Transformation or Preservation? the Nature of Capitalism in Post-apartheid Southern Africa

This paper provides a historical analysis of persistent problems with underdevelopment and uneven development in Southern Africa by examining preand post-liberation trajectories in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. The aim is to understand how capitalism in Southern Africa impacts struggles to transform social and economic relations in the pursuit of broad-based and sustained improvements in human and natural well-being. The core assumption is that an ‘unreconstructed’ or blandly reformed kind of capitalism will merely entrench inequalities and unacceptable levels of underdevelopment and that, unfortunately, this is essentially the only kind of ‘vision’ on offer from the region’s political leaders. Generations of uneven development, combined with neo-liberal economic reform by largely accommodationist post-liberation governments constrained by an increasingly competitive global economy produces converging pressures on states and peoples to accept ‘the market’ (and now more often international finance) and its harsh demands as the sine qua non of any feasible socio-economic system. These pressures make it very difficult for the ‘targets of development’ to formulate and implement independent strategies suited to their own particular needs and explain why political transitions to independence and nominal democracy have not produced radical socioeconomic transformations. An increasingly bifurcated debate, at elite and civil society levels, on the region’s future ensures that struggles against capitalism and the exclusion of the region’s peoples from a stake in decision-making are again renewed across Southern Africa.