From the Boer War to the End of Apartheid

Abstract

Pijovic offers a historical overview of Australia’s engagement with Africa from its earliest days to the end of apartheid in South Africa. The chapter firstly explores Australia’s ‘flawed’ history of supporting colonialism and sympathy for apartheid, and then turns towards examining the country’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle between the 1970s and 1990s. Detailing engagement with Africa through successive Australian governments between the late 1940s and early 1990s, Pijovic highlights how Australia’s engagement with the continent came to be so centrally focused on racism in Southern Africa (South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) and the anti-apartheid struggle, and why that engagement mostly came through multilateral settings such as the Commonwealth—Australia’s traditional ‘window’ into Africa.