Le Sud et les relations transatlantiques

Routine observation suggests that South African foreign and security policy still looks North notwithstanding that its rhetoric looks to the Global South. Even the country’s newly-found international “refuge” in the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economic partnership, which includes an Atlantic country, Brazil, does not seem to have changed South Africa’s century’s long international infatuation with the North. Why this has happened, certainly nominally, remains somewhat of a mystery. After all, the country is seen as a champion of the South’s struggle against both racism and decolonisation.

This essay explores the issue but not by using the tired routines of Realism which have dominated writing on the Atlantic such as there is in the South African literature. [114] Most of this is historical and, as will become clear, is tied to the British imperial project and to the Cold War – the short-hand for the first is caught in the label, The Cape Sea Route and for second, read The Angolan War. These persist never mind that South Africa was “discovered” from the Atlantic by Bartholomew Diaz, the Portuguese explorer in 1451. It was first settled (and quite literally fortified on the Atlantic side through the building of The Castle in Cape Town by the Dutch from 1652 onwards. This was a decisive move in the formation of the South African state because it brought, the region in the mainstream of a modernity which would have states at their centre. The Dutch were in the Cape until they lost the Battle of Muizenburg, in 1795 : this was a decisive, but until recently wholly ignored, skirmish fought by two Atlantic nations, the Dutch and the British, on the Cape Peninsula’s Indian Ocean seafront.

All this is one way of missing the point about the Atlantic, as the title suggests. Another emerges from the deep questions which have engaged Atlantic Ocean scholarship. So, South Africa was not central in the important and continuing issue of Atlantic slavery. This is not to argue that this scourge was not central to South Africa’s story. On the contrary, it was central to it from 1652 to 1834-5. But many slaves, however, travelled southwards, not on the Atlantic, but by way of the Indian Ocean, although those from West Africa might well be thought of as “Atlantic Slaves”. ¹⁷⁷

But it was the vast African hinterland and emerging imperial interests towards the North and the East that seem to have occupied the South African mind more than any other issue – never mind that the deepest impulse for the formal organisation of the state, as we have already noted, came from the Atlantic world. A little reflection [115] suggests that the essence of the country and indeed, the continent’s story, was the development of the national project. This began in all earnest with the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 which indirectly projected European sovereignty onto Africa. The key word was (and remains) sovereignty because this has enabled states to both form and to function, and the idea of international relations to grow and to prosper. So, the modern roots of sovereignty, notwithstanding its powerful hold on the affairs of South Africa and the continent do not lie in what we now call Southern Africa. Instead, they lie in the Atlantic world.

Drawing on historical sociology and international political economy, this argument shows that South Africa’s Atlantic sea-board, through the link to Europe, holds the key to explaining the power of property and the persistence of sovereignty in the politics of both South and Southern Africa. After all, it was from this – the country and the sub-continent’s western side – that the impulses for modernity came : “…of shoes – and ships – and ceiling wax” (to use Lewis Carroll’s phrase ¹⁷⁸) that sealed the long European hold on the project that we call South Africa. But, and this is the message of the piece, it is the enmeshment in Africa that now holds the key to the Atlantic.

The recent growth of interest in the Atlantic, and its 21^st Century affairs, is a development that will be watched with much interest. Not a little of this will come from critical international relations (IR) scholars, like myself. This is because, certainly in IR, interest in Atlantic matters has brought out the discipline’s most toxic side [116] (like the low horizons of Cold War Strategic Studies) which both grew and flourished over concerns around the Atlantic. Indeed, the alloy of the so-called “Golden Age” of Strategic Studies, in no small way, was cast on the idea of the Atlantic Alliance and its adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union. The stultified methodology and laborious jargon of Strategic Studies set the outer agenda for IR for almost three decades. Looking back, we can readily appreciate that most of this literature was embedded in Cold War Realism. As such, it was thick on state-centred interpretations of history, thin on Sociology and, most importantly, too free of true common sense. These were the same sets of understandings that failed to predict either the ending of the Cold War or, for that matter, apartheid ¹⁷⁹, notwithstanding the claim to knowing and to knowledge of how the future could unfold.

The weakness of this work was the over-riding imperative to position sovereignty at the centre of their epistemology. The failure to understand that sovereignty, for all its analytical privilege. is wrapped up with constructed understandings of complex social phenomenon. To ignore this – as Strategic Studies did, and much of IR scholarship continues to do – is to miss the social underpinnings of what makes for the international.

