Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years

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Robert Kinloch Massie (1997). Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years. Nan A. Talese / Doubleday (New York).

Type	book
Scope	Wider apartheid literature
Method	archival narrative
Period studied	1652–1994
Regions	South Africa, United States, Angola, Namibia, Rhodesia
Themes	sanctions divestment, politics ideology elections, business and state, macro fiscal finance debt, resistance social movements, origins segregation, bantustans removals influx, transition post apartheid
Citation key	massie1997

Argument

Massie traces how the United States and South Africa influenced each other from colonial contact to the 1994 election. He argues that US federal policy was constrained by cold-war logic, so the initiative passed to churches, universities, pension funds and city/state governments. These bodies moved through incremental stages of commitment from shareholder resolutions to divestment. The book maintains that sanctions, capital flight and the 1985 debt standstill limited the Pretoria government's choices, split the white constituency and destroyed business confidence, thereby helping bring a negotiated outcome rather than race war. It is narrative political and institutional history with biographical portraits.

Evidence and method

Interviews (over 150, including Tutu, Crocker, McFarlane, Sullivan, Bok); archives (Kennedy Library, Diggs Collection, ICEOP/OIC Sullivan papers, ACOA Amistad, Gerhart BCM collection); SAIRR Survey of Race Relations; New York Times and South African press; congressional hearings; Arthur D. Little Sullivan reports; IRRC and ICCR documents; memoirs (Mandela, Crocker, de Klerk, Woods); secondary works such as Nattrass, Houghton, Lipton, Wilson, Kane-Berman.

Place in the debates

• Do sanctions/disinvestment work, or do they backfire (perversity thesis)? (see Sanctions, disinvestment and the anti-apartheid movement). Strongly pro-effectiveness: argues that economic pressure imposed a stiff tax on the economy, destroyed business confidence, split the Afrikaner community and aided peaceful transition, and that predictions of intensified Afrikaner resolve were wrong.
• Constructive engagement vs sanctions in US policy (see Sanctions, disinvestment and the anti-apartheid movement). Critical of Crocker's constructive engagement as ineffective and slow to change; documents its collapse after 1985-86 and the Congress override of Reagan's veto.
• Sullivan Principles: workplace reform vs withdrawal (see Sanctions, disinvestment and the anti-apartheid movement). Sees the Principles as useful insider pressure but insufficient; notes activists' critiques, and Sullivan's 1987 shift to total withdrawal.
• Capitalism and apartheid: functional or in tension (see Liberal vs revisionist: was apartheid functional or dysfunctional for capitalist growth?). Notes the debate (Lipton, Wolpe, Oppenheimer) but mainly stresses that apartheid's costs and inefficiencies taxed the economy and that business pressed for reform after Sharpeville and in 1985.

Findings

• Verwoerd deliberately starved homeland development, setting aside a tiny share of what the Tomlinson Commission advised. (p. 49)

  Of the commission's suggested minimum financing to bring economic vitality to the homelands, Verwoerd set aside less than two percent.

• Verwoerd explicitly preferred white supremacy to growth. (p. 53)

  poor and white than rich and mixed

• Gold's fixed price forced mine owners to hold down labour costs, giving rise to compounds, migrant labour and punitive controls. (p. 73)

  it was at the mines that key economic elements of South Africa's system of racial domination-workers' compounds, migrant labor at subsistence wages, and punitive controls-originated.

• Sharpeville triggered immediate capital flight and a reserves drain. (p. 80)

  On June 16, 1960, the New York Times reported that South Africa's reserves had dropped twenty-five percent, or more than $95 million.

• Growing manufacturing conflicted with Verwoerd's influx-control and separate-development goals. (p. 77)

  The more manufacturing grew, the more the government would be faced with a large and permanent urban African population who needed housing, utilities, medical care, food, and schooling.

• US direct investment in South Africa expanded rapidly after 1945. (p. 78)

  By 1960 U.S. direct investment-that is, the asset value of majority-owned subsidiaries-exceeded $475 million.

• Massie's thesis that sanctions constrained Pretoria and helped yield a peaceful settlement. (p. xxviii)

  The gradual tightening of the economic noose, far from bringing the intensification of Afrikaner resolve predicted by so many foreign policy professionals, in fact limited the choices available to the government

• Business leaders requested a radical change of policy after Sharpeville, showing early business-state tension. (p. 82)

  a demand from the men who run the nation's economy for a radical change of policy.

• By 1985 South Africa's foreign debt and Chase's refusal to roll over loans triggered the debt standstill and a sharp rand fall. (p. 818)

