Exporting Apartheid: A South African Intellectual's Incursions into Pan-African Politics, 1960-66

This paper will explore the migration of apartheid through the Southern African region, arguing that it is important to grasp this proliferation both at the levels of international relations and personal practice. In 1960, Ethiopia and Liberia tried to wrest Namibia (then known as South West Africa) from South Africa’s grip in a now largely forgotten example of pan-African solidarity. The two countries argued (ultimately unsuccessfully) at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that South Africa was not fulfilling the stewardship role of its old League of Nations mandate and that the mandate should be rescinded. This paper will explore the involvement of Prof. Andrew Howson Murray in the ICJ case. Murray, a political philosopher and public intellectual based at the University of Cape Town, drafted key aspects of the South African defense of its conduct in South Wes. The paper will thus show how key conceptual components of apartheid discourse were exported regionally and internationally, and how they interacted with ideals of African national sovereignty that were, at that time, still quite novel.