This is our second piece by second-year UoP history student Elliott Thomas, who has come a long way since I taught him in his first year at Portsmouth. As you might guess from his choice of topics, Elliott has his sights set on a career in the foreign office!
On 4 May 1978, at the refugee camp of Cassinga, in Southern Angola, Namibian refugees ran out to greet the planes they thought were sending supplies gathered by Sam Nujoma (the president of the Southwest Africa People’s Organisation, SWAPO).[1] Instead of supplies however, they were greeted by an astronomical amount of explosive ordinance, delivered by the South African Airforce, a total of ‘1,200 personnel bombs, 20,000 pounds of high-explosive bombs’ alongside various other pieces of ordinance.[2] As if this onslaught wasn’t bad enough – South African paratroopers were soon deployed in order to sow more terror amongst the populace[3] Whilst it was touted as another success in a long line of South African actions against SWAPO, it did not go very well for the South Africans – as they were met by an unexpected offensive by Cuban tanks stationed nearby.[4] The Cassinga massacre is notable not only for its brutality, showcasing South Africa’s determination to hold on to its illegal occupation of Namibia, but also significantly it was the first time Cubans and Namibians ‘shed their blood together fighting against the South African racists’ as the head of the Cuban Civilian mission in Angola, Jorge Risquet stated.[5] The massacre at Cassinga is a microcosm, it showcases how a militarily superior South Africa fought a bitter struggle of influence within Southern Africa to maintain its occupation of Namibia and maintain its apartheid regime. This blogpost seeks to illustrate why and how South Africa sought to dominate its neighbours.
Depiction of the Cassinga massacre at the Namibian Independence Museum
From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, apartheid South Africa (Pretoria) held military and economic dominance over southern Africa, consistently outspending the anti-apartheid coalition in military expenditure (the so called ‘frontline states’, which included nations like Zambia and Tanzania).[6] Its previous status as a ‘White Dominion’ within the British Empire and its vast mining industry (accounting for over 75% of the free world’s supply of gold in 1969) meant that it also started out more economically developed compared to the other African countries gaining independence from the 1960s onwards – with gross domestic product (GDP) consistently higher than the other states.[7]
Map of African mineral resources showing the mineral wealth of South Africa, source: www.grida.no/resources/7867
Yet despite this economic and military dominance in the region, the government in Pretoria and the ‘securocrats’ (the military/intelligence officials who dominated South African political decisions from the late 1970s thanks to prime minister P.W. Botha coming to power) were deeply fearful of foreign intervention in the region, particularly that of the Soviet Union.[8] The South African security nexus believed that all forms of conflict in Africa served as ‘avenues for Soviet involvement’; the South African Defence Forces (SADF) argued that South Africa was faced with a ‘Soviet backed revolutionary war’, with the fight against African liberation movements being seen as the same as the ‘battle that the US and Western Europe were waging against Eastern Europe and the USSR.’.[9] South African elites exploited fears about communism for political purposes, the threat wasn’t fully illusory: the South African Communist Party (SACP) was the oldest communist party in Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) received training and support from the Soviets and many liberation movements were inspired by Leninist ideology.[10]
In the mid 1970s Southern Africa assisted the few remaining African states still under either white minority rule or colonial domination in resisting decolonisation. In Angola and Mozambique, Portugal – the last European colonial power remaining – fought a bitter struggle against liberation movements to maintain its control over lands it saw as an integral part of Portugal.[11] Portugal was a member of NATO, yet despite claims that it’s war in the colonies was to fight communism, its European partners saw Lisbon’s war as a diversion at best and a disgrace at worst, whilst the Johnson administration in the United States grew ever dissatisfied with Portuguese ‘incompetence’.[12] However, one state that was very keen to keep Portugal in charge of its colonies was South Africa, which cooperated with the Portuguese alongside the white minority government of Rhodesia to fight against black guerilla movements.[13] Yet in 1974 the Portuguese dictatorship would be swept aside in the Carnation revolution, and it signed agreements to evacuate its colonies, with Mozambique falling under the governance of the Marxist Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (FRELIMO) whilst Angola would be plunged into civil war between the Soviet backed Movimento Popular de Libertacao Angola (MPLA), and the Chinese and American backed Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola (FNLA) and the Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola (UNITA). [14] This collapse sent South Africa into a panic: what once was two buffer zones now led to one new Marxist regime in Mozambique and what was assumed to be another one on the rise in Angola with strong Soviet and Cuban backing.[15] This led to the apartheid regime funnelling support into the FNLA and UNITA, not wanting a Marxist state on the borders of Namibia, alongside increasingly trying to come to a favourable conclusion to the conflict in Rhodesia.
