ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on US state activity, providing only essential details on changes in southern Africa and domestic US politics. The anticapitalist content of the Council on African Affairs's work was sufficient to have it put on the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations in 1948. American policy toward South Africa and its white-ruled neighbors during the pre-1975 period can be characterized as "non-crisis policy." The white settler classes in Angola, Mozambique, and Rhodesia had developed economic and political structures that blocked the development of a black business class, and prevented an orderly transition to the type of neocolonialism predominant in the rest of Africa. While the Truman administration was preoccupied with the cold war in Europe, there were important changes taking place in South Africa that presaged the future dilemma of US policy. South Africa as an issue in itself was of little concern to the Truman administration.
