When the fates, in the guise of whatever forces guide the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates, picked the southern African plateau and Soviet Siberia as the home sites of at least fifty rare metals, they acted with lit-fie regard for either social or ethnic realities. The results confound morality, make a mess of industrial choreography, and guarantee a schizophrenic dimension to whatever passes for statecraft both inside and outside the UN.
The whole big blooming mess demands some intricate charting if we hope to make a stab at predicting future world history. Seemingly, we are caught between two inexorable movements. The capitalist West, with its “hi-tech” economy, depends on a steady flow of all sorts of hardening alloys. The Big Four of cobalt, chromium, platinum and manganese are absolutely essential. The West needs cobalt for jet aircraft, for computers, for space shuttles, and for most electronic equipment. It needs chromium for roller and ball bearings, for automobile connecting rods, for high speed drills and dies. It needs platinum for catalytic action in automobile exhaust systems. And it needs manganese—the remaining rare metal in the Big Four—for the simple reason that no one knows how to make steel without it.
The Soviets have their own chrome and other rare metals. But the western world must have Zaire and Zambia for cobalt. It must have Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and South Africa for chrome. Some of the platinum group of metals come from Canada, but South Africa is the big supplier. The fates were more liberal with their distribution of manganese (there is a lot of it on the floor of the oceans, and Brazil has been a big source of it). But, again, it is South Africa that is the world’s leading supplier of highly processed ferromanganese.
So the “Z’s”—Zambia, Zaire, Zimbabwe—have it, along with their ethnic enemies, the beleaguered white rulers of “apartheid” South Africa. If economics, the economics of the market, ruled men’s minds, the “Z” problem would bother nobody. But African politics, with many a nudge from the Soviet Union and its sidekick of Castro’s Cuba, threatens the market. A race war in South Africa, coupled with an OPEC-type price conspiracy of the “Z’s” and an invasion of Southwest Africa (Namibia) by the 20,000 Cubans now stationed in Angola, would bring all the high-tech nations of the western world to their knees.
A Study in Political Economy
In a book that was originally projected as an investment guide, The Strategic Metals War, authors James E. Sinclair and Robert Parker (New York, Crown, 185 pp., $17.50) found so many warning signals that what they started as a compendium for stock market advisers becomes something else again. This is not only an investment guide, it is a prime work in modern political economy.
The authors are inevitably compelled to be geopolitical experts. They raise all sorts of inconvenient questions. With Admiral Mahan (The Influence of Sea Power on History) looking over their shoulders, they indicate the importance of control of the oceans around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. Ships carrying oil from the Persian Gulf to North European and Carib-bean-Gulf of Mexico destinations need support from safe harbors in South Africa. So do the ore freighters that bring fifty rare metals from the mines of the South African plateau (including the “Z” nations) to the unloading points for factories in the West German Ruhr and in Pennsylvania.
It is easy to scoff at those who think that politics can permanently overwhelm markets. The libertarians who trust markets to prevail have a point when they tell us that recent oil discoveries in Mexico, Alaska and the North Sea have helped break the back of OPEC and so made the Per sian Gulf less important to the West than it was in 1973. But frantic search for cobalt, chrome and platinum (along with germanium, tantalum, vanadium and antimony) hasn’t resulted in strikes with a distribution comparable to the new sources of oil all around the world. The three “Z’s” and South Africa, along with Siberia, still maintain their near monopoly of the more important rare metals.
Wars Over Cobalt
The history that is recounted in The Strategic Metals War is one of narrow escapes. In 1978 some 3,000 men of the Marxist-leaning Congo National Liberation Front based in Angola (where they were trained by Cubans) passed through Zambian territory and took over the mining center of Kolwezi in the Zaire province of Shaba. The invaders encountered no resistance from the army of Zaire. They first ordered the closing of the Kolwezi mines. Then they herded the white women into a hotel and forced them to dance on a small stage before being raped and shot. More than 90 whites and 750 Africans were murdered by the invaders.
Meanwhile the price of cobalt in world markets started jumping. The Soviets, who had advance notice of the invasion, had been buying up available cobalt at the pre-invasion price of $6.85 a pound. When the invasion hit the world headlines cobalt went all the way up to $49 a pound.
With cobalt mining in Shaba totally suspended, President Mobutu of Zaire put in a hurry call to President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France. With help from U.S. military aircraft a rescue force of French foreign legionnaires and Moroccan troops were flown into Shaba. The Marxist invaders, who had flooded the mines, were quickly driven over the border into Zambia and Angola. It took fifty days to restore normal operations in the mines. In 1979 and 1980 cobalt had to be ferried out of Shaba by air at a cost of $1.50 a kilogram.
What the West must face is that it may take force to keep supplies from the three “Z’s” moving. It certainly takes a nimble diplomacy. The railways running from Zaire and Zambia direct to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are only intermittently operative. The “Z” nations are compelled to cooperate with the hated South Africans in order to get their metals to market by way of Cape ports.
In Zimbabwe, at the moment, tribal troubles are threatening mining operation. There is no reason to suppose that the tribal rivalries will completely disrupt the chrome mar-ket-after all, South Africa has chrome to sell, too, and there is no immediate difficulty in getting blacks to do the mining. But Mr. Sinclair tells us that, since the Shaba troubles in Zaire, it has become increasingly difficult to attract western capital into African mining. Mining equipment is wearing out.
And so the metals war goes into a “cold” stage. It could get hot again tomorrow. Stockpiling in the West is in order.
John Chamberlain’s book reviews have been a regular feature of The Freeman since 1950. We are doubly grateful to John and to Henry Regnery for now making available John’s autobiography, A Life with the Printed Word. Copies of this remarkable account of a man and his times—our times—are available at $12.95 from The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533.
