ABSTRACT
Some African leaders forecast what was to happen and advocated preventive action, but that advice was in general ignored in the stampede for the independence on offer from the colonial powers. The goal of independence appeared to be such an improvement on the dependent colonial state that few even bothered to try to look beyond it. Political union was a necessary prerequisite to economic union. That view was endorsed by the Casablanca bloc, the opposing view by the Monrovia bloc. Both groups were subsumed by the Organization of African Unity in 1963 where the views of the latter bloc gained the ascendancy. The Union of South Africa was formed from the four former British colonies of the Cape, Natal, Orange River and Transvaal in 1910. Its birth was long and painful. South Africa became the continent’s strongest economic power based on minerals but with sufficient size to support the largest manufacturing sector of any economy in Africa.
