The Mixed-Masala of Southern African Nations Has Two Options: Remain Crushed by Capitalist-Imperialist Underdevelopment or Surge towards Scientific Socialism

The Mixed-Masala of Southern African Nations Has Two Options By E.Landman.pdf

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[This article is part of a set of three sparked by the mid-2026 xenophobic attacks in South Africa and the reader would benefit more by reading the other two as well. The first is titled, No to Xenophobia and Divisions Between Workers! Forward to a Workers Government! Accessible at https://www.writingsonthewind.com/post/no-to-xenophobia-and-divisions-between-workers-forward-to-a-workers-government. The second is, The African Border as an Instrument of Imperialist Extraction and Class Rule. Accessible at https://www.writingsonthewind.com/post/the-african-border-as-an-instrument-of-imperialist-extraction-and-class-rule]

Southern Africa has witnessed unceasing mass migrations for well over a thousand years, becoming transformed in recent and modern history into labour migration for the imperialist bosses and settler farmers. Migration continues to this day, as labour for mainly South Africa's capitalist enterprises, farms and services.

The most striking fact about the peoples of Southern Africa is that almost none of them sits inside the borders of a single country. In many cases today, we find populations who also live under the same name and speak the same language on the other side of the line – their unity severed by an internationally recognised border. Every one of the region's political boundaries was drawn by a European power or powers in the nineteenth century (sometimes with settler governments or local chiefs in the room), amalgamating some peoples and splitting many. To them these peoples were mere instruments to be exploited or problems to be constrained and disciplined, while robbing their lands of whatever wealth they could find. Xenophobia,[1] when it demands that each people keep within its own borders, is asking for the impossible. The xenophobes have adopted the role of policemen of the European borders, and they do it for free.

The region as defined by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), if we look at the spread of its sixteen member states,[2] is clearly corresponding to economic realities of the southern part of the continent, which is a more organic and realistic approach than one determined by geography. Therefore, by the Southern African region, we mean the current sixteen member states of the Southern African Development Community. This definition makes sense because it is an existing framework of economic integration, common institutions, shared labour markets, and shared populations.

I. Southern Africa is a Region with Migration in its DNA

a. Migrations, fusions and new nations

Let us start at the beginning. The oldest inhabitants of the region are the San, hunter-gatherers who ranged across Southern Africa for well over a hundred thousand years before any herder, farmer or colonist set foot in it.[3] This is the earliest that records exist for, which means it is very likely that they have been in the same place for much longer – Crowe (listed in footnote 3) states it was 'up to 140 000 years'. Onto that ancient foundation came others. Khoikhoi herders arrived in the southernmost part about two thousand years ago. About 1700 years ago, the region witnessed the arrival of the iron-working Bantu-speaking farmers who spread south and east across the entire region (until agricultural constraints stopped them at the edge of what became the Western Cape). The Nguni cultural-linguistic population amongst them, to use today's terminology, settled in the Eastern Cape, across KwaZulu-Natal and later in Southern Mozambique. The Khoikhoi were, according to scholars, not a huge migration and they intermarried with the San at the margins while remaining a distinct pastoralist society, and it's that partial mixing plus shared ancestry that gave rise to the name "Khoisan", to refer to both groups.

The great convulsions that shaped the population map we know today came with the Mfecane[4] of about 1815 to 1840, a vast churning of warfare, displacement, consolidation, migration and fusion,[5] decades prior to the scramble for Africa. It began at precisely the moment European slave traders escalated their gruesome activities from the ports of Mozambique, from east Africa, Angola and the Congo basin. The Cape Colony was the first European settlement in existence at the time. However, Afrikaner expeditions had been moving inland (the Great Trek) from the Cape Colony to massacre the natives and steal their land from 1835, putting tremendous pressure on the native populations in their way.

The nations that were formed in the region were not ancient ethnic formations, but political constructions, each one manufacturing a new people within a generation or two. Shaka's Zulu kingdom welded a scatter of conquered Nguni chiefdoms into a single nation by enrolling the defeated into its own regiments and homesteads, in what is today, KwaZulu-Natal. Mzilikazi's Ndebele, fleeing that kingdom, became a Nguni-speaking aristocracy ruling a Sotho-Tswana second tier absorbed on the (South African) highveld and a Kalanga-Shona majority incorporated beyond the Limpopo River, settling in the south of Zimbabwe to this very day. The Basotho were built deliberately out of those fleeing the wars as a Sotho core that naturalised Nguni refugees alongside it in modern day Lesotho. Soshangane, the Ndwandwe general, fled north with his people after Shaka defeated the Ndwandwe Kingdom. He created the Gaza state of a thin Nguni ruling layer over a Tsonga majority in present day Mozambique. Zwangendaba's Ngoni crossed the Zambezi into what is now Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. And the Kololo seized Barotseland in western Zambia, on the upper Zambezi River. In this period, nations were forged out of many peoples and powerful states emerged as opposed to the earlier smaller chiefdoms.

With respect to the Xhosa farmers of the Eastern Cape, the Europeans fought them back, deeper into the Eastern Cape, during a century of frontier wars. They were later defeated and roped into the South Africa that was formed by Britain and the colonial settlers in 1910.

