suggests, much of this will turn on the nature and behaviour of the state we now call South Africa. The triumphalism over South Africa has made it very difficult to appreciate that embedded deep within the same state is a statist culture which has not changed. As the state reaches into its collective memory it is discovering that routine responses to challenges are more likely than even the acknowledgment of the necessity to think long and hard about creative responses. In this, as I have suggested, the international relations community has played the role of accomplice. The effects of the re-assertion of the neo-realist thinking of the "new" South Africa, the patrolling of its sovereignty, is to be found in the deepening paranoia around migration to the country. The debate on migration to South Africa belongs, not on these, but on other pages, save for this observation: the discourse over the issue is cast within "a righteous anger and defensiveness in which 'others' are finally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our civilization and way of life." (Said. 1994. 376)

This issue remains perhaps the litmus test of the new South Africa commitment to the people of the region. Will the country share the gains of its now increasingly mythical struggle with those who supported it or will, as now, sovereignty remain the only real force which binds South Africans together against the regional other? As a result, will South Africans as they have for four decades continue to live up against their neighbours?

It is patently disingenuous to question the idea of peace in a region which - for three centuries - has only known war and conflict. In the search for quick answers to the unfolding challenges of the region, the idea of peace - its making, its keeping - has been de-linked from the many layers of complexity which underpin relations - international, inter-community, inter-personal - throughout Southern Africa. Throughout the sub-continent, a range of new social items have been detected; many of these, it seems, run parallel to the gradual breaking down of the nation state's capacity to deliver government and, with it, its slow but sure break-up. What this suggests is that identity is nor pre-ordained: like all products of social intercourse, it changes with time.

***

A central theme of these pages is that sovereignty has not secured identity in Southern Africa: indeed, quite the opposite. Preoccupation with sovereignty have created security-conscious states and these have generated violence - a process which has been abetted by mainstream approaches to International Relations which have reinforced the statist understandings of policy-makers. This is a condition, as every undergraduate student of international relations theory should now understand, which is neither necessary, nor commanded by history.

To change this however will require the exploration of "new forms of community in which individuals and groups can achieve higher levels of freedom". (Smith, Booth and Zalewski. 1996. 279) Early work along this path has yielded modest results: in quite extraordinary ways the region's people do appear to be marching to a different drum from that of the region's states. (Vale. 1996; Booth and Vale. 1994). But does this mean that we can confidently assert that there are two Southern Africa - one of states, the other of people? There is a sense in which this exists. Despite the claims to longevity, Southern Africa's is a recent state system: in Westphalian terms it reaches back, as we have seen, only to the early years of this century. As an interesting aside this system not significantly older than South Africa's President who was born in 1918.

Recent work on political memory - so compelling illustrated in the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - suggests how selective and haphazard it is, and can become. In Southern Africa's case, the histories which have carried these memories have, invariably, been these rooted in privilege. Despite hugely attractive work in social history, especially on South Africa, the region as seen from below remains to be fully explored. But different readings of history alone may not help. The capacity of Neo-realists to appropriate the space opened by alternative readings of history must not be under-estimated. Let this example make the point. Recently, Deon Fourie SD. SM, MMM, JCD, KStJ., associate professor of security studies at the University of South Africa and "until 1995...Director: Part Time Forces at SA Army Headquarters with the rank of Brigadier" (Carlsnaes and Muller. 1997. 313) rediscovered South African history. "It is not unusual nowadays", writes the Professor, "to hear black South Africans jokingly say that the first security threat came from the sea - it brought Europeans to the Cape of Good Hope" (Carlsnaes and Muller. 268) He then uses this proposition to reinsert neorealist perspectives into his understandings of the security concerns in the region.

It is however possible to take a different routing; to suggest that the rediscovery of deep historical impulses will enable the search for new forms of identity in the region. A quick example make the point. Again, the first is again from theology. In the cusp of the frontiers between the expanding influence of white, empirical power and the "other", the long-contested Transorangia, an "Ethiopian" Christian movement took root: based on creative use of the Bible and explicit African imagery, it was regarded as a "major threat to peace in the entire region" (Elphick and Davenport. 133). Today, the off-shots of one of these African Indigenous Churches (AICs), the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), has adherents which dwell from Malawi in the sub-continent's north reaches to Cape Town in the south: it is thought that the probably has 5-million adherents across the sub-continent. Its location the life of its adherents is palpable when each year, literally, tens of thousands members folk to Moira in the South Africa's Northern Province in pilgrimage. The political significance of the AICs, particularly the ZCC, has been well recognized by successive South African leaders.

