The two World Wars (especially the First) drew the thoughts of those who ruled South Africa back to their European roots even though, in both, fierce battles were fought on African soil. In the first of these, in the country now called Namibia, South Africa’s invasion was led (literally on horseback) by its then Prime Minister, General Louis Botha. Another South African Prime Minister (this one was in-waiting), Jan C. Smuts, led the South African invasion of the then German East Africa (the place is now called Tanzania). But the country’s deep emotion was spilled not by these African events, but by a European place, Delville Wood, where South African troops were decimated at the five-day Battle. As a result, a site in France, near the village of Longueval, entered into the consciousness of white South Africans, especially its English-speakers. This undoubtedly, reinforced their connection towards their European “home”.
The Second World War left an enduring impact on South African maritime thinking with the purported never-changing value of the Cape Sea Route becoming a central plank in South Africa’s many Cold War pleadings from the South African government that apartheid and anti-Communism was one and the same thing. Aside from [120] these claims (and the routine patrolling of maritime waters), South Africa deep-sea naval interests have been modest. So, the complicated issue of the country’s 1959 accession to the Antarctic
181 Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui : a parable play, Londres, Eyre Methuen, 1976, p. 96.
Treaty and South Africa’s scientific interest in Marion Island and Prince Edward Island 182 aside, the country’s interest in the Southern Oceans has been minimal. The only serious off-shore activity was in the aforementioned Angolan Civil War where South Africa’s navy was involved in several skirmishes off Angola using a forward maritime base at Walvis Bay in the country now called Namibia 183. But, the capacity for long-range projection was limited. An arms embargo limited the purchase of deep-water ships and naval strategy, borrowing from the Israelis, was built around Strike Craft.
In the somewhat whimsical conversation on a South Atlantic Treaty Organisation (SATO) 184, apartheid’s maritime strategists had less to say than did the hard men in its army. The catchy onomatopoeic association with NATO and the often-flighted asymmetries of power in the South Atlantic, enabled the idea to make quite regular appearances at conferences on Strategic Studies and regional issues. But, apartheid and American indifference to the South Atlantic was to mean that the idea held little water notwithstanding the purported interest expressed by successive Latin American juntas.
Arguably, apartheid’s single biggest achievement in the Atlantic in the post-War period was its almost total capture – commercially, that is – of Ile de Sol, an island in the Cape Verde, in order to refuel its long haul international flights to both Europe and North America. In one of the great Cold War ironies, the very air field in which every chip of stone and every pane of glass had been imported from South Africa was used to ferry Cuban [121] troops to Angola to oppose South Africa’s invasion of that country in 1973. It was also ironical, but not surprising given its location, that the Island was also the site for bilateral talks between the US and South Africa over the impasse over Namibia.
182 Steven Chown and William Froneman, dir, The Prince Edward Islands : Land-Sea Interactions in a Changing Ecosystem, Stellenbosch, Sun Media, 2008, 470 p.
183 Willem Steenkamp, Border Strike ! SA into Angola 1975-1980s, 3rd ed, Durban, JustDone Publishing, 2007, p. 99.
184 To examine the treatment this possibility received in the literature, see Andrew Hurrell, “The politics of South Atlantic Security : a survey of proposals for a South Atlantic Treaty Organisation”, International Affairs, Spring 1983, vol. 59 no 2, p. 179-93.
The Angolan War, like many Cold War events, was a long, drawn out affair, running from 1975 until 2002. The Naval dimension of the war was incidental rather than central but South Africa’s power projected into the conflict zone was augmented by its command of regional waters. But this war against the Cubans was won (and arguable lost) in a land battle at a place call Cuito Cuanavale and this only after apartheid’s South Africa’s air-force had lost control of the skies. This reinforces the central point of the essay that the struggle for Africa’s land matters far more than the sea.
Before the battle at Cuito, however, South African power in the region was considered invincible, a judgement that, in no small way, was supported by the guessing game around South Africa’s nuclear capability. There are many tributaries to this story but the deep one remains to be told. This is because, routinely, most of these would have disregarded the maritime dimensions of nuclear warfare. But a brief and intense double flash of light in the southern Oceans (somewhere between Cape Point and Antarctica) in September, 1979, raised questions over this issue. The occurrence opened speculation that the apartheid state had tested a nuclear device. Although this was confirmed as fact by an official of the post-apartheid state, its timing and other factors suggest that the fact and the fiction of whether or not a device has been tested by the apartheid regime remain open to interpretation. A panel commissioned by the Carter White House ruled the possibility out, but more recent work suggests that the [122]
panel may well have overlooked some salient issues in its deliberations. What is clear, however, is that the apartheid state was deeply implicated in the building of nuclear devices, and that its efforts in this direction were assisted by several other states, notably Israel 185.
The one South Atlantic issue that South Africa, like most other countries, could not avoid being involved with was the issue that seemed to draw the region back to the age of tall ships : the Falklands War. Given the significance of the events around this War, it is probably useful to set down the circumstances which lead to its outbreak. Briefly put, the British gained control over the small archipelago of islands in the Atlantic Ocean in 1833. But Argentina,
185 Sasha Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance : Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, New York, Pantheon, 2010, p.82.
which gained its independence in 1820, claimed sovereignty over the islands both because of its location and, more importantly, in its role as the heir to earlier Spanish claims over the islands. Talks over the resulting dispute continued over several centuries but these were bedevilled by the insistence of the tiny island population that they wanted to remain British. In April, 1982, the Argentine, without warning, landed some 17 000 troops to occupy the Falklands and South Georgia. Unsurprisingly, the British responded to this invasion of their sovereignty in a hostile manner. This set the scene for a short but very bitter conflict which followed the failure of various diplomatic efforts at mediation.
For apartheid South Africa, the conflict came at an opportune moment. Beginning in the 1960s, the country had been under increasing international pressure over the issue of apartheid. Much of this was driven by the increasingly powerful weapon of sanctions which had been applied two decades earlier by the League of Nations to Italy over its occupation of Ethiopia and which, in South Africa’s case, were spearheaded by an increasingly [123] hostile United Nations (UN). A largely successful trade boycott was followed by an almost fully successful sports boycott, and these had been over-shadowed both by an arms embargo and the country’s near-total exclusion from the work of the UN. These issues were very much at the forefront of South African thinking as the Falklands War broke out. The country’s involvement, such as it was, turned on two well-established impulses of its foreign policy, hope and threat.
The first flowed from the British determination to launch a flotilla to retake the islands. Surely, the argument ran, South Africa’s strategic location (not to mention the naval refurbishment resources at the former Royal Navy facility at Simonstown), would mean that London would turn to the country irrespective of apartheid. But this, which would have been an endorsement of the view that the Cape Sea Route was important in Cold War thinking, never happened. The second issue, threat, emerged from a worry in British and American defence circles that South Africa would sell weapons to the Argentine – a particular worry being the Exocet Missile. In the end, it remains uncertain as to whether this happened but not a little of South Africa’s hesitation was due to British pressure. Certainly this was another case
of the South Africa government taking its international and strategic cues from the north.