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White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialisim and Anti-Commumisim vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela
Based upon exhaustive research in all presidential libraries from Hoover to Clinton, the voluminous archives of the African National Congress [ANC] at Fort Hare University in South Africa, along with allied archives of the NAACP, the Ford and Rockefeller fortunes, etc., this is the most comprehensive account to date of the entangled histories of apartheid and Jim Crow that culminated in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in Pretoria. The author traces in detail the close ties between e.g. Mandela, Robeson, and Du Bois--among others--and how their working in tandem with the socialist camp (particularly the Soviet Union and Cuba) was the deciding factor (along with the struggles of Africans and their allies on both sides of the Atlantic) in compelling the reluctant retreat of the comrades-in-arms: apartheid and Jim Crow. However, weeks after the collapse of the Berlin Wall the apartheid regime chose to free Mandela and to legalize the ANC and its close ally, the South African Communist Party--while anticommunism, a major ideological weapon of the ruling class in Washington and Pretoria alike, surged--putting the Mandela government in a weakened position in the prelude to the nation's first democratic elections in 1994 and thereafter. Also detailed in these riveting pages are the allied struggles in Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Congo, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique, along with the massive solidarity movement in the U.S.--particularly among unions and students--that contributed mightily to victory. This is a story well worth studying as we continue to combat anticommunism--and struggle for socialism.
883 pages, Paperback
Published May 9, 2019
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About the author
Gerald Horne
73 books408 followersDr. Gerald Horne is an eminent historian who is Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. An author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews, his research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, war and the film industry.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 11, 2025
It’s fitting that a 900 page history on the fall of apartheid South Africa lands with such relevance today, as another settler colonial apartheid state - Israel - faces mounting global resistance in the midst of its ongoing genocide and relies on the same pillars that once propped up Pretoria: U.S. economic, military, and ideological support, and a racialized security doctrine that links anti-Blackness abroad with counterinsurgency at home. You would be remiss to ignore these parallels, as Horne describes mass student protests, calls to boycott divest and sanction, and liberal obfuscation that are as potent in 1975 as 2025.
Horne burrows into diplomatic cables, political speeches, FBI memos, and financial records to reveal how white supremacy in Southern Africa was a core node in the global order the U.S. sought to preserve. "Liberation in Southern Africa was not simply the result of slow moral evolution or international hand-wringing," Horne reminds us, "but the direct consequence of decisive ruptures in the global imperial order." With a refined dedication to dialectical materialism, Horne has once again cemented himself as THE people’s historian.
One of the book’s most significant contributions is its treatment of synthetic whiteness: the strategic alignment of disparate European and settler forces under the racialized umbrella of "the West." The U.S. was able to forge a pan-European white identity under the banner of settler colonialism and Jim Crow, while South Africa, due in part to the long-standing Boer-British tensions and its resultant Nationalist offshoots, could never fully consolidate whiteness in the same ideological way. This divergence haunted South Africa, particularly in the post-WWII years as it tried to secure legitimacy on the global stage. Horne shows how the U.S. consistently backed white-minority regimes in Africa, including colonial Portugal and apartheid South Africa, not in spite of their racism but because of their utility in the fight against global communism. Portugal, a fascist colonial power, remained in NATO’s good graces for decades precisely because it held the line in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The 1974 Carnation Revolution, which overthrew Lisbon’s fascist dictatorship, marked a geopolitical crisis for the U.S. that reverberated across Africa as formerly colonized states gained momentum.
Horne is also attentive to the internationalist consequences of anti-colonial struggle. Ghana’s independence in 1957, for instance, marked a major turning point, diplomatically and militarily, in the African continent’s push toward decolonization. Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana became an important supporter of the anti-apartheid movement. Similarly, the Soviet defense of Egypt during the Suez crisis helped solidify its image in the Global South as a defender of anti-imperialism, in contrast to the U.S. and its European allies. This gets at a key dynamic: the retreat of the traditional Western European imperial masters from the continent opened up possibilities for revolutionary developments on the one hand and the emergence of a new neocolonial regime propped up by the U.S. on the other.
Post-1975, with the defeat of U.S.-backed forces in Angola and the Cuban-Soviet alliance on the rise, Washington pivoted sharply toward counterrevolution. Horne is clear that this began not with Reagan, but with Carter, whose administration (for one example) fueled the rise of the Afghan mujahideen as part of a broader rollback strategy. Southern Africa’s role in the global order thus transformed to laboratory for counterinsurgency. South African police studied riot control in the U.S., just as the GILEE program today sends American police to Israel. The line from Soweto to Ferguson to Gaza is both structural and material.