And then there was the Cape Colony. Where the Mfecane's migrants assembled new nations by absorption, the intruding Europeans' Cape Colony dissolved old ones by genocide, massacres, oppression and abuses, while introducing slaves from the continent and Asia. Its commandos hunted the San of the interior in a campaign of blatant genocide, reducing a population of perhaps fifty thousand in the Cape to near-destruction. They broke the Khoikhoi herder societies through war, land theft and the smallpox epidemic of 1713; several Khoisan groups migrated into Namibia as a result of this destruction. The European settlers lumped the remaining survivors together with the Cape's imported slaves, into the new creolised people later labelled 'Coloured', an amorphous group that was actually more than one group, some of whom escaped the pressures of the Cape Colony into Namibia.[6] At any rate, here the mechanism was opposite to the Mfecane, but the lesson is the same – the peoples of the region were made, unmade and remade by migration long before they were divided by borders created by the European powers. Let the xenophobes howl against the winds that carry the tears, sighs and memories of the peoples of Southern Africa as they trekked over the rivers, mountains, plateaus and plains. Yet, persistent migratory routes show that a unifying impulse beats in the heart of the region, calling out to all its people, as the old ties of kinship and ancestral lands refuse to be silenced.

b. The migration that plundered the region and drowned it in blood

One migration that the border-guards never count or the xenophobes do not care about, was the most violent and the most impactful of all with its heel on the necks of the locals – the invasion by the Europeans. They arrived first as slave traders, then as invaders and many of them with nothing to their names but greed and murder in their hearts and heads. The Dutch of 1652 arrived as the servants of a trading company, the British 'settlers' of 1820 as the surplus poor of a depressed Britain, shipped out at the Crown's expense. Those who came later were hardly different. They scoured the land with their superior weapons and massacred proud native peoples, armed only with spears or bows and arrows (they like to pretend these were wars – bringing a gun to a knife-fight is outright murder). The purpose of these massacres and genocides was to steal the land and its riches from underneath the dead or broken bodies of their owners. They came in waves and continuously brought fellow Europeans over, fully subsidised, to share in the bloodied loot of their plunder in exchange for helping to murder and oppress the locals. They settled down over the dead bodies and broken societies they caused, taking whatever they fancied, and moulded the defeated into their puppets, labourers and servants. This is the one group that did not absorb those they defeated – not even the mixed offspring that they themselves fathered – but despised them and pushed them into broken lives and misery to make them pliable for their new roles.

These invaders themselves brought in groups from far away, who have over time been incorporated into the region as part of the settled population – slaves from Asia, Madagascar and other African areas; Indians settled in KwaZulu-Natal, indentured as labourers on the sugar cane plantations. This added to the mixed masala of nations the region consists of today.

Only three countries were ruled by settler minorities until independence, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia (the last by Germany then Apartheid South Africa after World War I). The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique had huge settler populations, but the colonies were controlled from the metropole, and when the latter collapsed, many fled back home, to South Africa, Brazil and other places. The rest of the region was also controlled directly from Europe.

Since independence, settler communities have declined sharply across the region, except in South Africa and, to a lesser extent, Namibia. In South Africa, where whites make up under 8% of the population, they still own most of the private wealth and control the economy in partnership with western imperialism. According to Chatterjee et al.,[7] the richest tenth of the entire population holds around 86% of household wealth – as is commonly known, whites form the bulk of that group. They continue that the top 0.1% owns close to one-third, and the top 0.01% (3,500 individuals) concentrate 15% of household net worth, "more than the bottom 90% as a whole". This underscores the atrocious inequality in South African society, with the top-most tiers being the white minority. They affirm that the end of Apartheid has not led to any decreasing of economic inequality (others mention slight improvement which went to the new elite). In Namibia, white farmers still own roughly 70% of commercial farmland, while black Namibians own 16%. The hold of the minority European settler community over the best commercial land in Zimbabwe was totally broken by the fast-track land redistribution programme since 2000, leading to many settlers leaving Zimbabwe for good. Where coherent settler populations remained, so did a grossly disproportionate hold on the nation's wealth – above all land, but in South Africa, over the entire economy.[8]

c. Family across borders

The result is a region whose peoples are, to this day, found on both sides of nearly every line. Some examples reveal the absurdity of the situation.[9] The San are scattered across six modern states – Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Setswana-speakers who give Botswana its name are more numerous across the border in South Africa. The Sotho straddle Lesotho and South Africa; the Swazi are divided between Eswatini, South Africa and Mozambique. The Tsonga-Shangaan are split three ways between Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the Venda two ways between South Africa and Zimbabwe. The Nama live on both sides of the Orange River in South Africa and Namibia; the Kwanyama of the Ovambo find the Angolan border drawn straight through their land; the Herero live in Namibia, Botswana and Angola. The Tonga of the middle Zambezi are split between Zambia and Zimbabwe by the Zambezi River. The Ndebele carried a Nguni identity out of Natal into Zimbabwe, leaving kith and kin behind. Peoples split up suffer much more than being divided from their own and being incorporated into a new nation that is foreign to them. According to Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (see footnote 9), "the incidence, severity, and duration of political violence are all higher for partitioned homelands which also experience frequent military interventions from neighboring countries. Third, split groups are often entangled in a vicious circle of government-led discrimination and ethnic wars. Fourth, respondents from survey data identifying with split ethnicities are economically disadvantaged. The evidence highlights the detrimental repercussions of the colonial border design". In other words, the new situation of these peoples dumped them into lives of more and unending hardship.

