Apartheid, colonialism and the Cold War: The United States and southern Africa, 1945-1952

This dissertation examines the relations between the United States and the region of southern Africa during the years of the Truman administration. While focusing on American policy toward the Union of South Africa at the advent of apartheid, this study also explores the closely connected issues of the decolonization of the Third World, American relations with the Western European imperial powers, race relations in the United States and in southern Africa, and the relationship between white racism and anti-communism in the Western alliance. Considerable use is made of official U.S. government papers, especially from the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as newspapers and journals of the period. While liberal and moderate Americans like Harry Truman hoped ideally to build a "free world" alliance which would include greater racial equality, their overriding concern for opposing the expansion of Soviet and other left-wing influence around the globe led them to embrace without discrimination all anti-communists. This policy seemed especially justified to Washington by the international crises, culminating in the Korean War, which characterized the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Truman administration chose to downplay the rise of virulent white racism in South Africa and allied itself closely with the strongly anti-communist Afrikaner nationalist government of Daniel F. Malan. The United States government in these years also built and maintained intimate ties with its fellow members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, including the British, Portuguese, and Belgian rulers of the colonies of southern Africa. The rich uranium mines of the Belgian Congo and South Africa proved central to American policy toward the region. Official U.S. interests in the region--strategic, economic, and political--combined with white American ambivalence about racial equality to forge powerful American support for white authority in southern Africa during the formative years of the Cold War and apartheid.