South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe — White Goods in Post-Colonial Societies: Markets, the State and Production

Abstract

Finding explanations for the inability of numerous postcolonial African states to transcend many of the legacies of colonialism has led to a position that is best described as Afro-pessimism.¹ In the context of ‘global informational capitalism’, argues Manuel Castells (1998) for example, the African continent can be considered to be part of the ‘Fourth World’ — a space that has become irrelevant to the global economy. Yet, renewed interest in some of the concerns of now unpopular theories of underdevelopment, in the form of what has become known as commodity chain analysis, shows that Africa does indeed link into the global economy, but mostly at the lower ends of commodity chains (Gereffi 1999; Kaplinsky 2000; Gibbon 2001). In the last decade, there has been a mining boom in many parts of Africa, often driven by South African mining firms, but sometimes linked into wars for control of mines in the context of ‘collapsed states’.²