d. Migrants built the modern South African economy

Labour migration is the oldest institutionalised movement of people in the region, after slavery. From 1900 the mines recruited labour across the whole region and even deeper inland, through the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA or Wenela) and later the Native Recruiting Corporation (NRC), both consolidated as The Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA) in 1977. By 1970 there were over a quarter of a million foreign migrants on the South African mines, drawn from as far north as Tanzania.[10] In 1985 the gold mines alone employed nearly a hundred thousand Basotho, some fifty thousand Mozambicans and tens of thousands more from Malawi, Botswana and Swaziland (now Eswatini);[11] at its height the industry leaned on close to half a million foreign workers.[12] While the mines provided oppressive living conditions as part of the extraction of cheap labour from these workers, migrant remittances became important sources of income for their home countries. The South African economy became the hub of most of the region. It is fair and accurate to state that the wealth of the region's single richest economy was dug, in large part, by the hands of its neighbours.[13] That system has since collapsed with the gold industry – foreign mineworkers had fallen to around thirty-five thousand by 2023 – but the movement it set in motion did not stop; it merely changed form.

II. Capitalism Transformed the Region and Impoverished the Masses

The nations mapped above did not only emerge from migration and absorption; over the last century and a half they were fused again, and far more tightly, by capital that sank its claws in stolen resources and needed cheap labour to maximise its profits. The mineral revolution that opened on the Witwatersrand in 1886 stretched recruitment lines across every border traced above and trapped the whole region and beyond into a single economic machine of cheap labour and super profits, with its engine-room in Johannesburg. The gold mines made South Africa a vital cog in the international imperialist machine, as can be seen from its status as the number one gold producer in the world for a century from 1905.

From all around they were brought in to dig South Africa's gold in unsafe mines. The gold mines spawned hastened economic development in supporting secondary industries that led to intense and wide-scale industrialisation. The region's railways and ports were laid out to carry that wealth to the sea and the European metropoles; and the smaller economies were shaped, deliberately, into reservoirs of cheap labour and captive markets for the South African industrial core. It was in the interest of the mining bosses to keep the regional countries from industrialising as long as the mines needed their able-bodied men. In this sense imperialism and South African capitalism underdeveloped the region. The debt South Africa owes the region, can never be repaid while it keeps extracting surplus value from its neighbours, which is still a feature of the character of the modern South African economy.

At the centre of the regional economy, sits South African capital, which in its essence today still is white monopoly capital. Economically, South Africa alone still accounts for close to half of the combined output of the sixteen SADC economies – about 47% in 2023, down from some 60% at the turn of the century as the neighbouring economies slowly started to grow – a preponderance no other region on the continent shows.[14] The South African monopolies constitute one of the biggest foreign investors throughout the region. They are the visible face of that domination, the mining houses that grew out of the Rand invest in platinum in Zimbabwe, diamonds in Botswana and Namibia, and gold in Tanzania. Manufacturing companies invest in cement manufacturing in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Mozambique gas processing, aluminium, and transport infrastructure. Furthermore, the South African government invests in water infrastructure in Lesotho. South Africa's banks, retail chains, breweries and mobile networks – Standard Bank, Shoprite, MTN and the rest – command the high streets and markets from Windhoek to Dar es Salaam. The monetary order tells the same story with the Common Monetary Area binding Lesotho, Eswatini and Namibia to the rand, and the Southern African Customs Union pooling the region's tariff revenue under South African administration and control. Lesotho sells its water to Gauteng; and South Africa rips off Mozambique's electricity output from the Cahora Bassa dam in a colonial-apartheid era arrangement to keep South African mining and industry going with cheap power. This is not a partnership of equals, but a classic imperialist relationship – a dominant country exporting its capital outward to extract surplus value from workers beyond its borders. The imperialist South African economy, sub-imperial in the world order as its chief focus is in its near-abroad, has no conscience when it comes to exploiting the region, and we see this in all the plans talked about by its presidents past and present, whose main job has always been to improve infrastructure, connectivity and profit chiefly for white monopoly capital – the true rulers of the country. This is the essence of the South African government's international diplomacy and its engagement in all regional and continental institutions as well as in conflict zones.

The wealth of the region flows mainly to Europe and South Africa, as it was engineered to do, while the industrial infrastructure that can industrialise it – the smelting, the refining, the manufacturing – is kept mainly in European capitals and, to a much lesser extent, in South Africa.

Into this economic structure of exploitation and underdevelopment, a new native ruling stratum has inserted itself on independence, and enriched itself, not by breaking the imperial relation but by managing it for a price and skimming from it. The end of classic colonialism and formal white rule opened the state, its wealth and connections to a black political class that has grown rich as a result of their closeness to the state apparatus – through bribes, tenders, licenses, board seats and the plunder of the public purse and national resources.[15] In addition, imperialist powers offered the new governments millions and billions of dollars in loans, with a nudge and a wink. Even though these loans trap their countries in a debt loop, it is of no concern to these elites as long as they can get their manicured hands on those millions and billions. Some of these leaders were counted amongst the richest people in the world while their populations suffered in squalor. Though there were (and still are) many, we will only name the most famous case – Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, the puppet who seized power in the wake of Patrice Lumumba's overthrow and murder at the behest of his western masters. At the height of his fortune his net worth was estimated as high as $5 billion, in today's terms the true value would be double. Compare that to South Africa's richest black businessman today, Patrice Motsepe, whose net worth stands at $3.6 billion in September 2026. South Africa's 'state capture' under the Zuma presidency, laid bare by the Zondo Commission, diverted hundreds of billions of rands from the state and its enterprises to a connected elite. In South Africa politicians at every level of government generally treat their positions as access to state money, resources and connections; the country's own economists find that what modest decline there has been in racial inequality since independence, has flowed almost entirely to a thin new black upper class rather than to the mass of the people.[16] In Mozambique some two billion United States dollars in secret, illegally guaranteed loans – the 'hidden debt' scandal – were run up by a political elite and left as a crushing millstone around the neck of one of the poorest populations on earth.[17] Everywhere the form is the same, a comprador bourgeoisie, black in complexion and imperial in function, whose patriotism has never once interrupted its accumulation. The interesting thing is that western imperialism helps them to enrich themselves with corruption in order to hold them to ransom – they use the same corruption as a charge later when they decide to back a different horse, the very Mobutu Sese Seko being a case in point.[18]