Put differently, to study a world which is entirely cast by sovereignty is…well, to miss much of the point.

Interestingly, the post-Cold War study of the Indian Ocean has grasped all this. It was not always so, of course. In the mid- and late-1960s, Indian Ocean studies were almost entirely captured by the Strategic Studies writ. Not a small part of the explanation for this comes from Britain’s shameless abandonment of the Chagossians [117] when, beginning in 1968, they handed first Diego Garcia and then the entire British Indian Ocean Territory to the United States (US) on the platter of their “special relationship”. The averred “threat” to Western security at the time was an expanding Soviet Navy and, later, India’s purported ambitions in an ocean which, to deliberately insert an irony which was missed by most Indian Ocean experts, was named for India ! But many interested parties with nascent Cold War ambitions, like Australia, were enticed into debates on the strategic significance of the Cold War.

Debates of this kind were of obvious interest to apartheid South Africa which traded upon and drew succor from Britain’s long-time strategic interests in the Indian Ocean, and the United Kingdom’s shrinking international role following the Second World War. This conversation was, like most debates in Strategic Studies, fuelled by a series of slogans and clichés like “British strategic interests east of Suez” and “the Simonstown Agreement” which, of course, has already crossed our path. The net effect was that Britain’s decline as a naval power seemed to reinforce South Africa’s determination to become a naval power even though it lacked the industrial infrastructure to develop this. There is a rich thread to be followed here but, alas, it lies outside our immediate ambit which was with Indian Ocean Studies.

Today, Indian Ocean Studies are alive with a curiosity that, frankly, beggars belief. Along its littoral, Anthropologists and Sociologists have discovered thriving and inter-linked diasporas who are driving not only thriving economic linkages, but are doing so within cultural codes that reach back several centuries. The Indian Ocean islands, instead of being considered as remote corners of a vast stretch of water, are being seen [118] for what they are : crucial lynch-pins in communities of Indian Ocean citizens. This is a world in which the idea of national sovereignty is entirely secondary to societal interests of all. Complex and multiple identities standing outside narrow nation-state preoccupations have been freed by the reach and the imaginative power of post-colonial studies.

There is a methodological and ontological lesson in this for nascent Atlantic Ocean studies. If the purpose of the reawakening is (as Strategic Studies so often does) to raise the alarm about a power vacuum or, more pointedly, to train a new cadre of area specialists, it must be ridiculed for what it is : an attempt to return us to a dark past, a place where the lights of the Enlightenment cannot burn. In no small part, the fault for the darkness lies with that modern plague, the IR think-tank, which seldom offers anything beyond an exhortation of the US’ “to do something”.

So, the watchword for IR as it ‘rediscovers’ the Atlantic must be drawn not from Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War but, rather, from a Century earlier, the Hippocratic Oath’s undertaking to “do no harm”.

It may be felt that this brush against the grain has been, perhaps, too harsh. After all, the discipline of IR did get a jolt after the Cold War ended. Its work was words, as Ken Booth famously notes ¹⁸⁰, but its words didn’t work anymore. But, and this is the salutatory lesson, the rediscovery of the utility and convenience of armed power has made a frightening return in the conduct of international relations in the 20 years since that eventful night in Berlin. This return has been both speeded and legitimised by the triumphalism of Western understandings of the world. It is in these times that [119] modernity’s dark side surfaces all too often. So, those who hope that the newly-discovered Atlantic world should be drawn into the benevolent arms of the triumphant West through the Enlightenment understandings offered by IR should best remember Berthold Brecht’s famous warning : “Don’t rejoice too soon at your escape / The womb he crawled from still is going strong” ¹⁸¹.

The two World Wars (especially the First) drew the thoughts of those who ruled South Africa back to their European roots even though, in both, fierce battles were fought on African soil. In the first of these, in the country now called Namibia, South Africa’s invasion was led (literally on horseback) by its then Prime Minister, General Louis Botha. Another South African Prime Minister (this one was in-waiting), Jan C. Smuts, led the South African invasion of the then German East Africa (the place is now called Tanzania). But the country’s deep emotion was spilled not by these African events, but by a European place, Delville Wood, where South African troops were decimated at the five-day Battle. As a result, a site in France, near the village of Longueval, entered into the consciousness of white South Africans, especially its English-speakers. This undoubtedly, reinforced their connection towards their European “home”.

