Several preliminary points should be made in order to better anchor the overall argument presented in this chapter. A first point refers to the notion of ‘globalisation’ itself, for this is a concept that must be demystified. It refers, of course, to all the ways in which the world has become, to put it simply, smaller in recent decades through, for example, the most dramatic of technological changes: from Skype to the BlackBerry and the like. But most fundamentally, the word speaks to the overbearing nature of our novel global economic relations (and, related to that, our global political relations). Increasingly, what we have – to a crucially important degree and in place of the nationally-premised, western-cited, ‘empires’ that Africa came to know too well – is something new: an ‘Empire of Capital’ that, through its supranational agencies (like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and its intermediaries (the state elites of both capitalist countries at the ‘centre’ of the system and of states elsewhere, such as in South Africa), works actively to guarantee the (relative) stability of the overall system.

Note carefully what this means. For, as I will argue, this is a very different empire from that produced by the overbearingly nationally-premised western imperialisms that preceded it. Consider, in this regard, the ambiguities of the ‘liberation’ that has come to define the essence of southern African aspiration in recent decades. There has been a crippling narrowing of the definition of liberation – from one that, in the 1960s and 1970s, saw it as heralding advance on the fronts of race, class and gender equality and of the achievement of a genuine democratic voice from below to one which has come, primarily, to see ‘liberation’ as being defined in terms of racial and national advance only. Of this reality, the most notable critique was that advanced by Frantz Fanon in the 1950s and 1960s. For he saw what had come to pass for ‘liberation’ in Africa as not so much ‘decolonisation’ but rather as a ‘false decolonisation’: