South Africa in Africa: Bound To Lead?

Abstract

South Africa's role in Africa since its democratic transition has been mired in controversy and characterised by differing interpretations. While it has wrestled ambivalently about constructing an African identity in the Mandela years, President Mbeki has firmly located South Africa's interests in Africa. The normative foundations of its Africa engagement with regard to providing public goods and leadership in peace diplomacy, resolving conflicts, and helping to develop the continent's institutions collides with the more instrumental aspects relating to investment, its commercial interests and the material sources of its hegemony. These dynamics have been profoundly shaped and determined by South Africa's domestic transitional order and its own development imperatives, as well as international role expectations. This article examines these issues and concludes that South Africa's future relations with Africa will depend on how it addresses the multiple ambiguities and contradictions of its engagement and pursues a hegemony that is more firmly grounded in meeting the continent's development and growth challenges.

Notes

Arguably this ideological dimension has been incorporated within the framework of neo-realism in much of the subsequent work of neo-realists who write on hegemony.

The history of SACU, and South Africa's role in it, is extensively documented elsewhere and therefore, will not be discussed in this article. Suffice to point out that independence for Namibia in 1989—followed by the country's formal joining of SACU as a sovereign state in 1990—and the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994 created the basis not only for the revision of the SACU Agreements of 1910 and 1969 but also for deeper engagement between South Africa and its SACU counterparts, which was absent during the apartheid era. See Erasmus (2004, pp. 180–197).

Conversations with South African officials, Department of Treasury, December 2007; and Conference on New Donors, European Investment Bank, May 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Alden

*Reader, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Garth Le Pere

**Executive Director, Institute for Global Dialogue, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]