The Second World War left an enduring impact on South African maritime thinking with the purported never-changing value of the Cape Sea Route becoming a central plank in South Africa’s many Cold War pleadings from the South African government that apartheid and anti-Communism was one and the same thing. Aside from [120] these claims (and the routine patrolling of maritime waters), South Africa deep-sea naval interests have been modest. So, the complicated issue of the country’s 1959 accession to the Antarctic Treaty and South Africa’s scientific interest in Marion Island and Prince Edward Island ¹⁸² aside, the country’s interest in the Southern Oceans has been minimal. The only serious off-shore activity was in the aforementioned Angolan Civil War where South Africa’s navy was involved in several skirmishes off Angola using a forward maritime base at Walvis Bay in the country now called Namibia ¹⁸³. But, the capacity for long-range projection was limited. An arms embargo limited the purchase of deep-water ships and naval strategy, borrowing from the Israelis, was built around Strike Craft.

In the somewhat whimsical conversation on a South Atlantic Treaty Organisation (SATO) ¹⁸⁴, apartheid’s maritime strategists had less to say than did the hard men in its army. The catchy onomatopoeic association with NATO and the often-flighted asymmetries of power in the South Atlantic, enabled the idea to make quite regular appearances at conferences on Strategic Studies and regional issues. But, apartheid and American indifference to the South Atlantic was to mean that the idea held little water notwithstanding the purported interest expressed by successive Latin American juntas.

Arguably, apartheid’s single biggest achievement in the Atlantic in the post-War period was its almost total capture – commercially, that is – of Ile de Sol, an island in the Cape Verde, in order to refuel its long haul international flights to both Europe and North America. In one of the great Cold War ironies, the very air field in which every chip of stone and every pane of glass had been imported from South Africa was used to ferry Cuban [121] troops to Angola to oppose South Africa’s invasion of that country in 1973. It was also ironical, but not surprising given its location, that the Island was also the site for bilateral talks between the US and South Africa over the impasse over Namibia.

The Angolan War, like many Cold War events, was a long, drawn out affair, running from 1975 until 2002. The Naval dimension of the war was incidental rather than central but South Africa’s power projected into the conflict zone was augmented by its command of regional waters. But this war against the Cubans was won (and arguable lost) in a land battle at a place call Cuito Cuanavale and this only after apartheid’s South Africa’s air-force had lost control of the skies. This reinforces the central point of the essay that the struggle for Africa’s land matters far more than the sea.

Before the battle at Cuito, however, South African power in the region was considered invincible, a judgement that, in no small way, was supported by the guessing game around South Africa’s nuclear capability. There are many tributaries to this story but the deep one remains to be told. This is because, routinely, most of these would have disregarded the maritime dimensions of nuclear warfare. But a brief and intense double flash of light in the southern Oceans (somewhere between Cape Point and Antarctica) in September, 1979, raised questions over this issue. The occurrence opened speculation that the apartheid state had tested a nuclear device. Although this was confirmed as fact by an official of the post-apartheid state, its timing and other factors suggest that the fact and the fiction of whether or not a device has been tested by the apartheid regime remain open to interpretation. A panel commissioned by the Carter White House ruled the possibility out, but more recent work suggests that the [122] panel may well have overlooked some salient issues in its deliberations. What is clear, however, is that the apartheid state was deeply implicated in the building of nuclear devices, and that its efforts in this direction were assisted by several other states, notably Israel ¹⁸⁵.

The one South Atlantic issue that South Africa, like most other countries, could not avoid being involved with was the issue that seemed to draw the region back to the age of tall ships : the Falklands War. Given the significance of the events around this War, it is probably useful to set down the circumstances which lead to its outbreak. Briefly put, the British gained control over the small archipelago of islands in the Atlantic Ocean in 1833. But Argentina, which gained its independence in 1820, claimed sovereignty over the islands both because of its location and, more importantly, in its role as the heir to earlier Spanish claims over the islands. Talks over the resulting dispute continued over several centuries but these were bedevilled by the insistence of the tiny island population that they wanted to remain British. In April, 1982, the Argentine, without warning, landed some 17 000 troops to occupy the Falklands and South Georgia. Unsurprisingly, the British responded to this invasion of their sovereignty in a hostile manner. This set the scene for a short but very bitter conflict which followed the failure of various diplomatic efforts at mediation.

