Between 'Artificial Economics' and the 'Discipline of the Market': Sasol from Parastatal to Privatisation

Abstract

This article explores the history of South Africa's oil-from-coal project, Sasol, the petro-chemical company central to apartheid South Africa's response to oil sanctions. Contrary to popular perception, South African interest in synthetic fuel pre-dates anti-apartheid sanctions. Anglovaal, a private mining company, acquired rights to the German Fischer-Tropsch process for converting coal into liquid fuel in the 1930s, and its subsidiary, SATMAR, converted torbanite into petrol and was an important precursor to Sasol. Like Germany, South Africa possessed no indigenous source of oil, and dependence on imports came to be seen as a strategic and economic vulnerability. Afrikaner nationalist reluctance to commit moneys to Anglovaal to build an oil-from-coal plant led to Sasol's establishment as a parastatal. Even so, this article argues, the project possessed enough 'Smutsian features' to attract criticism from Afrikaner nationalists.The low cost of black labour in the early apartheid...