Effects of Cold War on Africa

The Impact of the Cold War and the Fall of the Berlin Wall on Southern Africa

John Daniel

Southern Africa’s immersion as a region into ‘the international civil war of the twentieth century’, as Sue Onslow (2009: 2) has described the Cold War, came relatively late in that seven-decade long conflict and lasted only a short period, no more than two decades. Yet the price paid in human and material terms was horrendous, arguably, as I have suggested elsewhere, ‘one of the great crimes of the twentieth century’ (Daniel in Onslow 2009: 50). The gradual winding down of the Cold War in the latter half of the 1980s likewise impacted on events in the south of the region, contributing significantly both to ending a decade of bloodshed as well as to the early 1990s transition to democracy in South Africa. The fall of the wall in Berlin was unquestionably one of the defining images of the twentieth century but it was not the decisive trigger to change in southern Africa. It was, as I will argue, a separate cold war-related development prior to the fall which was the greater catalyst. But first the terrible impact of the Cold War, a catastrophic legacy little recognized by the South African public of the present day. The politician most responsible for the catastrophe of the Cold War in Southern Africa was PW Botha. In 1966, he assumed the post of Minister of Defence in the National Party government. Up to this point, the South African government’s primary security concern had been the rising tide of African nationalism and the threat which European decolonisation from Africa was seen as posing to continue white-minority hegemony in the south of the continent. PW Botha’s vision of regional security was, however, broader. According to a South African Defence Force (SADF) submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), he conceptualized the threat to South Africa within the context of the ‘East-West ideological conflict’. In his view, the ‘West was

137

The Impact...