Economic History Seminar

Du 02/10/2024 de 12:30 à 14:00

R1-09

SARKAR Jayita ( University of Glasgow)

An Anti-Decolonization Bloc. Rössing in Apartheid Namibia

Transnational capital developed Ro?ssing Uranium Limited in South Africa-controlled apartheid Namibia in the 1960s and 1970s. While official newspapers in Windhoek claimed that Ro?ssing was an outcome of renewed hopes of a nuclear energy renaissance after the 1973 oil shock, a closer look at the archives presents a different story. As international pressure increased on the South African government to relinquish its illegitimate control of Namibia—— evident in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in June 1971, activism of Sean MacBride as the UN Commissioner for Namibia, and the UN Decree 1 of December 1974—— foreign mining companies increased their extractivism of Namibian natural resources, including uranium. Fearing that an independent and universal Namibia would evict them, these companies began overmining, exporting raw materials and continuing to dispossess Black labor. Ro?ssing was similar but different: it was a combination of the old and the new. Built through majority funding from the Anglo- Australian Rio Tinto Zinc along with contributions from Canadian Rio Algom, French Total Compagnie Minie?re et Nucle?aire, and South African Industrial Development Corporation, it functioned as a secretive and repressive proto-state, while also coopting the language of corporate social responsibility of the 1970s through its philanthropic Ro?ssing Foundation. It was a joint-stock company established with White capital that was closely aligned locally with the German Sudwester settler identity of Swakopmund while dispossessing Black Native laborers toiling in Arandis, Damaraland. Based on corporate and business archives (Ro?ssing, Total Energies, and National Association of Manufacturers), international archives (UNESCO, UNCN, and United Nations), and activists’ collections (Barbara Rogers papers and CANUC), this chapter presents Ro?ssing as a transimperial reactionary bloc throughout the 1970s and 1980s determined first, to prevent independence of Namibia and second, to survive unscathed should independence arrive anyway.