SADCC, SANCTIONS AND SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract

THIS ONE-DAY CONFERENCE on 18 April 1986 at the University of Birmingham, jointly sponsored by the Royal African Society and the Department of Extra-Mural Studies, Birmingham, brought together 57 participants drawn from public life, business, the academic world, journalism and the diplomatic service to discuss current problems and future prospects for relations between South Africa and her neighbours in the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference. The special focus was on the possible impact of sanctions on the states. The conference was opened by Douglas Rimmer, Vice-Chairman of the Council of the Royal African Society. He thanked Ian and Willie Henderson for their initiative in calling the conference, and urged that the meetings should be used not to provide an outlet for the passions which South African affairs provoke, but to examine objectively the oppositions of ideologies, economic interests and political forces in the region. He called for reali-sm in a spirit of free enquiry and rational debate. The day was divided into four sessions, the first of which provided a historical perspective to the formation of SADCC in 1980. Ian Henderson's paper reviewed South Africa's relations with the region from 1910 to 1975, reminding participants that Smuts's objectives in seeking afronding (rounding-off) of the Union's frontiers in the years after 1910 by the incorporation of the High Commission Territories were similar to the goals of detente in the 1970s: to structure the politics and the economies of southern Africa so that the Union/Republic defined development ob jectives for her neighbours in the interests of white South Africa. In one sense, South Africa's regional diplomacy in the 20th century was highly unsuccessful, Namibia being the only addition to the frontiers of 1910. But in a more important sense, South Africa's 'informal empire' in the region expanded in a silent but effective process about which little has been written. Responding to the theme that South Africa had failed by diplomacy to achieve direct political control over the hinterland, Willie Henderson looked at the origins of SADCC, not so much as a set of written agreements produced by the front-line states at the height of the war in Rhodesia but as a search for effective regional diplomatic alliances pre-dating the front-line brotherhood. Seretse Khama's key role in picking up and developing the