Whilst Rhodesia and South Africa were aligned in their positions to keep white minority rule, there was little love between the Anglo-dominated Rhodesian government and Afrikaner-dominated South African government.[16] The Rhodesian government found itself in an increasingly brutal bush war against the Maoist Zimbabwe African National Union (ZAPU, led by Robert Mugabe) and Marxist Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZANU, led by Joseph Nkomo).[17] By the late 1970s it was clear that white minority rule was untennable, and so after a coordinated squeeze play between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and South African prime minister B.J. Vorster in 1976, the Rhodesian government under Ian Smith was forced to induce the promise of majority rule within two years. Whilst this deal fell apart, Pretoria continued to pressure Rhodesia to come to some kind of peace conclusion, in order to avoid the radical ZANU from coming to power.[18] South Africa was trying to keep a constellation of buffer states on its border; its funding of UNITA and the FNLA, alongside sometimes reluctant interventions supporting Rhodesia was in support of this goal, yet the landslide victory of ZAPU in the Rhodesian elections during its transition to majority rule (something that came to a great shock of South Africa) caused it to become much more violent in its attempts to maintain a hegemony in southern Africa.[19]
The 1980s saw more direct military campaigns on the behalf of South Africa to maintain its control of Namibia and prevent Soviet-backed states gaining enough strength to contest its dominance. Whilst South Africa had not been shy in using more abrasive military means, such as the 1978 massacre in Cassinga and a short-lived military invasion of Angola in 1975, this newfound desire to use military means was coupled with Ronald Reagan sweeping into office in the 1980 U.S. election.[20] The Reagan administration helped Pretoria ignore UN Resolution 435, which called for South Africa to abandon its illegal occupation of Namibia, stating that it would only support the resolution if Cuban troops were withdrawn from Angola at the same time.[21] However, even if Cuban troops were to withdraw from Angola, it is likely Pretoria would have kept its occupation of Namibia. As P.W. Botha would state in 1987 that if Namibia was lost, ‘South Africa’s enemies will stand their rifles on the banks of the Orange river’[22] . With the MPLA gaining ground in Angola, Pretoria sought to neuter the threat before it could reach the Angolan border, and so it launched a blitz campaign against MPLA forces, surrounding much of the regular units around Cuito in 1988.[23] Yet this South African masterstroke would doom the apartheid regime’s occupation of Namibia, as this escalation made Cuba throw its full weight behind the MPLA, stripping much of its defences at home to send to the Angolan struggle. [24] With the Reagan administration mired in the Iran-Contra scandal, Fidel Castro saw an opportunity to send large quantities of support in form of material aid, and most crucially – soldiers. [25] By June 1988 South African air superiority was evaporating as a column of Cuban, Angolan and Namibian forces swept across Southern Angola, whilst the SADF retreated back to the Namibian border.[26] The Cuban victory in Angola proved to be one of the last nails in apartheid’s coffin. Nelson Mandela would state that it ‘destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor and inspired the fighting masses of South Africa … Cuito Cuanavale was the turning point for the liberation of our continent’.[27]
Montage of images from the battle between South African and Angolan/Cuban forces at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-8.
In conclusion, South Africa’s military and economic dominance gave it the position of regional hegemony. Being a minority rule state, it was petrified of the idea of black liberation movements gaining bases in neighbouring countries and so sought to maintain a constellation of allied states, such as the Portuguese colonies and Rhodesia. When this failed, they switched to military brute force, something that was thwarted when Cuba was able to throw its full weight against the regime. Pretoria was correct in the fact that it would not be able to survive a coordinated assault by Communist-backed groups, yet it did not consider that its escalatory actions, particularly in the 1980s, would cause a similarly-seized counteraction from said communist regimes, ultimately contributing to its doom
Read Elliott’s piece on Trump and the US Evangelicals here
[1] Piero Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York. The struggle for the independence of Namibia”. In Cold War in Southern Africa: white power, black liberation, ed. Sue Onslow (Routledge 2012), 264.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 264-5.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Noel Anderson and Mark S. Bell, “The limits of regional power: South Africa’s security strategy, 1975-1989.” Journal of Strategic studies, vol.46, No.2 (2023), 406.
[7] Ibid.; paper prepared by the National Security Council Interdepartmental group for Africa 1969, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v28/d17.
[8] Sue Onslow, “The South African factor in Zimbabwe’s transition to independence.” in Cold War in Southern Africa: white power, black liberation, ed. Sue Onslow (Routledge, 2012), 151-2.
[9] Noel Anderson and Mark S. Bell “The limits of regional power: South Africa’s security strategy, 1975-1989” Journal of Strategic studies, vol.46, No.2 (2023), 414.
[10] Ibid., 415; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times (Cambridge University Press 2007), 216.
[11] Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1950: the past of the present (Cambridge University Press 2019), 205-206.
[12] Westad, Global Cold War, 209.
[13] Anderson and Bell, “The limits of regional power”, 415.
[14] Westad, Global Cold War, 226-228.
[15] Anderson and Bell, “The limits of regional power”, 414; Sue Onslow “The South African factor”, 151-152.
[16] Ibid., 151-2, 154-5.
[17] Ibid., 153-14
[18] Ibid., 158-9.
[19] Ibid., 170-171.
[20] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 267-8, 271.
[21] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 271; UN résolution 435 (1978), https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/default/files/document/files/2024/05/nm780929scr43528197829.pdf
[22] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 272-273.
[23] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 276.
[24] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 275.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 276-278.
[27] Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York”, 284.
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