Stephen Sparks

Between 'artificial economics' and the 'discipline of the market': Sasol from parastatal to privatisation

This article explores the history of South Africa’s oil-from-coal project, Sasol, the petro-chemical company central to apartheid South Africa’s response to oil sanctions. Contrary to popular perception, South African interest in synthetic fuel pre-dates anti-apartheid sanctions. Anglovaal, a private mining company, acquired rights to the German Fischer–Tropsch process for converting coal into liquid fuel in the 1930s, and its subsidiary, SATMAR, converted torbanite into petrol and was an important precursor to Sasol. Like Germany, South Africa possessed no indigenous source of oil, and dependence on imports came to be seen as a strategic and economic vulnerability. Afrikaner nationalist reluctance to commit moneys to Anglovaal to build an oil-from-coal plant led to Sasol’s establishment as a parastatal. Even so, this article argues, the project possessed enough ‘Smutsian features’ to attract criticism from Afrikaner nationalists.The low cost of black labour in the early apartheid era was important to the project’s initial financial viability, but the article argues that it was the state’s interventions to regulate the fuel market, discipline the oil multinationals and massively subsidise oil-from-coal which saved the project from obsolescence. Energetic management also mattered: with low oil prices preventing oil-from-coal expansion during the 1960s, Sasol leveraged state support to facilitate diversification into the wider petro-chemical industry. After Sharpeville, Sasol spearheaded South Africa’s increasingly isolationist oil strategy, while, at the same time, Sasol managers became increasingly defensive about their dependence on state support. Sasol’s privatisation in 1979 was, however, precipitated by the need to fund two massive new oil-from-coal plants in the aftermath of the oil shock and Iranian revolution to meet the apartheid state’s strategic priorities. Sasol’s new hybrid identity as a company with private shareholders enjoying public subsidies continues to be controversial.

Crude Politics: The ANC, the Shipping Research Bureau and the Anti-Apartheid Oil Boycott

Abstract The workings of the anti-apartheid oil boycott have attracted little scholarly attention to date. Their symbolic importance and contribution to the significant escalation of financial cost for the Apartheid state has been noted, as has the role of Western states and multinational oil companies and Middle Eastern oil states in undermining the boycott. This article focuses on an aspect of the boycott which has received insufficient attention: the role in the boycott of the African National Congress (ANC) and of the Shipping Research Bureau (SRB), the Dutch anti-apartheid organisation specially established in 1979 to trace oil shipments to South Africa. Through a close reading of under-utilised source materials, the article analyses the ANCs handling of the SRBs identification of Middle Eastern anti-apartheid allies as the primary source of oil supplies to South Africa throughout the length of the boycott. The SRBs ‘anti-apartheid forensics’ was hamstrung by the ANCs asymmetrical emphasis on the collaboration of Western oil companies with Apartheid. Dependence on invaluable anti-Apartheid solidarities of various kinds constrained the ANCs ability to act vis-à-vis allies, who in pursuing their own interests, were in violation of the boycott.

Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town

it requires to endure for the foreseeable future. Perhaps Cavanagh’s most notable contribution in this work is his success in illuminating a remarkable, and unexpected, continuity between the two case studies of Griqua Philippolis and Afrikaner Orania. As the author’s deft interweaving of the two case studies unfolds, so this continuity emerges as less and less surprising. Cavanagh argues that much of the continuity is due to the extraordinary ‘resilience of the structures of settler colonialism’ (99). Rather than fall into the common trap of affording the 46-year period of apartheid disproportionate influence on the present, the author has highlighted ‘a much longer history of South African dispossession’ (100). Both the Griquas of Philippolis and the Afrikaners of Orania dispossessed others before establishing sovereignty over a particular place, while also risking subsequent removal and dispossession themselves. This shared, tenuous relationship to land is what makes this comparative analysis work; the case studies are not exceptional, rather they represent many other examples in a long history of dispossession and repossession in the South African context, followed by yet more dispossession and repossession.