Kontextmaschine

17th August 2022

Post reblogged from Immortalism and Interplanetarianism with 802 notes

andmaybegayer:
andmaybegayer:
Taking my cousin to visit the Nelson Mandela House museum, there was a tour guide there with a group of New Yorkers there from some educational programme. There was a very interesting reaction when he told them that the CIA was responsible for giving Mandela up to the Apartheid government in 1962, I forget that it’s not common knowledge that the USA saw Apartheid South Africa as a bulwark against communism in Africa.
It’s also easy to forget that the years before Mandela’s arrest overlap pretty much completely with the activity of MLK the USA. The American Civil Rights Act only came into effect a few years later.
The Cold War West in general backed themselves into a corner when dealing with Apartheid South Africa because on the one hand, Nazis had made blatant racial segregation uncool by the end of the 50’s, but on the other hand, the opposition to the Apartheid government consisted primarily of socialists and communists and was in many ways a weird semi-third-worldist movement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/16/the-cias-mysterious-role-in-the-arrest-of-nelson-mandela/

As the only industrial economy in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa was one of the most critical dominos in Domino Theory; a communist South Africa would be even more useful as an African base for further communist expansion than Angola, having an impact like or even greater than Cuba in Latin America or China in Asia. Its command of the Horn of Africa also offered influence over sea lanes. Recall that from 1967 to 1975 the Suez Canal was closed, and western powers were on guard against attempts to secure the Indian Ocean as a communist redoubt

Tagged: history