a. On the contributions of Patrick Bond

Academic, author and activist, Patrick Bond, sketches two phases of elite formation in Africa: a post-independence cadre that issued developmental rhetoric but never challenged the North–South imperialist order, and then, in the 1980s, a 'home-grown' technocratic neoliberalism nested in finance ministries and central banks, with the World Bank consciously cultivating 'independent technocratic policy capacity' to insulate these policy elites from domestic accountability. Bond presents the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), President Mbeki's pet project, as a disguised false pan-African 'partnership with the North' that actually amplifies uneven development within Africa.[19] He continues to show how the ANC under both Mandela and Mbeki proudly made themselves and the new South Africa available as the dutiful servants of Washington's imperialistic neoliberal agenda on the African continent – Mandela even proudly boasted that Cecil John Rhodes would have been proud of the neoliberal economic plan promoted by the ANC for South Africa! Imagine invoking the greatest representative of the genocidal and rapacious British imperialism in Africa. To this Bond affirmed that the aims of NEPAD were basically the modern version of Rhodes' policy of imperialist plunder. Of course, Rhodes was smiling in his grave, that is the point! Bond sees Pretoria as the deputy sheriff of Washington and an accumulation centre in its own right. He, however, does not analyse South African sub-imperialism as the export of capital in the region – a significant shortcoming – but rather as a proxy or regional agent for US imperialism. In fact, in a later piece[20] he extends his views on South Africa's sub-imperialist nature. According to him, South Africa is not imperialist at all because various monopolies shifted their headquarters to western capitals where their profits are being drained to, leading to South Africa 'retaining far too little of the surplus'. This is not a sound argument as imperialism is defined by the extraction of surplus value from foreign labour. What the imperialists do with their profits is their business; what Bond is exposing is the unpatriotic nature of white monopoly capital and not the non-imperialist character of South Africa. What he does reveal in Looting Africa, is well-evidenced and excellently laid out and must be read together with our analysis of the economic component of Southern Africa's sub-imperialism. According to Bond, Pretoria's posture is 'talk left, walk right'. He explains their conduct and reward as follows, "Once the South African government showed its willingness to put self-interest above principles, the international political power centres invested increasing trust in Mandela, Mbeki, Manuel and Erwin, giving them insider access to many international elite fora". To emphasise, Bond's points on the perfidious character of the comprador bourgeoisie of Africa and especially South Africa, are well made and hit the nail on the head. In a 2008 paper Miller et al.[21] evaluate different perspectives on South Africa's sub-imperialist character, including Bond's. Though they do not take a clear position, they clearly show the central role of South African monopolies in the economy of the region. They write of how the end of Apartheid also freed South African capital from political constraints, leading to it galloping northwards and sinking its tentacles all across the continent, enabled by the ANC-SACP government as well as recipient regional governments. They continue that the trade imbalance between South Africa and the region was 9:1 in the former's favour by the early 2000s. We fully endorse the 'many' in their statement that, "Many saw recent investments as predatory, displacing existing local enterprises and production through a mix of aggressive and unfair intra-firm trade, pressurized merger and acquisition bids, politically-leveraged access to large scale privatisations and cheap financing from South Africa, and skills poaching. The unemployment effects, service disruptions and costs, national revenue shortfalls and diminished local accountability of FDI operators became glaringly apparent, and the subject of increasing public scrutiny". In other words, South African capital acted no different to the western imperialist powers, benefiting from neoliberal policies and practices at the cost of the host economies and working classes. There can be no doubt that South Africa is a sub-imperialist country, both in the classical Marxist sense and as a proxy.

b. Liberation could not abolish inequality

Beneath this new comprador elite, the deep structure of ownership has scarcely shifted. In South Africa – the region's core and its richest economy – on the World Bank's reckoning the country remains the most unequal on earth, with race still the single largest determinant of where a person stands economically.[22] Measured by average income, white South Africans live at the level of Denmark and black South Africans at the level of Bangladesh, in one and the same country.[23] The mines, the banks, the commanding heights of the regional economy remain overwhelmingly in white and foreign hands; the black majority supplies the labour, a black elite supplies the management and the political cover, and the wealth piles up, generation upon generation, in the same hands of those whose ancestors killed and robbed, with crumbs thrown to their new servants. This is the material reality that xenophobia is summoned to conceal – for it is far safer, for those who own the region, that a Zimbabwean worker and a South African worker should fight each other over a shack and a wage, rather than that they should ask each other why a small minority own the wealth in our region. Across Africa, across the world, national liberation within the framework of capitalism could not abolish gross inequality, this has been proven over and over. Kwame Nkrumah warned about this in the early days of African independence,[24] but he was not listened to and was pushed aside by US imperialism in a CIA-sponsored coup. Genuine liberation is the job of the organised political force of the working class. This is the short definition of Trotsky's permanent revolution.

