In Black and Gold, Anthony Sampson provides an original insight into the critical frontier of apartheid South Africa – the relationship between international big business and the Black political movements on which the country’s future eventual rested upon.
He traces vividly the dramatic confrontations when the diamond and gold millionaires first employed African miners over a century ago, thereby creating a new kind of urban African nationalism. He describes how the ferocity of Afrikaner apartheid was followed in the sixties by the piling-in of Western multinationals, which Africans rightfully saw as paymasters and apologists for apartheid.
In the climactic chapters he tells the inside story of the attempts by businessman to defuse the crisis and to come to terms – culminating in secret meetings following the two emergencies of 1985 and 1986, and the lobbying and passionate arguments over disinvestment and sanctions.
This book does an excellent job at providing the historical context of how Azania (South Africa), despite the valiant struggle of many African patriots, became the illustrious paragon of a neocolonial polity that it is today, thus leaving the African majority still mired in subjugation to a european minority.