For apartheid South Africa, the conflict came at an opportune moment. Beginning in the 1960s, the country had been under increasing international pressure over the issue of apartheid. Much of this was driven by the increasingly powerful weapon of sanctions which had been applied two decades earlier by the League of Nations to Italy over its occupation of Ethiopia and which, in South Africa’s case, were spearheaded by an increasingly [123] hostile United Nations (UN). A largely successful trade boycott was followed by an almost fully successful sports boycott, and these had been over-shadowed both by an arms embargo and the country’s near-total exclusion from the work of the UN. These issues were very much at the forefront of South African thinking as the Falklands War broke out. The country’s involvement, such as it was, turned on two well-established impulses of its foreign policy, hope and threat.

The first flowed from the British determination to launch a flotilla to retake the islands. Surely, the argument ran, South Africa’s strategic location (not to mention the naval refurbishment resources at the former Royal Navy facility at Simonstown), would mean that London would turn to the country irrespective of apartheid. But this, which would have been an endorsement of the view that the Cape Sea Route was important in Cold War thinking, never happened. The second issue, threat, emerged from a worry in British and American defence circles that South Africa would sell weapons to the Argentine – a particular worry being the Exocet Missile. In the end, it remains uncertain as to whether this happened but not a little of South Africa’s hesitation was due to British pressure. Certainly this was another case of the South Africa government taking its international and strategic cues from the north.

While the ending of apartheid was heralded both as a “miracle” and as a “new beginning”, these claims are more reflective of the hyperbole which drives everyday political analysis rather than a recognition that the true compass of international relations is to be gleaned by understanding [124] the long duree and the limitations of language. So, and on this we must be clear, continuity rather than change has marked South Africa’s strategic and foreign policy in the twenty and more years since the bright February day in 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked from his prison cell.

Well, perhaps a qualification is (or a series of them are) necessary around the idea of continuity. Of course, everything changed on all the country’s fronts. South Africa’s long isolation was formally ended but, alas, the country’s domestication into the ways and the whims of the globalisation regime that accompanied the end of the Cold War turned the one-time pariah into what British commentators breathlessly proclaimed was “just another country”. After four years of “Mandela Mania”, the country was returned to the international status quo, a place where national interest (measured in the technical language of markets) were to trump human rights every time. Certainly, rhetorically, the latter were important for the post-apartheid state. In a powerful piece published in the blue ribbon American journal, Foreign Affairs, Mandela (then President of the ANC and not of the country) had written that “human rights will be the lights that guide our foreign policy” ¹⁸⁶. This claim of exceptionalism, as Kai Holsti has recently pointed out ¹⁸⁷, was a product both of the relatively peaceful ending of apartheid and the embrace that the post-apartheid state enjoyed internationally. However, a foreign policy based on human rights was called “radical” by a succession of commentators ¹⁸⁸ whose intent was to reassert into the debate around the post-apartheid state the ideological end of mainstream international relations thinking. This too was a form of domestication which would end, alongside other pressures, with the new government’s decision to abandon a Keynesian-driven macro-economic policy called the Reconstruction and Development Program (the [125] RDP) and replace it with a home-grown form of neo-liberalism known by its acronym GEAR (Growth, Economic and Redistribution Programme).

Other things changed, too. And, of these, a few linked directly with the Atlantic. Caught off-guard (or quite simply, conned) by an international arms industry, post-apartheid South Africa purchased US$ 3 billion of new armaments. The deal included (almost) an entire new navy : corvettes, submarines and helicopters. The age of so-called strike-craft naval defence was over : the country now had a small (but in its region, not insignificant) deep-sea capacity. What has South Africa’s government made of this ? If truth be told, not very much – and we should add, mercifully. Periodically, the country’s ships have been used to stage peace-talks, as in the 1996/7 talks over the collapsing situation in the country once called Zaire (now the DRC) which were staged on the South African vessel, Outeniqua, which was moored in the Atlantic at the mouth of the Congo River.