Yet the same integration that today drains the region to enrich the few and impoverish the masses could, on a radically different social basis, be the start for remaking the region into a society that has stepped out of the bloody and corrupt history of capitalism and imperialism and into the light of a society for its people by its people.

III. Towards a Socialist Federation of Southern African States

That the same people so often live on both sides of a border is not merely an argument against xenophobia; it is an impetus for how to remake the region in the best interest of all its people. Independence brought the continent more misery, but it was the best that the African liberation parties could muster – to rule as servants of imperialism for their praise and trinkets, to plunder their own countries' resources to enrich tiny elites, to enrich themselves through shameless corruption, and to refuse to take any responsibility for the impoverishment and underdevelopment that their policies have imposed and facilitated on their 'liberated' countries. This is the extent of possibilities under capitalism – the cry must be heard across the continent: no more tinkering with this programme or that partnership to rehabilitate capitalism, it had its chance and proved incompatible with the majority of the people, incompatible with humanity. The parties of the comprador bourgeoisies stand exposed and have nothing to offer but more of the same – Africa needs to overcome them and push them into the dustbins of history where they belong, along with their system of capitalist-imperialism.

No single nation-state can fully undo the historical, economic and social injustices outlined above. The goal of a Socialist Federation of Southern Africa States has long ago been raised in the South African revolutionary movement and needs to be considered by forward-thinking people in all regional countries. Those who benefit from the capitalist system, and those who fear profound change, cling to this system with all their might. But the history of Africa, and indeed of the whole world, has proven that without profound change, only a minority will continue to enjoy this earth. The planet belongs to us all and we need to fight for what is ours. A voluntary union led by workers' power, the region's working people ruling through powerful local, provincial, national and regional structures that abolishes capitalism and its borders while guaranteeing every nation and community within it the right to self-determination. This means the right to its own language and culture, land, self-government, and the right to leave the federation. Such a federation will dismantle capitalism and imperialism and build a unified, integrated economy based on the needs of the people and permanent development as opposed to the obsolete, degenerate and destructive profit-driven system that serves minorities. It will once and for all resolve the genuine burning issues of recognition, neglect and oppression suffered by minorities in quite a few regional countries such as Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia and Tanzania. A socialist federation of regional states would have no ulterior motives in approaching such issues and would find just solutions that lead to better unity, permanent growth and development. This is not utopian sentiment but the only sustainable framework in which the region's tangled, overlapping peoples can live as equals and as productive members of a thriving, non-exploitative society; rather than as one another's foreigners competing for the scraps from the table of imperialism and its servants.

On the other side of the coin are the white settlers, whose ancestors were alien to this continent, who sit with a level of the region's wealth that is many times their size in the population. In South Africa, they own the majority of that wealth – still to this day, in the ANC-SACP era. This situation was created by imperialism and kept in place by its puppets. The white stranglehold over the economy must be shattered, and the economy must be freed from its capitalistic profit-for-the-minority-first shackles. The only progressive solution that will be just and equitable, is not the replacement of a white bourgeoisie with a black one, as some liberation parties prefer – but the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and the land under the control of the working class and their allies on the farms (workers and small farmers) on behalf of all the people – and socialism will achieve that. The wealth of the region will in this way be transferred to society as a whole, as opposed to changing hands between individuals. Additional steps will have to be taken to ensure that racial economic inequality is terminated and rolled back decisively. A socialist dispensation should not treat the white settlers as if they are to blame for the deeds of their ancestors, they should not, for instance, be deported but given the option of leaving or staying. They should be treated with the dignity and respect reserved for all people without exception. The settlers who decide to stay would help to break the system of white economic privilege and will be fully embraced by their black and brown brothers and sisters and would build the region with them as equal citizens. Social and historical justice is important in overcoming the past, however, a socialist programme has no place for vengeance, only resolving historical problems with progress for all concerned.

a. Key components for a regional socialist economy

If the preceding section showed a region rich in everything but the power to keep its own wealth, the socialist answer to that condition is not merely a just one, but immensely productive. Imagine what the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy and the land, combined with the fusion of sixteen economies into one planned whole – under workers' control – would actually unlock. The region's bountiful raw materials (e.g. minerals, oil, timber, agricultural products) would no longer be shipped out raw, but smelted, refined and built into finished goods locally, for domestic use and export. Trade unions in South Africa have long called for this, the beneficiation of raw materials. The export of raw materials on the cheap and the buying back of finished products at exorbitant prices is one of the key parasitic mechanisms through which imperialism is allowed to rob and underdevelop Africa. No longer will we import the clothes, food and other goods we need that we can produce ourselves, simply because they can be produced cheaper elsewhere – only puppet governments can argue that cheaper goods is a good trade for deindustrialisation, mass unemployment and poverty. Cheaper means nothing for the many millions without jobs. That neoliberal logic has led to super profits for the monopolies of the imperialist countries while decimating industries and jobs. The region must produce what is possible to develop its economy and crush unemployment and poverty. We note that a strong push in this direction has been initiated by AES – the Sahel confederation – and is being supported to some extent (at least in words at the moment) by other countries such as Ghana, Botswana and Namibia; not to forget Johnny-come-lately South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who mouthed the same slogans at the recent BRICS summit. He tends to make radical statements and moves before elections but fails to follow through afterwards. In any case, in a capitalist dispensation, the beneficiation of raw materials will be subsidised by taxpayer money and will benefit big capital, who will probably make wide use of robotic labour and Artificial Intelligence to score on wages.

