AHC/WI: Prosperous South Africa

I'm not sure exactly what the limits of this site are on "evil" scenarios, but I'll add this one:

Apartheid South Africa and Israel jointly develop working nuclear weapons and a delivery system according to the Vela incident in 1979, and regardless of whether it's public knowledge or not, the South African elite decide this means apartheid isn't going to go away.

After this, Israel's war in Southern Lebanon gets a lot uglier than it did before, and Israel is forced to do things that alienate it further from the US. South Africa provides massive loans to Israel as well as weapons sales, and many Israeli weapons manufacturing companies relocate to South Africa to take advantage of cheap black labor.

South Africa becomes a major arms exporter, taking Israel's place, and becomes known as the only large arms exporter willing to make deals with extremely despotic regimes. Due to their status as a nuclear power, they ignore pleas to let Namibia go, and eventually it is accepted as the status quo for better or worse, similar to the occupation of Eastern Europe by the USSR.

Presumably after making big-dollar deals with countries like North Korea, NCP Sudan, Iran, and expansionist Indonesia there would be extremely strict embargoes put into place against South Africa by the rest of the world, but South Africa suffers less in this scenario than countries like Iran in the same situation due to a porous border in the Kalahari desert to smuggle goods from bribe-able neighbors and the ability to grow most of their own food. The (white) people suffer a little but not as much as people in Iran OTL. We also see that OTL the white elite remained overall wealthy under sanctions.

Then the commodities boom happens in the 2000's, and countries that have less regard than others for human rights situations (China) become more willing to make deals for South Africa's vast mineral resources.

As the commodities boom winds down, the pressure on Apartheid South Africa to reform grows too loud to ignore, as its (white) citizens are not eager to return to the lean times. Because of this, the South African government wildly spreads misinformation about the terrorism of South African blacks (Israel-Palestine style) and tries to covertly assassinate leaders of the BNC, with mixed success.

They then announce the end of apartheid in ~2012 with a new constitution in which blacks have equal rights (but a constitution in which minority voices do not have much of an impact)... and then unceremoniously dump the eastern half of the country under the guise of an independence referendum. The US and friends are furious, but this is enough of an excuse for diplomatically isolated states such as Russia and Iran to drop the embargo.

South Africa now consists of a majority white/colored Western Cape, Northern Cape, and a colonial-style administered Namibia, and the government scurries to prop up Mugabe-style dictators in the rest of the dumped provinces and encourages conflicts between them. At the same time an Israel-style settlement policy is initiated.

This gives you a relatively prosperous South Africa by way of not including poor people in the country. I am a little ashamed to have written something so horrific as 2015 Apartheid South Africa, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

I think this scenario will lead to SA being far poorer than it is today, whites included. A continuation of apartheid would have seen the economy continue to shrink And the government would have run out of money by some point. There would also have been an even more serious skills shortage, as there is even more white emigration but at the same time there aren't skilled black people available to take up jobs.

Also, there's no way that the eastern provinces would just be abandoned, so to speak. There are large numbers of whites in the eastern part of the country and there is no way a white government would give up places like Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban without fight.

Your scenario is an interesting thought experiment along the lines of 'Make apartheid and South Africa as bad as possible' but it doesn't fulfil the WI of making SA more prosperous.
 
Marius, I think you're right for several reasons I hadn't considered before:

I think this scenario will lead to SA being far poorer than it is today, whites included. A continuation of apartheid would have seen the economy continue to shrink And the government would have run out of money by some point.

I had hoped to offset this by transplanting the Israeli defense industry to SA, but I can see the numbers are just not proportional for it to make up for a continued embargo. There really isn't a solution to this because the geopolitics don't allow for it.

Although in a true worst case scenario, South Africa could create and lead a coalition of apartheid states in Angola, Rhodesia, etc backed up by nuclear weapons, but that's just getting into the realm of silly horror at this point.


Also, there's no way that the eastern provinces would just be abandoned, so to speak. There are large numbers of whites in the eastern part of the country and there is no way a white government would give up places like Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban without fight.

Perhaps instead of abandoning those cities, South Africa could be more like a spider web and create more "Lesothos" that they can ignore and not spend money on developing. That would tie in nicely with a settlement policy were it not for the problem of attracting immigrants to a suffering country.
 
Perhaps instead of abandoning those cities, South Africa could be more like a spider web and create more "Lesothos" that they can ignore and not spend money on developing. That would tie in nicely with a settlement policy were it not for the problem of attracting immigrants to a suffering country.

I've seen suggestions for partition from the 1980s that had a core white SA around the Cape, with land corridors connecting what is now Gauteng, and Durban to this core state.

Just on a point of fact, Lesotho was not created by South Africa, it was always administered by Britain. A better example would be one of the bantustans, such as Transkei or KwaZulu.
 

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I always thought that it is fairly well off. I have been in Capetown some ten years ago, and aside from some exotics it looked like prosperous city. They also seem to have money to burn as they wanted to organise some big football games. So they looked like rich and acted like rich... :confused:
 
I always thought that it is fairly well off. I have been in Capetown some ten years ago, and aside from some exotics it looked like prosperous city. They also seem to have money to burn as they wanted to organise some big football games. So they looked like rich and acted like rich... :confused:

The cities are relatively well off, and most whites - and a growing proportion of black people - live Western middle class lives.

That said, there are high levels of inequality, and unemployment is at least 25%.

South Africa is a high-skill economy, with the vast majority of unemployed people being unskilled (among graduates there is effectively full employment).
 
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