The Cuban rout of South African forces in Angola (the first example of the apartheid state being struck down by a nonwhite army) gave the Global South a glimpse of what solidarity could achieve. For Washington, this was an existential crisis. It wasn’t just Angola that had to be “corrected”, but Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada…anywhere else where Havana’s example might inspire resistance. In this way, Angola became the flashpoint for a new phase of counter-revolution, especially in Latin America.
While mainstream liberal narratives credit apartheid’s fall to U.S. sanctions and elite diplomacy, Horne reveals a more grounded truth: it was mass African resistance, bolstered by material support from Cuba and the USSR, that forced the hand of capital. The U.S. State Department may have eventually soured on Pretoria, but it never stopped fearing the specter of socialism. Capital investments by the U.S. in Southern Africa ran deep, and when national liberation movements threatened those investments, liberal antiracism was quickly subordinated to liberal anticommunism.
In this light, Horne is especially astute in highlighting the ideological strain between the NAACP and the ANC. While the ANC embraced armed struggle and Pan-African solidarity, the NAACP was wedded to litigation and liberal alliances, its leadership often aligned with U.S. Cold War policy. The friction between these positions (and between domesticated Black leadership in the U.S. and revolutionary forces abroad) provides some of the book’s most clarifying insights. It was also pretty amazing to see (for the first time?) Horne document his own involvement in these various formations of domestic struggle against apartheid.
I’ve seen criticisms that say the book is bogged down in names and dates, but to me this is an archival account in the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois. Horne’s encyclopedic narrative introduces us not just to heads of state but to bankers, generals, unionists, spies, and revolutionaries, whose relationships and actions knit together a vast system of domination and resistance. If you want a single volume that shows how the Cold War functioned as a mask for the preservation of racial capitalism, this is it.
Horne’s closing remarks are perhaps most fitting:
“Yet what still unite[s the United States and South Africa is] that wealth redistribution remain[s] the order of the day. Until that lofty goal is attained, there will ever be unrest and the potential for revolution.”
Horne burrows into diplomatic cables, political speeches, FBI memos, and financial records to reveal how white supremacy in Southern Africa was a core node in the global order the U.S. sought to preserve. "Liberation in Southern Africa was not simply the result of slow moral evolution or international hand-wringing," Horne reminds us, "but the direct consequence of decisive ruptures in the global imperial order." With a refined dedication to dialectical materialism, Horne has once again cemented himself as THE people’s historian.
One of the book’s most significant contributions is its treatment of synthetic whiteness: the strategic alignment of disparate European and settler forces under the racialized umbrella of "the West." The U.S. was able to forge a pan-European white identity under the banner of settler colonialism and Jim Crow, while South Africa, due in part to the long-standing Boer-British tensions and its resultant Nationalist offshoots, could never fully consolidate whiteness in the same ideological way. This divergence haunted South Africa, particularly in the post-WWII years as it tried to secure legitimacy on the global stage. Horne shows how the U.S. consistently backed white-minority regimes in Africa, including colonial Portugal and apartheid South Africa, not in spite of their racism but because of their utility in the fight against global communism. Portugal, a fascist colonial power, remained in NATO’s good graces for decades precisely because it held the line in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. The 1974 Carnation Revolution, which overthrew Lisbon’s fascist dictatorship, marked a geopolitical crisis for the U.S. that reverberated across Africa as formerly colonized states gained momentum.
Horne is also attentive to the internationalist consequences of anti-colonial struggle. Ghana’s independence in 1957, for instance, marked a major turning point, diplomatically and militarily, in the African continent’s push toward decolonization. Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana became an important supporter of the anti-apartheid movement. Similarly, the Soviet defense of Egypt during the Suez crisis helped solidify its image in the Global South as a defender of anti-imperialism, in contrast to the U.S. and its European allies. This gets at a key dynamic: the retreat of the traditional Western European imperial masters from the continent opened up possibilities for revolutionary developments on the one hand and the emergence of a new neocolonial regime propped up by the U.S. on the other.
Post-1975, with the defeat of U.S.-backed forces in Angola and the Cuban-Soviet alliance on the rise, Washington pivoted sharply toward counterrevolution. Horne is clear that this began not with Reagan, but with Carter, whose administration (for one example) fueled the rise of the Afghan mujahideen as part of a broader rollback strategy. Southern Africa’s role in the global order thus transformed to laboratory for counterinsurgency. South African police studied riot control in the U.S., just as the GILEE program today sends American police to Israel. The line from Soweto to Ferguson to Gaza is both structural and material.
The Cuban rout of South African forces in Angola (the first example of the apartheid state being struck down by a nonwhite army) gave the Global South a glimpse of what solidarity could achieve. For Washington, this was an existential crisis. It wasn’t just Angola that had to be “corrected”, but Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada…anywhere else where Havana’s example might inspire resistance. In this way, Angola became the flashpoint for a new phase of counter-revolution, especially in Latin America.
