South Africa also became the knot that tied together the diverse histories and fortunes of Asia, Europe, and the United States. Like the rest of the continent, South Africa saw her people hunted down and carried away like slaves. Their labour was used to develop what later became the United States, and profits from the sale of their bodies as commodities became part of the capital that figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Eric Williams have proved was the basis of Western Europe’s nineteenth-century industrial revolution
From 1652, when first Dutch and French settlers, then British settlers streamed into South Africa and began forcibly taking land from the Africans, to the nineteenth century when the whole country became first a British colony and then a crinoline supervised by a white minority, the gold, diamonds, and mineral resources of South Africa were used to develop Western European industries— and later U.S. industry, too— and to build enormous gold reserves. Is there any bank, financial institution, or industry of any significant size in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan that is not indebted to the gold and diamonds of South Africa?
The majority of the industries inside South Africa are branches, subsidiaries, or partners of those in the West and their enormous profits are clearly rooted in the slave wages of black workers and in the poverty of the majority guaranteed by the cruel system of apartheid. The South African economy is still inextricably tied to that of the West, so it is unsurprising that even now Britain and the United States are hostile to calls for economic boycotts to motivate South African government and institutions to undo the legacy of apartheid in the country’s continued social inequality and Black poverty.