of agricultural production, whose low prices
needed to be raised. This, in turn, led to riots in
the Copperbelt, where production and real
income were falling while basic foods were
costing more. Lack of investment in modern
mining equipment and exhaustion began to show
up in the copper mines. When the price of copper
did rise, production could not be expanded.
Although Kaunda had broken off relations with
the International Monetary Fund in 1988, he
could not halt the continuing depression, even in
the short term. Unrest and opposition, strikes and
disruption in the Copperbelt, undermined his
popularity. Unemployment escalated and stan-
dards of living fell rapidly. The mismanaged one-
party political system was doomed.
In October 1991 Kaunda accepted the de-
mand for multi-party elections. His United
National Independence Party was defeated by the
newly formed Multi-Party Democracy, whose
leader, Frederick Chiluba, was duly installed as
Zambia’s second president. Kaunda bowed to the
democratic will and retired.
Chiluba dominated the 1990s, his party
controlling the legislature. In December 2001,
however, it appeared the majority of the electo-
rate were looking for change. The results when
announced gave a narrow win to the ruling party
and its candidate Mwanawasa who despite allega-
tions of electoral fraud was sworn in as president
in January 2002. Zambia’s population growth was
rapid and by the new millennium had increased to
10.4 million; the people too remained sunk in
poverty with a standard of living only little above
that of Malawi.
The demise of white power in Rhodesia could
have been interpreted at the time as sealing the
fate of white rule in southern Africa. Indeed, only
ten years after the collapse of white rule in
Rhodesia, the white South African government
began negotiations which, it hoped, would lead
to a power-sharing constitution. The African
National Congress, the major but not the only
black participant in the negotiations, demanded
majority rule. The gap between these two posi-
tions was a wide one, but that there should be
negotiations at all in the 1990s in South Africa
had been unthinkable only a few years ago. There
are some parallels with Rhodesia. The application
of international sanctions, the isolation of South
Africa and the increasingly severe economic pres-
sure as the flow of foreign investment was reversed
finally convinced the government and the major-
ity of white South Africans that a solution had to
be found to the white–black conflict. The white
population was able to hold out longer.
The white population of South Africa forms a
much larger minority than that in Rhodesia. They
are not a few hundred thousand whites among
millions of black people, but 4 million. Nor are
South Africa’s whites comparatively recent immi-
grants; the great majority are South African-born,
and their families have lived in Africa for genera-
tions. The Afrikaners can look to historical roots
as far back as the seventeenth century, when their
ancestors settled on the Cape only some seventy
years after the first establishment of English
colonies in North America. Their motherland is
no longer in Europe but in Africa. But unlike the
settlers in North America they did not grow and
develop to outnumber by many times the indi-
genous peoples. Despite substantial English
immigration they remained a minority.
Yet the minority of whites in 1993 still claimed
rights to most of the available land and, through
ownership of the gold and diamond mines and
industry, dominate South Africa’s economy. The
earnings from mining exports allowed South
Africa to take off on a rapid industrial revolution
from the 1940s onwards on a Western model.
Industrial manufacture increased several times
over, making South Africa self-sufficient in many
manufactures and bringing to the white popula-
tion a prosperity comparable to that enjoyed
by Western nations. Although the black and
coloured peoples earned only a fraction of white
incomes, they also shared in the growing pros-
perity. As the South African government never
tired of pointing out, the country’s black citizens
had incomes comparable to the highest of any
black person in Africa.
This economic transformation had important
social and international repercussions. Afrikaners
were no longer poor farmers, and the division
between them and the ‘English’ lessened. Black,