South Africa is located at the southern edge of the African continent. It borders with Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Lesotho is virtually an island nation within South African territory. Taking only geographical location into consideration, Lesotho and Swaziland should strongly depend upon South Africa. Lesotho is just 300 kilometres away from those areas of South Africa that host half of all South African industrial activities and account for 79 per cent of the regional power’s mining output (Nel and Illgner 2001). In the case of Swaziland, the possibility exists to reach the world’s oceans by crossing Mozambican territory, although the transport infrastructure for this still needs to be upgraded. Assuming that the necessity of making shipments via South African territory leads to economic and political dependence upon that country, landlocked Botswana is also closely tied to South Africa. Zimbabwe is closer to the Mozambican coast. Mozambique and Namibia possess few sites suited to being deepwater harbours. Five continental members of SADC do not share borders with South Africa. Links from South Africa to Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter DR Congo), Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia are complicated by the fact that there is in each case always at least one country lying in between.