The hydropower of the DRC can provide the entire region with cheap and clean electricity for industry and households alike, with the Cahora Bassa hydro project and Eskom as excellent potential back-ups – the region has an abundance of energy generation capacity.

The migrant-labour system that makes one worker cheap by making another 'illegal' would give way to a common wage and common rights, ending the race to the bottom that capitalist borders exist to enforce. Expanded railways, ports and truck routes as part of the regional distribution network and vibrant points of international trade, will enhance economic development and job creation.

The industrial base of South Africa, which far outstrips the rest in size, is well-positioned to become the initial springboard for the industrialisation of the entire region. In comparison, the size of South Africa's manufacturing base is slightly larger than the combined capacity of the other 15 countries.[25] Economic development should not engender dominance by any specific country or countries, and should cover the entire region.

Several countries in the region are already huge tourist attractions and the potential exists to develop this industry into a much bigger, integrated driver of economic development. There are many more innovative possibilities for development that people on the ground will be able to come up with given the opportunity; other possibilities will reveal themselves when the time comes.

The vast wealth now concentrated in a few hands and skimmed by a corrupt elite, would be turned at last to the development of the regional economy and the abolition of poverty, which is the seedbed of xenophobia itself.

This is the concrete meaning of the Socialist Federation of Southern African States for the ordinary worker, not a flag or a slogan but electricity, industry, food, productive and meaningful work and a vision of a future that humanity deserves. The natural endowment outlined above would finally be turned to the benefit of those it belongs to and who labour to make it useful to society. Capitalism keeps Southern Africa a servant because a servant is worth more to its owners than a rival; only the common ownership of the mines, the land, the water, the banks and so on, can convert the region's sleeping wealth into the industrial power it is plainly capable of becoming. The alternative is more of the same, squabbling and fighting over scraps in a dogfight to the bottom where crime, decay, misery and xenophobia co-exist to destroy us even further – while the capitalists and imperialists lick their lips around their sumptuous tables. Such is our present, but it can also be our future, or we can break the cycle by building a society where everybody works to develop the economy and our humanity together, with an equitable share of the fruits of the earth.

A socialist plan for the region cannot simply pool the productive apparatus as capitalism has arranged it, for that arrangement itself is the crime. A century of imperialism turned the periphery into a reservoir of cheap labour and unprocessed minerals and made the Witwatersrand the workshop that everyone else and everything else fed into. The first task of a regional plan is therefore the conscious levelling of development: to industrialise where colonialism forbade industry, to beneficiate minerals in the countries that wrench them out of the ground, to build in Maputo and Lusaka and Lubumbashi the productive capacity that was deliberately concentrated in the south. The measure of the plan is not how much it produces but how fast it closes the gap between the centre and the periphery that capital spent a hundred years protecting.

b. Two roads to federation

The call for the peoples of the region to go forward together is not a novelty we have invented. Federation has been tried in Southern Africa before – and it was tried by the enemy.

Between 1953 and 1963 the British bound Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.[26] It was sold, then as now, in the language of a shared prosperity and a larger market. In substance it was a device to place the copper of the north and the labour of all three territories at the disposal of the white settler economy of the south, with the African majority granted no say in the matter. It was federation as an instrument of plunder, and the African peoples understood it as such. Mass resistance broke it apart within a decade, and out of its wreckage came the independence of Zambia and Malawi. The lesson is that unity in the service of capital is only exploitation on a larger scale.

That is precisely what confronts us again today. The Southern African Development Community is a federation in embryo – a free-trade protocol, a common market in the making. But it is integration built on capitalist foundations, and it has done for the region exactly what its class character dictates. It has widened, not narrowed, the dominance of the South African economy; it has exposed the fragile industries of the smaller states to a competition they cannot survive, hastening their deindustrialisation;[27] and it has left the worker of the region no better defended than before. Capitalist integration is not a promise for the future but a curse on the land. It already exists, it is a fact, and it serves the bosses, especially white monopoly capital.

Against this neoliberal dream of Mandela's ANC, stands another tradition entirely – the socialist and pan-African tradition that argued, from the earliest days of independence, that the balkanisation of the continent into scores of weak states was not an accident of geography but a design of empire, drawn precisely so that no fragment could stand against imperial capital. Nkrumah put it most sharply. He was a socialist, and he grasped that unity emptied of socialist content would be no liberation at all; against the gradualists who wanted no more than a club of sovereign presidents, he demanded a genuine union (continental) government with a common plan. That argument was right, and the decades have only proved it more so. What the experience exposed was not a fault in the goal but a limit in Nkrumah's method – unity and socialism pursued from above, through the state and the single party, rather than built on the organised, democratic power of the working class. A socialism handed down by the state, however genuine the intention, rests on foundations a coup can knock away in a single morning, as 1966 showed (and the coup in Venezuela that started with the kidnapping of its presidential couple sixty years later). The unity we need can be raised only on the foundation that cannot be so easily knocked away: the organised power of the working class itself in the workplaces, streets, neighbourhoods, municipalities, cities, and wherever else workers are to be found.[28]

When Nkrumah was moved out of the way by US imperialism – as was the case with many other anti-imperialist leaders – unity from above, by the handshake of presidents, had free rein on the continent and they made sure the commanding heights of every economy remained in imperialist hands. Unity of that kind – unity of governments that rule as the local agents of capital – can only reproduce dependency in a larger form, as the SADC demonstrates every day.