This example suggests that the "bits-in-between" the states of the region now tell us more about Southern Africa's future than do the tired routines of offered by the legacy of Westphalia. If critical theory (following Marx) is the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age, then in Southern Africa, these are with people who have not one national identity, but many; one of which may be to Southern Africa.

The significance of social movements, like the ZCC has been hidden by the state-centric patterning of the conflict over the ending of apartheid in which the colour boundary between black and white was superimposed on the geographical boundaries around successively the Rhodesias, South West Africa and South Africa. It is undoubtedly true that the celebration associated with both the ending of apartheid and the "towering figure of Nelson Mandela" (to quote a clichˇ, I have all too frequently used myself) will delay thus process, but academic work on identity and memory is running apace in South Africa. This work might begin with the history of migrant workers and lead backwards towards rootings and explorations of early African societies: histories written, as it were, from the other side of the evolving series of frontiers. This undoubtedly offers an attractive alternative narrative to the staple diet of history-through-the-pages-of-states which reveal increasingly repressive social conditionings.

Whether the location and highlighting of these alternatives to the states in Southern Africa will be sufficient to build a counter-hegemonic force remains unclear. What is clear is this: in Southern Africa, Westphalia is not what it once promised to be.

***

As I write these words, the rituals of statism have played out in another forgotten corner of Africa. Nigerian aircraft have first strafed Freetown in Sierra Leone and their troops, acting in the names both of the Economic Community of West Africa and the Organisation of African Unity have taken this capital city. Their mission? to restore democracy to this West African country. But the irony is that Nigeria itself is a military dictatorship. Chairman of the Organization of African Unity, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe praised the Nigerian-led ECOMOG forces for capturing Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone from junta leader Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Paul Koroma. "ECOMOG will remain in Sierra Leone until they are certain that all resistance is gone," said Mugabe, adding "it may take time, but all the same want to say well done to them."

Bibliography

Notes:

Note 1: Dr Tony Holiday help me think my way around this. Back.

Note 2: These have been set out in Peter Vale and John Daniel. Back.

Note 3: In 1994 Botswana's per capita gross national product of 2,800 US dollars per annum was higher than that of middle-income nations like Russia and Costa Rica. In Africa, only Gabon, Mauritius and South Africa achieved higher scores. Its foreign reserves grew by 10.5 percent during 1994/1995 to about four billion dollars, sufficient to finance 23 months of imports -- a situation many other developing countries would envy. However, about 60 percent of its 1.4 million people are poor; many are also jobless. Unemployment affects 25 percent of the active population, according to official estimates, but the real figure is probably between 45 to 50 percent. Back.

Note 4: See Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson. (eds) The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared. New Haven. Yale University Press. 1981. Back.

Note 5: [The liberal historian T.R.H Davenport has recently written a brief biographical note on the Boer leader and statesman Paul Kruger which offers an interesting insight into thinking around sovereignty. (Davenport. 1998)] Back.

Note 6: Hobden Back.

Note 7: The names commonly associated with this work are Jack Spence, John Barratt, James Barber and Deon Geldenhuys. Each was a trained historian and, only with the exception of the first, each studied within the Oxbridge tradition. The first three were closely associated throughout their professional lives: Geldenhuys' PhD was supervised by Spence and examined by Barber; he wrote his important book on South Africa's foreign policy whilst in the employment of the South African Institute of International Affairs where John Barratt was then the Director. Let me add this personal note: my early career parallels this in almost every way. Back.

Note 8: The illegal importation of black workers fro the region into South Africa’s mines. Back.

Note 9: It is worth rounding out Arendt’s methodological comments: “Instead of indulging in such an old-fashioned uncomputerizable activity, the reckon with the consequences of certain hypothetically assumed constellations without, however, being able to test their hypotheses against actual occurrences. The logical flaw in these hypothetical constructions of future events is always the same: what first appears as a hypothesis - with or without alternatives, according to the level of sophistication - turns immediately, usually after a few paragraphs, into a "fact", which then gives birth to a string of similar non-facts, with the result that the purely speculative character of the who enterprise is forgotten...the most obvious and profound objection to this kind of strategic theory is ...its danger..for it can lead us to believe that we have an understanding of events and control over their flow which we do not". Arendt, 1969. I want in forthcoming work to take this further: especially with regard to the techniques associated with senario-building which have become very powerful in the mind of South Africans. Back.

Note 10: he uninhabited Kasikili island, known as Sedudu in Botswana, lies in Chobe river on Namibia's north-eastern border with Botswana. In April 1996 Botswana deployed troops on the island during an operation to eradicate a bovine disease. Namibia's foreign minister protested arguing that the responsibility for this task lay with Namibia's Defence Force. SABC Channel Africa Radio, Johannesburg, in English 1500 gmt. 23 April, 1996. Back.