Mandela as a heavenly saint and Rwanda as hell: these were the images that the Western media and policymakers used to frame Africa as the twentieth century came to a close.¹ It was a stark pairing, setting South Africa’s nascent democracy and racial reconciliation against depictions of collapsing states, AIDS, war, and genocide. Implicit in this pairing was the hope that a powerful postapartheid South Africa would lead the continent in addressing the challenges of democratization, globalization, and conflict resolution. An African renaissance, led by new leaders like Mandela, was widely heralded as Africa’s best and perhaps last hope.

While...

The twentieth century began with Great Britain’s imperial armies being humbled at the hands of Afrikaner republican guerrilla forces. From the British side the war was ostensibly in defense of citizenship rights for white British citizens living in the Afrikaner-ruled South African Republic. Yet the real cause of what would prove to be Britain’s greatest colonial war was evident worldwide: a battle over the glittering wealth and power that emanated from the Transvaal’s massive gold mines. It took Britain years longer than expected to win the war, at a cost of several million pounds, 22,000 troops dead (out of 250,000...

“South Africa First!” was the rallying cry of the National Party in 1924, aimed squarely at the Smuts government’s alliance with the Randlords and Great Britain. As the post–World War I crisis erupted, key segments of the white community found common cause in protesting against the sacrifice of their interests in favor of those of the mining magnates and their political allies. The future of South Africa, Prime Ministers Louis Botha and Jan Smuts had long maintained, was married to gold and Great Britain. The National Party proposed an alternative: the country’s wealth would be localized through manufacturing and...

When stock markets crash, banks default, speculative bubbles burst, and unemployment accelerates, calls for state intervention against the brutality of unfettered markets invariably follow. This was particularly true between 1914 and 1945, a period marked by the collapse of the international financial system, a “thirty years war” of sorts between the great powers, a deep global depression, and rolling waves of labor and social unrest. It would be, as Karl Polanyi eloquently argued, an epoch where widespread social and economic unrest eventually led political authorities to shelter their citizens from highly competitive and destabilizing market forces.¹ In rich, core areas...

As World War II came to a close, the foundations of South Africa’s impressive economic growth, which had seemed so solid, began to shake and wobble. Sporadic discontent by black and white workers erupted into a major strike wave. Alliances between employers and the state over labor policy gave way to increasingly acrimonious conflicts. Electoral support for the government, particularly by white workers and Afrikaners, collapsed. Seizing the opportunities created by these conditions, Afrikaner nationalists mobilized within the white population and across class lines and won the 1948 election. A new word, apartheid, would henceforth frame the construction and analysis...

At no time in the twentieth century did South Africa stand taller on the world stage than at the end of World War II. It had been part of the winning war coalition, was a linchpin of the world financial system, and had a prime minister in Jan Christian Smuts who was a confidant of Churchill and had been a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in both world wars. Smuts, like Cecil Rhodes before him, saw the world as his oyster: throughout the war he had spoken to prominent audiences of the problems of postwar reconstruction, and with the...

As the 1970s dawned, South Africa’s rulers were in a self-congratulatory mood. The swelling tide of African nationalism that had so threatened them ten years earlier had ebbed. Fears of an intractable recession and capital flight, so sharply etched following the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, had faded away as a new inflow of foreign capital investment fueled an economic boom. Even the power imbalance between Afrikaner and British elites receded as grand new Afrikaner conglomerates flourished and whites benefited from steady economic growth. The National Party, it seemed, had fulfilled the apartheid promises of the 1948 election.

Unrest in the mid-1970s...

In the late 1990s a new wave of protest began to ripple across South Africa. In the next ten years it would surge, with protesters all over the country demanding the basic necessities of life—from housing, land, and water to electricity, jobs, and basic health care.¹ Demonstrators aimed their barbs at a wide range of local, national, and global targets. In this respect the Cape Town protest of February 14, 2003, was larger than most I attended during those years, with more than 10,000 people in attendance, but its contours were typical of many such events before and after....