So, there are two roads to federation, and they run in opposite directions. One is the road of capital, such as the neoliberal project of the SADC – integration that extends and intensifies exploitation and deepens the grip of the strong over the weak. The other is the road proposed in this article: the federation of the working classes of the region, built from below on the socialised ownership of the economic core of the sixteen countries, whose whole purpose would be to abolish the very domination that capitalist integration entrenches. It is the class content in the solution that makes all the difference.

c. Guarding against a new overlord

We noted that the industrial base of South Africa, larger than that of all its neighbours combined, would be a springboard for the regional economy. We have also documented South Africa as the sub-imperial power of the region – the workshop that drained its neighbours of their labour, their rivers of their power and their markets of their manufactures. The obvious question follows, what is to stop a socialist federation, anchored on the South African industrial base, from becoming South African domination in a red coat?

The answer to this question begins from the point made a moment ago – what makes South African capital dominant is not the machines on the Witwatersrand but who owns them and to what end they are turned. Under capitalism, the South African economy dominates the region because it is driven by private profit, and profit sends its investment where returns are highest and recruits its labour where wages are lowest, reproducing the centre and the periphery with every turn of the cycle. Take that apparatus out of private hands, place it under the democratic ownership and planning of the working class of the whole region, and the logic that made it an instrument of domination is broken at the root. A socialised industrial base is not a weapon of the country it happens to sit in; it is a common inheritance, to be directed by common decision.

IV. Conclusion

The conclusions offered in this article for discussion are just a few key points that need to be reworked, fleshed out and expanded in a collective regional effort by revolutionaries and all other interested people and organisations. In doing so, a lot of work needs to be done to draw the lessons of the past so that we do not fall into the same traps that caused powerful revolutionary movements to end in disaster, such as the Stalinist counterrevolutions. We must remain careful of regimes that take strong anti-imperialist measures but rely only on top leaderships and exclude workers' control over the political affairs and economy of the countries concerned as in the case of Nkrumah – the AES being the most current case in point.

The main task falls upon the South African working class, the strongest, most concentrated and most experienced proletariat to lead the fight for socialism and to protect the federation from any forms of chauvinism and supremacy and to champion the development of its neighbours as equals. This is what proletarian internationalism means in concrete regional terms. The antidote to a chauvinist South Africa is a South African working class that consciously refuses the role of overlord.

It must be noted that the struggle for socialism is not a future struggle, but the struggle of today; every demand that is fought for today – big and small – is part of the journey for the ultimate objective. Organisations and revolutionaries in the region (and across the continent) need to reach out to each other for joint work – practical and theoretical. The ruling classes have a myriad of regional, continental and global institutions and they are well organised; socialist revolutionaries need to catch up.

Notes

1. We see the xenophobes' emphasis on 'illegal' immigrants as a cover for violence against all black immigrants as their supporters have not only ignored the 'legal' status of their targets, but they have also killed South Africans for looking or sounding like immigrants. This last point alone, ironically, shows how we are actually all just the same.

2. The sixteen are Angola, Botswana, the Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. See SADC, https://www.sadc.int (accessed 20/08/2026).

3. On the depth of San ancestry in the subcontinent see the following: ScienceDaily. (20/09/2012). Khoe-San Peoples Diverged before 'Out-of-Africa' Migration of Modern Humans. Accessed 23 August 2026 from, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120920141139.htm; and Crowe, T. (4/02/2016). In The Conversation. How the Origin of the KhoiSan Tells Us That 'Race' Has No Place in Human Ancestry. Accessed 23 August 2026 from, https://theconversation.com/how-the-origin-of-the-khoisan-tells-us-that-race-has-no-place-in-human-ancestry-53594

4. The older thesis of a single Shaka-driven cataclysm has been contested by Julian Cobbing and others as an excuse for the impact of colonialism in, Cobbing, J. (1988). The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo. Journal of African History 29, no. 3: 487–519. Accessed on 30/08/26 from, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-history/article/mfecane-as-alibi-thoughts-on-dithakong-and-mbolompo1/342F2627DC6748BA17D732C83A6326FA

5. Insightful historians such as Cobbing trace the origin of the Mfecane to the late 18th century when the region was subjected to ecological disasters, drought, famine, competition over the ivory and slave trade centered on Delagoa Bay, Mozambique, and the rise of Shaka's Zulu kingdom.

6. The information about the migrations and consolidations depicted in this section is widely written about and available. Here we submit three sources that together, tell the story. Etherington, N. (2001). The great treks: The transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854. Longman. https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/47893949; Thompson, L. (2001). A history of South Africa (3rd ed.). Yale University Press. https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/560542020; and Adhikari, M. (2010). The anatomy of a South African genocide: The extermination of the Cape San peoples. UCT Press. https://openuctpress.uct.ac.za/uctpress/catalog/book/30

7. Chatterjee, A., Czajka, L., & Gethin, A. (2022). Wealth inequality in South Africa, 1993–2017. The World Bank Economic Review, 36(1), 19–36. Accessed on 30/08/26 from, https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhab012

8. For more details on the information in this section, the following sources are very helpful. Namibia Statistics Agency. (2018). Namibia land statistics, reported in The Namibian, "Whites own 70% of commercial farms". Accessed on 30/08/26 from, https://www.namibian.com.na/whites-own-70-of-commercial-farms/; Scoones, I., Marongwe, N., Mavedzenge, B., Mahenehene, J., Murimbarimba, F., & Sukume, C. (2011). Zimbabwe's land reform: Challenging the myths. Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(5), 967–993. Accessed 18/09/26 from, https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/3854; Statistics South Africa. (2023). Census 2022: Statistical release P0302. Accessed on 5/09/26 from, https://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/P0302/P03022022.pdf