While mainstream liberal narratives credit apartheid’s fall to U.S. sanctions and elite diplomacy, Horne reveals a more grounded truth: it was mass African resistance, bolstered by material support from Cuba and the USSR, that forced the hand of capital. The U.S. State Department may have eventually soured on Pretoria, but it never stopped fearing the specter of socialism. Capital investments by the U.S. in Southern Africa ran deep, and when national liberation movements threatened those investments, liberal antiracism was quickly subordinated to liberal anticommunism.
In this light, Horne is especially astute in highlighting the ideological strain between the NAACP and the ANC. While the ANC embraced armed struggle and Pan-African solidarity, the NAACP was wedded to litigation and liberal alliances, its leadership often aligned with U.S. Cold War policy. The friction between these positions (and between domesticated Black leadership in the U.S. and revolutionary forces abroad) provides some of the book’s most clarifying insights. It was also pretty amazing to see (for the first time?) Horne document his own involvement in these various formations of domestic struggle against apartheid.
I’ve seen criticisms that say the book is bogged down in names and dates, but to me this is an archival account in the tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois. Horne’s encyclopedic narrative introduces us not just to heads of state but to bankers, generals, unionists, spies, and revolutionaries, whose relationships and actions knit together a vast system of domination and resistance. If you want a single volume that shows how the Cold War functioned as a mask for the preservation of racial capitalism, this is it.
Horne’s closing remarks are perhaps most fitting:
“Yet what still unite[s the United States and South Africa is] that wealth redistribution remain[s] the order of the day. Until that lofty goal is attained, there will ever be unrest and the potential for revolution.”
April 7, 2022
Warning to the aspiring author: Keep in mind that a gigantic pile of chronologically arranged archival quotes will hardly make a book if you don't invest sufficient time in relentlessly cutting out the irrelevant parts, rewriting the draft and building a narrative that pulls all the strings together.
In this 900-page book, it is very rare to read three successive sentences that are interconnected and working towards assembling a transnational history of the rise and fall of the Apartheid regime. Admittedly Gerald Horne is a comrade who himself has been very active in the fight against the Apartheid, and I learned many interesting details from the book, but ahh, the name of the high school that the daughter of one insignificant pro-apartheid US officer went in South Africa wasn't one of them.
It is document after document, letter after letter, newspaper article after article that Horne's writing sucks the joy of living off your soul and not only once you find yourself asking "is the juice really worth the squeeze?"
Lo and behold: Apartheid regime took a lot support from the US imperialism, as the anti-apartheid forces from the global socialist forces. And it wasn't a coincidence that the "fall" of the Apartheid regime overlapped with the fall of socialism, making it a safe option to transfer the power to Mandela's ANC, which practically left all the culprits, murderers and torturers of Apartheid unpunished and their wealth and privileges untouched.
And why comrade Gerald Horne calls it a "liberation" is beyond me.
In this 900-page book, it is very rare to read three successive sentences that are interconnected and working towards assembling a transnational history of the rise and fall of the Apartheid regime. Admittedly Gerald Horne is a comrade who himself has been very active in the fight against the Apartheid, and I learned many interesting details from the book, but ahh, the name of the high school that the daughter of one insignificant pro-apartheid US officer went in South Africa wasn't one of them.
It is document after document, letter after letter, newspaper article after article that Horne's writing sucks the joy of living off your soul and not only once you find yourself asking "is the juice really worth the squeeze?"
Lo and behold: Apartheid regime took a lot support from the US imperialism, as the anti-apartheid forces from the global socialist forces. And it wasn't a coincidence that the "fall" of the Apartheid regime overlapped with the fall of socialism, making it a safe option to transfer the power to Mandela's ANC, which practically left all the culprits, murderers and torturers of Apartheid unpunished and their wealth and privileges untouched.
And why comrade Gerald Horne calls it a "liberation" is beyond me.
April 11, 2022
I have to admit this is the weakest Gerald Horne work that I have read to date. While it is superbly researched it is dry, hard to read, and is weighed down with minutiae that detracts from the important ideas. Horne tries so hard to cram every detail into this work that the big important ideas get lost in the mix.
The Thesis of "White Supremacy Confronted" is "that it is difficult to understand the decolonization of South Africa if one ignores contemporaneous events in North America, and indeed, the global correlation of forces more generally." In my opinion, that is a pretty weak thesis to begin with, far to broad and generalized to make an effective argument. You could make the same argument for just about any event in any place, but given the way the book is titled one can assume this will be about imperialism and anti-communism in North America affecting South Africa. That is essentially what this is about.
