South Africa’s ‘Africa Renaissance’ Project: Between Rhetoric and Practice

Abstract

South Africa's putative status in Africa as a regional and sub-regional hegemonic power is sometimes viewed from the prism of its exceptionalism and Afro-modernity. The study on which this article is based analyzed secondary data from print and electronic media to argue that although South Africa has shown mixed behavior in its foreign policy in Africa, neo-imperialism is not the most appropriate mode to conceptualize it. Contrary to the arguments of some studies that have unjustifiably placed South Africa's continental diplomacy in Africa within the orbit of neoimperialism or sub-imperialism, this paper argues that South African diplomacy in Africa is also captured within the orbit of its constitutional democracy. We argue that South Africa has collaborated with international capital to create unequal exchange between it and Africa. South Africa's African Renaissance rhetoric appears more of a response to the world economic order it found itself in at the end of apartheid than the purported African revival it projects.