A newly published book on South Africa’s foreign policy (roughly from 1910 to 2010) makes no mention of Atlantic issues, for example ¹⁸⁹. And, James Barber’s review of “Mandela’s World”, as he called his 2004 book on the early days of post-apartheid foreign policy, is also devoid of any mention of the Atlantic ¹⁹⁰. So, and using the language of mainstream international relations, what have been South Africa’s foreign policy and strategic interests these past twenty years ? Difficult to say, really. If anything, the country’s international relations have seemed anathematic to the issue of change. To be fair, the need to change the culture of the ministry charged with running policy has been difficult and, given political rather than strategic imperative, this must be judged to be a success. But hopes that the policy could be owned by [126] the country’s people have not borne fruit, nor has much been yielded.

So, the high hopes of the immediate post-apartheid years – the Mandela years – have faded. Unsurprisingly, there are many reasons for this, but the five which follow help to open a wider arc of understanding. Of course, the glow of the early Mandela years could not be sustained. But beyond the banal observation that nothing lasts forever, a more instructive lesson is tapped from the idea of exceptionalism. Following Holsti’s lights ¹⁹¹, each country which has gone through a revolution considers itself the inheritor of a distinctive international responsibility : America, France, the Soviet Union, each adopted this position. So, it is that South Africa in the glow of overcoming the apartheid scourge understood it had an international destiny. The Mandela piece, which has already crossed our paths in this essay, was a manifestation of that calling.

More prosaically, and drawing from the change in the country’s macro-economic policy, South Africa was seduced by the easy logic of the Globalisation discourse with its ready lexicon of free and open markets and liberal democracy. The image of a borderless and peaceful world in which they would play a leading role was promoted both by intellectuals, like the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s “Pivotal State Theory” ¹⁹², and by South African-based think tanks like the South African Institute of International Affairs. Borrowing an insight from Michel Foucault ¹⁹³, the role played by the disciplining language of modernity was difficult – no, it was impossible – for South Africa to resist.

Thirdly, and not insignificantly, the cause of liberal internationalism, which was deeply enmeshed in the [127] modernist and celebratory impulse of Globalisation, was attractive to South African policy-makers. For one thing, South Africa’s role in the Southern African region, whatever form it was to take, was legitimised by the ending of apartheid ¹⁹⁴. The slowly deterioration in neighbouring Zimbabwe and the uncertainty in the Lilliputian states around South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland in particular, created new responsibilities for South Africa. Together with these developments, much of the logic of apartheid which had focused on security was reworked as particular constructed imperative, pushed by new think-tanks, of what was called the “New” South Africa. This, a commanding idea, saw the country as facing a range of new threats : from threats to the personal, like crime or HIV/AIDS, to threats to the country’s political achievements, like migration, an issue tapped from the Fortress Europe notion. The resolution of this myriad of closely linked issues was seen in the country’s invasion of the micro-state of Lesotho, in 1998, in order to secure the country’s embattled prime minister –an event which was followed weeks later by the US invasion of Haiti to restore Jean Bertrand Aristide to power.

Then, and drawing on the security issue, South Africa’s Second President, Thabo Mbeki, almost single-handedly overturned the established routines of African security which were enshrined in the Charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) ¹⁹⁵. The latter had been formed in 1963 paradoxically to encourage the desire of a united Africa and to guarantee the sovereignty of individual African states. The OAU overcame the resulting schizophrenia by the ancillary interest in furthering the momentum of independence on the continent and, importantly, in opposing both minority rule and apartheid. By the mid-1990s, however, the continental [128] organisation was ready for a make-over : the thorny issue of minority-rule in the then Rhodesia was resolved, the long-drawn out dispute over Namibia has been satisfactorily resolved and, of course, apartheid had ended. Almost as important, the Cold War had ended and the organisational language of international politics had changed gear. Africa’s make-over took the form of a commitment to union, loosely based on the refurbished European Union (indeed, the continent called its new program the African Union). The new organisation drew its grammar on security – and, indeed, from economics – the emerging discourse of the post-Cold War world. These were imbued with the surveillance routines and controlling values of neo-liberal economics and bent themselves towards neo-conservative thinking on security. In a formal way this neo-neo framing of the search for African integration in the late-20^th Century were drawn together in the New Economic Program for Africain Development (NEPAD) which was the brain-child of South Africa’s then President, Thabo Mbeki.

