Selling Apartheid: South Africa's Global Propaganda War
- ISBN-10
- 1431422533
- ISBN-13
- 9781431422531
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-12-01
- Publisher
- Jacana Media
- Authors
- Ron, Nixon
Description
“This is an important story that needs to be told about the apartheid government’s global lobbying effort …” – Eleanor Holmes Norton, US House of Representatives “This is a tale of intrigue, rich characters and large chequebooks, played out in all the Western capitals. This book is for those who want to understand the full intricacies of the Washington–London–Bonn–Pretoria relationship during the years of white minority rule, and the tough strategic and moral questions it raised.” – Anton Harber, Caxton Professor of Journalism, Wits University Selling Apartheid tells the story of the South African propaganda campaign, run with military precision, which involved a worldwide network of supporters, including global corporations with business operations in South Africa, conservative religious organisations and an unlikely coalition of liberal US black clergy and anti-communist black conservatives aligned with right-wing Cold War politicians. A large focus of the campaign was put on the United States because as its one-time coordinator, Eschel Rhoodie, wrote: “America dominates Western thought as far as Africa is concerned.” Not even the exposure of the programme by South African journalists in the late 1970s, which would bring down a president and send Rhoodie on the run, would stop the worldwide campaign. In fact, it would expand and morph into a much larger and subtler operation. It would end in the early 1990s, only after domestic problems caused the government to focus its energies on issues at home. The book details interviews with many of the players, such as South African government ministers and civil servants, corporate leaders, anti-apartheid leaders and others, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the attempt to sell apartheid abroad. In addition, thousands of previously unreleased records from both the South African and the United States archives will help shed light on the scope of the campaign and reveal an astonishing story. “During the course of writing this book, I have asked many people just how successful the efforts of the South African government were to try to influence world policy-makers and ward off the inevitable. In other words, what did Pretoria accomplish by spending hundreds of millions of dollars over nearly five decades on its campaigns to win hearts and minds overseas? Neither the commissions set up by the South African government to investigate secret funding nor the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ever attempted to answer the question of what the apartheid government received for the billions it spent on lobbying, setting up front groups and companies, and buying off politicians and journalists. Part of the problem lies with the absence of records. It is common knowledge that the apartheid government deliberately and systematically destroyed thousands of pages of records related to its propaganda activities before the handover of power to the ANC in 1994.” – Ron Nixon
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