The SADC region and white settler colonialism

Abstract

The current Southern African Development Community (SADC) was initially formulated as the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC) and was, to a certain extent, premised on liberation politics. One of its main objectives was to address the problem of the Apartheid regime, which was destabilising the Southern African region. SADC is driven by the objectives of development, peace, stability, and economic integration. While these objectives of the current SADC are laudable, this paper posits that they are not sustainable, so long as South Africa remains a malign regional hegemon and, at the same time, a white settler colony. In 1994, the Afrikan majority was not liberated from white settler colonialism. What occurred during the ‘negotiations’ was a transition from ‘slavery by coercion to slavery by consent’. This took the form of the triumph of the democratisation paradigm at the expense of the decolonisation paradigm, which is in line with liberation politics. Instead of State succession premised on the Nyerere doctrine, South Africa experienced government succession under the civil-rights based leadership of the African National Congress (ANC). The research question of this paper is: What is the relationship between the national question in South Africa and the regional question in the SADC region? This paper argues that the national question in South Africa must be resolved before South Africa, as the post-conquest New Afrika/Azania, can be an Afrikan-centred regional hegemon. Afrikans must go back to the liberation politics of SADCC to bring an end to South Africa and replace it with an independent New Afrika that is premised on Lembede’s idea of ‘Africa for the Africans’. The paper relies on the theory of functional developmentalism and Afrikanism/Garveyism as regionalism to interface the national question with the regional question.