Secondary industrialisation in Southern Africa: the 1948 Customs agreement between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa

Abstract

Understanding of the process and pattern of post‐war industrialisation in colonial Zimbabwe can be significantly enhanced by paying close attention to the 1948 Customs Agreement between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Keen to expand and consolidate an export trade already worth over £10 million per annum by 1948, the South African authorities were prepared to foster industrial development north of the Limpopo precisely because the Southern Rhodesian government itself never envisaged more than limited support for a restricted range of secondary industries. While the Southern Rhodesians were convinced that their policy judiciously combined the interests of primary producers and secondary industry, the South African state was more than content to relinquish the fringes of its own light consumer good sector to Southern Rhodesian factories in return for bigger markets for South African enterprises higher up the industrial ladder. The paper suggests, moreover, that industrialisation in Southern Rhodesia was less a process of ‘loosening’ its ties of dependence than their reconstitution in the post‐war era, and in doing so, attempts to shed additional light on South Africa's own process of industrial development.