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The April 1974 coup in Lisbon and the ensuing rapid decolonisation of Portugal's colonies marked the birth of the Southern African theatre of the Cold War. It also heralded the steady decline of Pretoria's apartheid regime. This paper seeks to illuminate why South Africa was so profoundly affected by the collapse of Lisbon's authority and the upheaval of the regional status quo that occurred as a result. It argues that in contrast to its creative and formative foreign policy endeavours in Africa, by 1974 South Africa's national security hinged fundamentally on a profound reliance on Lisbon to combat radical black nationalism and on Washington to provide diplomatic cover for their joint efforts. The primary impact of the coup, therefore, was to undermine South Africa's entire security and thereby produce the sense of acute isolation that drove its shift towards the more radical security policies of the late 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Broadcasting Amendment Act of 1960, the South African government began to regulate forms of entertainment intended for public and private consumption. Radio broadcasts were controlled and musical recordings were regulated under this and subsequent legislation, with over 100 albums being banned outright and many more individual songs classified as ‘undesirable’. This legislation was applicable in the ‘homelands’, and musical productions – especially for SABC Radio Bantu – were censored. However, enforcing censorship laws in terms of live performances in the ‘homelands’ proved more problematic. Whilst the evidence from Venda lends some support to the established, romantic notion that musicians – and their music – were deeply embedded in the struggle against apartheid, there is equal evidence to suggest that many musicians at the time had little interest in revolutionary activity. Whilst self-censorship was prevalent on many levels, the motivation for this was not clear-cut. Christian convictions that those in power had been put there by God, or the liberating conviction that musicians were ‘simply entertainers’ and not politicians, prompted musicians to abide by censorship laws. Even for those who were politically aware, challenging the system was generally perceived to be not worth the risk. In the former ‘homeland’ of Venda, important exceptions to this stem from one family – the Mukwevho of Tshitomboni – whose most famous son, Colbert, made himself a target of the state by adopting reggae as his genre of choice. By charting Colbert's transition as a musician from the late 1970s to the present day, this paper demonstrates that musicians in the former ‘homeland’ of Venda had more freedom to record and perform ‘undesirable’ songs than has previously been accepted. However it does not follow that they all did so. The story of the Mukwevho family shows how different artists reacted in diverse ways to the political situation in which they found themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The leadership that rose to power in FRELIMO in the early 1970s derived great strength from their international status. It was in the international context that they found crucial resources to put into effect their modernist nationalist vision, and the political networks they developed within the context of the Cold War played a major role in securing FRELIMO the status of the legitimate national liberation movement in Mozambique during the liberation struggle. This article specifically focuses on the Italian solidarity network supporting FRELIMO in Mozambique: this network was rooted in personal contacts developed from the early 1960s, and it gained a major role in Europe after the ‘International Conference of Solidarity with the Peoples of the Portuguese Colonies’, held in Rome in 1970. This article examines the exceptional ability of FRELIMO leaders such as Marcelino dos Santos to ‘internationalise’ their nationalist project, the brilliant diplomacy of these leaders in exploiting the features of the Italian political system and society, and the unusual amalgam of political and civil society groups across the Cold War divide that came together in support of FRELIMO’s cause in Italy. It argues that these factors were part of the vicissitudes of the anti-colonial struggle in Mozambique and are key to understanding how FRELIMO was able to consolidate its power at the time of independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes two features without which social science research work in the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA – Centre for African Studies) at Eduardo Mondlane University during the period 1976–86 cannot be fully grasped. First, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the Mozambican state's attempts to construct socialism, and the strategies of the South African ‘empire’ in trying to build a hegemonic bloc in the region, particularly in its radical form of maintaining an economic and military destabilisation policy in Mozambique. Second, the conflicting, ambiguous and productive interactions between the CEA the Mozambican state, and among CEA researchers, over their research interests, research priorities and primary political loyalties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1969, Portugal and South Africa signed an agreement that enabled the apartheid regime effectively to extend its tentacles of empire over the proposed dam at Cahora Bassa. Located in the heart of central Mozambique, far from the South African frontier, the dam became a security project masked as a development initiative. Cahora Bassa, including the massive lake behind the dam, rather than becoming the multi-purpose dam originally envisaged by Portuguese planners, was transformed into a strategic security project designed to blunt the advance into southern Mozambique of the liberation movement the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and, by extension, its ally the African National Congress (ANC). In this way, the colonial regime and its apartheid ally hoped to prevent attacks against Mozambique's major colonial urban areas of Beira and Lourenço Marques. From Pretoria's perspective, it was preferable to fight the ANC in central Mozambique rather than along the Limpopo river – southern Mozambique's frontier with South Africa. The hydro-electric project at Cahora Bassa also ensured South Africa's energy security. The 1969 agreement guaranteed that 82 per cent of the electricity generated there would be exported to South Africa at well below the world price. This article examines the vital role played by South African interests in financing, constructing, and defending the dam site at Songo, which resulted in the dam's deterritorialisation and allowed South Africa to incorporate Cahora Bassa as an outpost of empire. It also explores the ways in which Pretoria held the dam hostage after Mozambique became independent, as part of a broader process of destabilising its socialist neighbour to the north. Even after the dismantling of the apartheid regime in 1994, the new ANC-led government resisted efforts to abrogate the colonial agreement, and Songo remained a foreign enclave. Although Mozambique regained sovereignty over the dam site in 2007, even today, most of the electricity generated by Cahora Bassa is exported to South Africa, at a price that remains a state secret. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

