Southern Africa: imperialism, racism and neo‐colonialism

This polemical piece aims to provoke further discussion on the character of imperialism and nationalism in Africa, by focusing attention on the broader continental and international background of the national‐liberation struggle in southern Africa. It takes issue with what is seen to be a typical position assumed widely by left commentators in the West that underestimates African resistance and misjudges African nationalism. It argues that that, in its turn, is due to the tendency to isolate and abstract Western imperialism as well as African nationalism from the overarching reality of the growing rivalry between the two superpowers, the US and the USSR, in the context of a marked parallelism and convergence of methods and objectives between the two.