There is a rich historiography dealing with issues such as American missionary involvement in South Africa from the late-19thC; the impact of Garveyism and Du Boisian thought on pan-Africanism and popular radicalism; the engagement of African American scholars and in South Africa in the interwar years (Ralph Bunche, Max Yergan); as well as growing involvement of major funding institutions like the Carnegie Corporation in comparative`race-relations’ research.
The Second World War proved to be an inflection point. Many of the pan-Africanist and Africanist solidarity links with South Africa were severed as a result of the Cold War and the retraction of African American radicalism. Yet, international critiques of apartheid South Africa at the United Nations, the Unesco statements on race, and growing international awareness of systemic civil rights abuses and political repression (Defiance Campaign, Treason Trial, Sharpeville) meant that official American involvement in South Africa became inescapable.
This presentation focusses on US foreign policy and policy-making communities at multiple levels and also in long-term perspective, with closer attention to popular, corporate (research bodies) and governmental responses. In taking a broad view of such relationships, while focussing on particular connections in greater depth, it argues that American involvement in South Africa and in the politics of segregation was episodic and rarely sustained – while at the same time consequential. South Africa’s problems often served to refract the United States’s internal racial divide, while also offering a means to project American internationalism, knowledge and anti-colonialism.