African Mirror, the South African-produced and world's longest running commercial newsreel, was a regular item in cinema programmes and on other exhibition circuits in South Africa from its inception in 1913. The importance of cinema newsreel has been recognised for its role as propaganda during wartime and its presence in everyday life, reaching wide audiences with representations of national and public events. The digitisation of Movietone, Pathé and other well-known newsreels has enabled scholars to access archive material and has generated detailed histories of newsreels' impact in the public realm. This article extends this analysis toAfrican Mirror. The archive of the South African newsreel constitutes a substantial body of film, produced weekly over 70 years. Its operations extended across southern and eastern Africa, as well as North Africa during the Second World War. It was screened on cinema circuits to mainly white, but also Indian and ‘coloured’ South African audiences, the latter a category which incorporated some African audiences, and its footage was supplied to newsreels such as Pathé. This article highlights the similarity ofAfrican Mirrorto other newsreels and argues that it played an important role in promoting ‘South Africanism’ in the first decades of Union. Providing an overview of its coverage of South African events, it details the conditions of production, distribution and exhibition ofAfrican Mirror, and describes how it became established as part of the cinema-going experience in South Africa between 1913 and 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the relationship between the nonviolent East Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi with Chinese passive resistance, or Satyagraha, in Transvaal, South Africa from 1906 through 1911. An overview of Transvaal laws on Chinese and East Indian minorities, including discriminatory legislation toward them, is provided.

This article considers the social hinterland of leading members of the ANC underground who, raised in the Transkei, came of age in the late 1970s. Earlier in the twentieth century, South Africa's Native Reserves were wellsprings of nationalist leadership. Prominent ANC leaders shared a similar regionally-focused set of familial, educational and professional connections that vaulted them to the centre of the nationalist movement. These regional networks remained important feeders for the ANC into the later apartheid era. Chris Hani recruited his leading cadres from a small pool of young men educated in Transkei's élite schools and earmarked for senior posts in the Bantustan bureaucracy. This social proximity of élite ANC cadres and leading Bantustan functionaries made the boundaries between opposition and collaboration permeable. While the ANC's attempted alliance with KwaZulu chief minister Buthelezi failed, hardening the distinction between militant nationalism and apartheid-corrupted ethnicity, its relationship with the Transkei's Bantu Holomisa is a counter-example of the blurring of these political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Rhodesian Front Party under Prime Minister lan Smith declared unilateral independence (UDI) from Britain on November 11 1965, the international community responded by imposing economic sanctions against the rebel regime. At the time, the British prime minister, Harold Wilson was convinced that given the smallness and the fragility of the Rhodesian economy, international economic sanctions would quickly bring Rhodesia to its knees. Sanctions did not succeed, in the short run, in bringing the Rhodesian economy to its knees, however, partly because South Africa and Portugal refused to participate in sanctions and helped Rhodesia circumvent sanctions. This study examines South Africa's economic support for Rhodesia in the early years of Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence. It argues that South Africans defied international opinion over the Rhodesian question partly because of the widespread sympathy for their kith and kin across the border that were fighting the same battle against black nationalism as the South African ruling party, but also because of South Africa's need to protect and promote national interests through a demonstration of the inefficacy of international sanctions and boycotts at a time when it was, itself, a possible target for international sanctions because of its apartheid system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social pension was introduced in South Africa in 1928, but eligibility was extended to African South Africans in 1944 and to African Namibians only in 1973. Botswana introduced its own social pension scheme in 1996, and Lesotho followed as recently as 2004. Initially conceived as a welfarist programme to provide social assistance to 'poor whites', South Africa's social pension was later exploited for a complex combination of political objectives, including the control of African urbanisation and maintenance of rural labour reserves (Bantustans) in South Africa, and 'winning hearts and minds' during South Africa's occupation of Namibia. Since the accession to power of the ANC and SWAPO governments in the early 1990s, equity concerns and antipoverty objectives have dominated. Racially discriminatory payment levels were declared unconstitutional and have been eradicated in both countries. While concerns have been raised about the fiscal sustainability of the social pension, its future as a social welfare programme in southern Africa and elsewhere depends mainly on political commitment from governments and taxpayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]