In a real way, these wider commitments and the country’s embrace of neo-liberalism drew it away from its earlier undertakings to anchor and further build the sub-region. Its foreign policy documents were increasingly permeated with the 19^th Century idea of ‘national interest’ – the all-embracing concept used so often to justify political preferences. Through this, the new South African government followed upon the country’s long simulation of Britain’s narrow approach to the idea of sovereignty. While this closed rhetoric may have satisfied markets, it caused some confusion in a region which in the aftermath of apartheid was more fluid than it previously had been. As a result, while the South Africa state (following the idea of Fortress Europe) reinforced its borders, both formally and informally, more and more Southern [129] Africans were drawn to the region’s richest country, South Africa. Not a little of the sporadic and often very violent outbursts of xenophobia in South Africa are explained by this. Interesting too, while its borders formally hardened as did the region’s people towards the former apartheid state, South African business moved into the African hinterland to seek out new and profitable markets.

The resulting paradox only reinforced the centuries-long ambiguity between South Africa and its neighbours. So, while the country accounts for 60 per cent of the region’s GDP and, far and away, enjoys access to the region’s strongest military force, history and politics offer different optics to understand options. The complex issue of Zimbabwe is a case in point. The two countries were torn asunder in 1926 in a fraught decision made by less than 2500 votes (this is just about the same number as the student count of undergraduates currently enrolled in a first year Economics class at one of South Africa’s larger universities). The Enlightenment debates around emancipation which would (a mere 15 years later) come to dominate the region’s politics were entirely absent in the debate on the Rhodesian Referendum. Instead, the decision of White Rhodesians to eschew the link with the Union of South Africa was almost the last gasp of the appeal of British Imperialism in Southern Africa. The formal closing of the border between the two states, which was only formalised on the ending of apartheid, took almost five decades.

Confusion and Contradiction

If anything, South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy has been a rousing disappointment except, perhaps, to the [130] business community which have moved decisively in two directions. First, under the ruse of economic globalisation and its supporting discourse of economic freedom, South African assets have mainly shifted to London. Then, and this we have already noted, lower down the food chain, South African retailing has moved decisively into the sub-continent. More adventurously, South African telecoms, with their international partners, have tried to conquer markets in the rest of the continent – this is their use of language, not mine.

Militarily and strategically, the country has quickly adapted to the global peacekeeping agenda which was first mooted by Boutros-Broutros Ghali, although it is probably true to say that they have stopped short of fully embracing Responsibility to protect (R2P). The explanation for this, incidentally, might lie less in the principle involved (although this was much spoken about during the months that NATO bombed Libya) and may have more to do with the lessons learnt from South Africa’s disastrous 1998 invasion of neighbouring Lesotho.

So, what lessons can be drawn
from this for reconfiguring the Atlantic ?

Considering five of these lessons open towards some ideas on the prospects for the country’s engagement with the Atlantic. First, South Africa will be continuously tied down in Africa. This is both in spite of, and because of, its preponderant strength. This Lilliputian reality leads to the second : its destiny will be African. This not only following the old truism that geography is destiny, but it will mean that as it comes to this challenge, it will use the techniques and the language of mainstream IR to manage [131] a sub-continent, certainly, and, perhaps, a continent where these techniques and language have little traction. Paradoxically, and this is the third point, its capacity to understand Africa is as limited as its capacity to do things. This is because, although part of the continent, the country remains distant from it in both speech and, indeed, action. Fourthly, based on present conversations about the country’s foreign policy, policy-making will remain caught between the exceptionalism claims of its early foreign policy which favoured human rights on the one hand, and an increasingly crowded international agenda and the intrusive idea of national interest on the other. The latter is propagated both by a rational-choice policy and think-tanks that largely lack the quality to look beyond the tired routines of foreign policy analysis. Finally, and this is not a South African-specific consideration, there has been a failure to recognise that making foreign policy is primarily a social process and, only secondarily, a tchnical one.

South Africa is, so it seems, deeply committed to multilateralism but this is an assurance which, on present evidence, is linked to its African identity. It is certainly true that the country has been known to play fast and loose with this thought. Nevertheless, if the country is to engage in these issues, its Western sea-board African association would, in my view, be the best place to start. The pity is that fundamentally, the country is not a maritime nation. So, where would an association with the Atlantic begin ? Can its membership of the Zone of Peace and Co-operation in the South Atlantic (ZPCSA), an organisation formed in 1986, to which South Africa acceded, become the point of both conceptual and policy entry ?

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