  the rand had fallen to thirty-four cents to the dollar

Evidence ledger

Sources used

Source	Kind	Period	How used
Carnegie Commission report on the Poor White Question in South Africa (1932)	commission or official report	1932	Supplies the figures on white poverty that frame the Volkscongres and the rise of Afrikaner nationalist politics.
Tomlinson Commission report (appointed 1952, published 1956)	commission or official report	1952-1956	Shows that the homelands needed massive capital inflows and that Verwoerd set aside less than two percent of the recommended funding.
Eiselen Commission report, 'Education for Natives as a Separate Race' (1951)	commission or official report	1951	Documents the intent of Bantu education and the share of African schools run by missions.
South African government commission report of 1941 on manufacturing dependence	commission or official report	1941	Supports the argument that the state recognised the need for a domestic manufacturing base.
U.S. direct investment figures and statements by trade mission head Hendrik van Eck (1961)	national accounts macro	1914-1961	Quantifies growth of U.S. investment in South Africa from $50.7m prewar to about $600m in 1961.
South African Institute of Race Relations, Survey of Race Relations (annual, 1960-1994/95)	official statistical series	1960-1995	Principal source for South African events, statistics, quotations, elections, violence, and economic indicators after 1970.
Arthur D. Little, Inc. reports to the Sullivan Signatories (annual from 1978)	company records or reports	1978-1990s	Provides data on signatory numbers, compliance ratings, worker numbers, and corporate spending under the Sullivan Principles.
Investor Responsibility Research Center annual surveys and 'How Institutions Voted'	secondary literature compilation	1975-1990	Tracks shareholder votes and institutional reasoning on South Africa resolutions.
Charles C. Diggs Jr. Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (incl. Diggs Trip Report, questionnaire to U.S. firms)	state archives	1970s	Documents Diggs's 1971 trip, his questionnaires to firms and corporate refusals to reply, and a State Department memo.
ICEOP Collection and Leon Sullivan/OIC Collection, Temple University	company records or reports	1975-1980s	Traces the formation, drafting and administration of the Sullivan Principles and company correspondence.
American Committee on Africa archives (Amistad Collection, Tulane; active files, New York)	union or movement records	1960s-1980s	Documents the organizing, conferences and bank and divestment campaigns of the U.S. anti-apartheid movement.
Gail Gerhart Black Consciousness Movement Collection (SASO newsletters, trial documents)	union or movement records	1970s	Source for black consciousness positions on bantustans and foreign investment.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library files (NSF, POF, oral histories)	state archives	1960-1963	Source for Kennedy administration deliberations on South Africa, Portugal and the Azores base.
U.S. congressional hearings and reports (House Africa Subcommittee, Senate Foreign Relations, etc.)	parliamentary debates	1966-1986	Evidence on corporate activities and legislative debate over sanctions.
The Ethical Investor, COFI Report, Harvard Austin Report, and the Harvard/Columbia/Yale/church investment committee reports	company records or reports	1969-1987	Traces institutional decision-making stages on South African investments.
Author interviews (more than 150, e.g. Sullivan, Crocker, Tutu, McFarlane, Robinson, Bok, Fredericks)	interviews oral history	1986-1993	Supplies recollections of key participants and internal deliberations.
Newspapers: New York Times, South African press (Rand Daily Mail, Cape Times, Star, Argus), Harvard Crimson, Columbia Spectator	newspapers periodicals	1960-1995	Primary basis for event chronology, quotes, and public reactions.
Opinion surveys: Schlemmer studies, Markinor polls, CASE study (Orkin), Feldberg survey	household or labour survey microdata	1970s-1986	Evidence on black and business opinion on disinvestment and sanctions.
Shipping Research Bureau reports on oil embargo violations	international trade or finance data	1981-1990	Shows South Africa paying about $2 billion a year to circumvent the oil embargo.
Kibbe and Hauck, Leaving South Africa (IRRC, 1988); Budlender, Assessing US Corporate Disinvestment (CASE 1989)	secondary literature compilation	1986-1989	Documents the terms of U.S. firms' withdrawals.
Hauck and Voorhes, Two Decades of Debate (IRRC, 1983)	secondary literature compilation	1960s-1983	Compilation on corporate and state divestment campaigns and the congressional climate.

Inference

Quantification: Illustrative figures.

Narrative political and institutional history. It uses chronological case studies (Verwoerd, ANC, Kennedy administration, corporate and university divestment) built on archives, interviews, press and official reports, with portraits of individuals as causal agents. The sanctions-effects claim rests on assembled economic indicators and testimony, not formal tests.

Key claims

Claim	Basis	Strength
Apartheid South Africa depended on foreign capital and technology, and U.S. investment grew sharply after 1945. (p. 76)	U.S. direct investment figures, Export-Import Bank loans and company histories, compiled from secondary sources.	Partial data
After Sharpeville, capital flight and a fall in reserves shook the South African economy. (p. 79)	New York Times report on reserves, press accounts of the Johannesburg exchange, and a government reserve figure.	Partial data
Kennedy-era U.S. policy toward South Africa was a contradictory 'two-pronged approach' shaped by cold war and NATO/Azores concerns. (p. 127)	JFK Library memoranda, Rusk aide-mémoire, Bowles and Bundy correspondence, and State Department policy studies.	Systematic data
The Sullivan Principles produced limited reform and became a vehicle for corporate cover. (p. 526)	Arthur D. Little compliance reports, critics' statements and ICEOP archival correspondence.	Partial data
Institutional investors moved through incremental stages from proxy voting to divestment, driven by student and church activism. (p. 431)	Author's case studies of Harvard, Columbia, churches and pension funds, shareholder-vote data from IRRC, and interviews.	Partial data
The 1985 debt crisis and sanctions imposed real economic costs and limited the options of the white regime. (p. 592)	SAIRR survey data, debt standstill documents, rand exchange rates, trade data and news accounts.	Partial data
The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and corporate withdrawals followed from bipartisan congressional pressure after the Reagan constructive engagement policy failed. (p. 618)	Congressional records, interviews with Lugar staff and McFarlane, Crocker's memoir, and press reports.	Illustrative or anecdotal

The author's caveats

The author flags that some archives are incomplete or lost, for example the original responses to the Longstreth-Rosenbloom letter and TransAfrica's historical files. He notes that the exact number of U.S. firms in South Africa was open to interpretation, and that poll results on disinvestment were disputed. He also suggests that the managers' voting threshold could be tested empirically but was not.

Gaps in the evidence

The argument that foreign pressure helped end apartheid is never tested against alternative causes, such as domestic unrest, the end of the cold war, or demographic and labour-market change. A counterfactual or econometric comparison would be needed, for example firm-level data on divestment and exit, capital-flow series from the Reserve Bank, and trade data. Much of this existed then but is scattered. Black South African opinion on sanctions is based on a few contested surveys, and South African government and Reserve Bank archives, now open, would show how officials weighed pressure.

Replicability: Data described but not public.