9. The information that follows is well-documented. A very useful source for those wishing to delve deeper into these issues, is Michalopoulos, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2016). The long-run effects of the scramble for Africa. American Economic Review, 106(7), 1802–1848. Accessed on 10/09/26 from, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20131311

10. International Organization for Migration. Migration in Southern Africa. Accessed 23/08/26 from, https://www.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl486/files/2018-07/RS7.pdf

11. International Labour Organization. Foreign Labour on the South African Gold Mines: New Insights on an Old Problem. Accessed 23/08/26 from, https://webapps.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/P/09602/09602(1987-126-2)199-218.pdf

12. Daily Maverick. Decline of Migrant Labour System for SA Mines Has Sown Xenophobic Seeds. (29/06/2026). Accessed 23/08/26 from, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-06-29-decline-of-migrant-labour-system-for-sa-mines-has-sown-xenophobic-seeds/ (giving both the apartheid-era peak of close to 500,000 foreign workers and the 2023 figure of about 35,000).

13. For a more detailed treatment of the South-African centered labour migration in the region, see Landman, E. The African Border as an Instrument of Imperialist Extraction and Class Rule. (9/09/2026). Accessed on 19/09/26 from, https://www.writingsonthewind.com/post/the-african-border-as-an-instrument-of-imperialist-extraction-and-class-rule

14. Southern African Development Community. SADC Macroeconomic Statistics Bulletin Year 2023. (November 2024). Accessed 22/08/26 from, https://www.sadc.int

15. This corruption is rarely understood objectively. No comprador ruling class will be happy to keep the old, vested capitalist and imperialist interests in riches, while they remain relatively poor. In the first place these people are already corrupt to the core, for how else could they sell out their people to administer the affairs of their masters? The raw routes of plunder pursued by the Europeans and settlers were closed, so they resorted to the easiest route – bribes and robbing the state and the national resources, amid cosy relationships with the imperialist powers, who set up this scenario while playing innocent, pious and high-and-mighty. This corruption is part of their partnership.

16. On 'state capture' under the Zuma presidency see the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (the Zondo Commission) Report (Pretoria, 2022). On the capture of the limited decline in racial inequality by a new black elite, see Léo Czajka and Amory Gethin, 'Racial Inequality and Redistribution in Post-Apartheid South Africa', World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2025/27; summarised at https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/thirty-years-inequality-and-redistribution-post-apartheid (accessed 22/08/26).

17. Open Secrets. (2021, February 9). Credit Suisse: An enabler of mega-looting in Mozambique? Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-02-09-credit-suisse-an-enabler-of-mega-looting-in-mozambique/

18. For references and further reading on the information used in this section, see the following. Bond, P. (2006). Looting Africa: The economics of exploitation. Zed Books; University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Accessed on 28/08/26 from, https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/looting-africa-the-economics-of-exploitation-9781848137288.html; Bond, P. (2013). Sub-imperialism as lubricant of neoliberalism: South African "deputy sheriff" duty within BRICS. Third World Quarterly, 34(2), 251–270. Accessed on 5/09/26 from, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.775783; Miller, D., Saunders, R., & Oloyede, O. (2008). South African corporations and post-apartheid expansion in Africa: Creating a new regional space. African Sociological Review, 12(1), 1–19. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/asr/article/view/43517; Helen Suzman Foundation. (2021). The Southern African Development Community II – Economy: Levels, growth, structure, income distribution and happiness. Accessed on 7/09/26 from, https://hsf.org.za/publications/hsf-briefs/the-southern-african-development-community-ii-economy-levels-growth-structure-income-distribution-and-happiness

19. Bond, P. (2006). Looting Africa.

20. Bond, P. (2013). So, Are BRICS 'Sub-imperialists'? Accessed on 7/09/26 from, https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/so-are-brics-sub-imperialists-by-patrick-bond/

21. Miller et al. (2008).

22. World Bank Group. (14/03/2022). In Southern Africa, Leveling the Playing Field at Birth Critical to Reducing Inequality, Intergenerational Poverty. Accessed on 30/08/26 from, https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/afr/publication/in-southern-africa-leveling-the-playing-field-at-birth-critical-to-reducing-inequality-intergenerational-poverty

23. Czajka, L., & Gethin, A. (2025). Racial inequality and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa (World Inequality Lab Working Paper No. 2025/27). World Inequality Lab. Accessed on 30/08/26 from, https://wid.world/news-article/racial-inequality-and-redistribution-in-post-apartheid-south-africa/

24. Nkrumah, K. (1963). Africa must unite. Heinemann. Accessed on 10/09/2026 from, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/1963/africa-must-unite.pdf

25. Author's calculation from World Bank. (live document). Manufacturing, Value Added (Current US$). World Bank Open Data, indicator NV.IND.MANF.CD. Accessed 21 September 2026 from, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD

26. Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed 21 September 2026, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federation-of-Rhodesia-and-Nyasaland

27. Moyo, B. (2024). Impact of SADC Free Trade Area on Southern Africa's intra-trade performance: Implications for the African Continental Free Trade Area. Foreign Trade Review, 59(1), 146–180. Accessed on 10/09/2026 from, https://doi.org/10.1177/00157325231184669

28. Nkrumah, K. (1963).