What do imperialism and anti-communism have to do with White Supremacy? If you know, you know. If you want to find out from reading this book be prepared to be confused. Honestly, I felt Horne answered this question better and more succinctly in his book "Black and Red. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963" so you might want to check that one out before even attempting this one.
The main ideas of this book is that US interest in S. African apartheid began during the Anglo-Boer war. Jim Crow ideas were imported from the US and put on steroids to create apartheid. In 1932 the Carnegie Corporation of New York released "The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission" which Horne argues is the blueprint for apartheid. This Report mainly improves the lives of Afrikaners at the expense of Africans.
During the 30s and 40's Afrikaners loved them some Nazi's so they were anti-Semitic as well as anti-Black racists. During the 50's,60's, and 70's there was pushback from Africans that mirrored the civil rights movements and Black Power movements that mirrored events in the US. This book had more acronyms and political organizations than you could shake a stick at and I could not keep track of who was who or what was what or why anybody was doing anything. Nelson Mandela was there. So was Paul Robeson. I had no idea who anybody else was or why they were important. The African pushback frightened US corporations who had huge investments in SA at the time and the US does what it does best when its money is threatened, it jumped in bed with the fascists and started to oppress the hell out of people. This naturally drove Africans to appeal to China and Russia for help.
I have to be honest, I kind of lost the plot by the time Horne got to the 80's and 90's. I was just exhausted from plowing through lines and lines of quotes from people I didn't know, acronym's of organizations I didn't recognize, and references to events I had no familiarity with. Horne assumes the reader will have an in depth familiarity with South African politics of the 20th century. My guy, I was in elementary school in 1994. I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia trying to figure out what he was talking about.
I would normally judge a book like this on how well its proved its thesis, but the thesis itself is too broad to make a strong argument. So do I feel like White Supremacy has been confronted? Not really. I feel like I read a list of disembodied events and quotes that maybe if I tried hard enough I could connect them in some meaningful way.
2.5 stars
The Thesis of "White Supremacy Confronted" is "that it is difficult to understand the decolonization of South Africa if one ignores contemporaneous events in North America, and indeed, the global correlation of forces more generally." In my opinion, that is a pretty weak thesis to begin with, far to broad and generalized to make an effective argument. You could make the same argument for just about any event in any place, but given the way the book is titled one can assume this will be about imperialism and anti-communism in North America affecting South Africa. That is essentially what this is about.
What do imperialism and anti-communism have to do with White Supremacy? If you know, you know. If you want to find out from reading this book be prepared to be confused. Honestly, I felt Horne answered this question better and more succinctly in his book "Black and Red. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963" so you might want to check that one out before even attempting this one.
The main ideas of this book is that US interest in S. African apartheid began during the Anglo-Boer war. Jim Crow ideas were imported from the US and put on steroids to create apartheid. In 1932 the Carnegie Corporation of New York released "The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission" which Horne argues is the blueprint for apartheid. This Report mainly improves the lives of Afrikaners at the expense of Africans.
During the 30s and 40's Afrikaners loved them some Nazi's so they were anti-Semitic as well as anti-Black racists. During the 50's,60's, and 70's there was pushback from Africans that mirrored the civil rights movements and Black Power movements that mirrored events in the US. This book had more acronyms and political organizations than you could shake a stick at and I could not keep track of who was who or what was what or why anybody was doing anything. Nelson Mandela was there. So was Paul Robeson. I had no idea who anybody else was or why they were important. The African pushback frightened US corporations who had huge investments in SA at the time and the US does what it does best when its money is threatened, it jumped in bed with the fascists and started to oppress the hell out of people. This naturally drove Africans to appeal to China and Russia for help.
I have to be honest, I kind of lost the plot by the time Horne got to the 80's and 90's. I was just exhausted from plowing through lines and lines of quotes from people I didn't know, acronym's of organizations I didn't recognize, and references to events I had no familiarity with. Horne assumes the reader will have an in depth familiarity with South African politics of the 20th century. My guy, I was in elementary school in 1994. I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia trying to figure out what he was talking about.
I would normally judge a book like this on how well its proved its thesis, but the thesis itself is too broad to make a strong argument. So do I feel like White Supremacy has been confronted? Not really. I feel like I read a list of disembodied events and quotes that maybe if I tried hard enough I could connect them in some meaningful way.
2.5 stars
September 22, 2021
A very good book, though I don't agree with everything it says. It is pretty dense and you'll have to take your time reading all of it. It'll certainly keep you busy for while. My suggestion: definitely read other books on the topics that it covers because it throws you in expecting you to know all the facts, so to speak. On another note: I recommend The Counter-Revolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne as well. But this book is definitely up there with that one.
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