Transnational choices and anti-apartheid resistance: African–Chinese movements

Abstract

After more than 25 years South Africa’s democratisation in 1994, marks a point to re-interrogate the relations between South Africa and China. During the apartheid regime, colonial rule was perpetuated and unleashed its effects in a gendered manner. The dawn of South Africa’s democracy introduced a formal decolonisation, which guaranteed equal rights and the end of systematic discrimination for all its citizens; it also brought with it a change in the international relations the government maintained. To underline the gendered dynamics of such relations, I show how women within liberation movements, who overall have not received due attention in China–Africa engagements, have always been a part thereof. Whereas transregional ties bolstered anti-apartheid resistance in the country, the legacies of South Africa’s previous authoritarian system remain palpable today. Calls for substantive decolonisation geared towards addressing the multi-layered injustices of the past take place alongside longstanding, contested South African–Chinese relations. In this article, I thus provide an inclusive transregional political history of gendered liberation politics and refer to an era where transnational choices in anti-colonial resistance extended to include exchanges with China. By doing so, I complicate narratives of Chinese–African cooperation and reflect on the potential to democratise such politics.

Keywords:

• African–Chinese relations
• anti-apartheid resistance
• South Africa
• gender politics
• liberation movements

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the archivists, journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable assistance and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Notes

1 In this article I distinguish between ‘African–Chinese’ and ‘Chinese–African’ relations to specify the direction and initiative of interaction between the respective partners. The latter also refers to the wider field of study.

2 The various organisations and parties referred to in this contribution include the ACWF and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China; the South African organisations in exile, namely the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) as well as the National Party (NP) in South Africa.

3 Whilst apartheid regulations eased in the early 1990s, an official change in government only occurred after the first democratic elections in April 1994.

4 Because of the overlapping party memberships and its orientation towards Moscow in this period, the SACP is included in the discussion on the ANC presented here but not separately mentioned.

5 Called Zhuge Liang in Ling’s (2013) version.

6 Admittedly, Chan (2013, 20) points to the soldiers who risk their lives and should thus participate in decisions around Meng Huo’s fate.

7 Manyeruke thus represents a link to the few other gendered analyses in China–Africa studies: they all analyse how women, as traders or migrants or political intermediaries, navigate these relations.

8 Initially, Beijing allied with Moscow – they were both critical of apartheid-rule – whereas Taipei allied with Washington and did not participate in the sanctions regime intended as a rebuke for the atrocities perpetrated in South Africa.

9 This also had repercussions on the classification of Taiwanese in South Africa and contributed to the complexity of race relations in the country (Park 2012; Harris 2018).

10 During the 1980s, trade relations between Beijing and Pretoria extended to major arms and technical goods, which are the bulwark of any sanctions regime. After reading the different accounts, it remains unclear which side possibly provided the other with nuclear material (see Alden 1997; Taylor 2006, 128; Shinn and Eisenman 2012, 344; van Vuuren 2018).

11 During the post-apartheid transition, the ANC – as the ruling party-to-be – maintained these relations and actively juggled relations with Taiwan before the government switched allegiances.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel

Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel holds the Chair for International Gender Politics at the University of Kassel. Prior to this she was a Senior Researcher and lectured at the Department of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research centres on the normative dynamics of international relations and postcolonial politics. Among other publications, she is the author of Mobilising Transnational Gender Politics in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor of Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations and Transformations (Springer, 2016) and Afrasian Transformations: Transregional Perspectives on Development Cooperation, Social Mobility, and Cultural Change (Brill, 2020).