Understanding how fascism was often informed by the politics of imperialism and colonialism is of particular importance for historians of fascism and the far right in the former settler colonies of North America, southern Africa and Australasia. Scholars, such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, have described settler colonialism as an invasive process involving the violent dispossession of the indigenous population, which shares an affinity with fascism’s need for violent expansion and the ‘cleansing’ of populations for the desired nation.¹⁸

Robin D.G. Kelley and Cedric Robinson remind us that many Black activists in the interwar period saw ‘fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism’.¹⁹ While staunchly anti-fascist, the Communist Party of South Africa noted in the early years of the Second World War that non-Europeans in the Union were not wholly convinced that fascism was much different to the racial hierarchy that existed in South Africa at the time.²⁰

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In its strongest formulations, the idea of ‘decoloniality’ might actually lead one to question the very distinction between fascism and colonialism in the Southern African context. Decolonial thought would stress the undoubted reality that in the colonial era, subjects of all southern African régimes, whether settler-controlled or metropolitan-centred, led lives constrained by racial structures and ideologies and the accompanying denial of democratic rights, high levels of state violence and extremely coercive labour practices (and that this history has long-lasting legacies).

This emphasis would point to the conclusion that there was no significant difference between overtly fascist colonial governments (such as Portugal in Angola and Mozambique) and those which claimed to align with democratic values (Britain in Northern Rhodesia for instance). In both cases the experience of the colonised was, it could be argued from this perspective, much the same.

In South Africa, such a view actually has a precedent in the Second World War politics of an important Black leftist group, the Non-European Unity Movement. The NEUM opposed the pro-British war effort of the government of Prime Minister Jan Smuts, arguing that his régime was itself fascist.

They adopted a rhetoric which portrayed themselves as analogous to the European resistance, for instance referring to Black participants in state structures as ‘Quislings’. Black people, in this view, had nothing to gain from an Allied victory, as South African segregationists were indistinguishable from [German Fascists].

However, there is also a strong Black intellectual history in the region, in which opposition to fascism is a significant theme. Within South Africa, at the same time as the NEUM was emerging, the leadership of the main African nationalist organisation, the ANC, supported the war effort, using the rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms.

It is true that they thus hoped to bring leverage to bear on the Allies to impose a liberalisation of racial policies on Smuts. But ANC leaders like Dr A.B. Xuma believed that their ends would best served by an Allied triumph than by the success of Hitler and his local allies in the radical wing of Afrikaner nationalism. The distinction between fascism and other forms of rule was seen by them as being a weighty one.

Moreover, during the era of guerilla war against the [anticommunists] in Mozambique and Angola, Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia and the South African apartheid order, both the insurgent movements and their allies abroad were often anxious to portray their opponents as ‘fascist’. This was rhetorically useful, as a tactic of delegitimisation, but also (although often inconsistently) used as a point of departure for political analysis.

There is thus a serious history of southern African Black intellectual engagement with the topic of fascism, and a closer look at that might be one useful way in which thinking about fascism from a decolonial perspective could be useful.

But, there are broader issues to which the decolonial approach might also usefully point us. One potential application is to insist that the experience of southern Africa needs to be given greater weight in Europe-focused studies of fascism. There is considerable debate on whether the […] Estado Novo (1934–1974) was ‘technically’ fascist, but it is indisputable that it belonged to the family of prewar European [anticommunist dictatorships].

Its (NATO-backed) colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique from 1960 to 1974 were major military and political struggles. Yet this enormous conflict has not sufficiently registered in the mainstream of European historiography. A decolonial perspective might suggest that this marginalisation reflects a reluctance to integrate the colonial world into historical thought about fascism.

Similarly, [Fascist] overseas operations in the ‘global South’ have seldom been taken seriously as part of the main story of German Fascism. During the 1930s [the Third Reich] ran a vast international organisational operation. This included powerful [Fascist] movements amongst the wealthy German community in South African-ruled Namibia and support to small but vociferous fascist movements in South Africa.

During the Second World War, a mass Afrikaner fascist movement, the Ossewa Brandwag, emerged in South Africa, which had strong clandestine links to [Fascist] intelligence and carried out sabotage operations. Without exaggerating their significance, a lot more could be done to relate these developments to events within the Reich and in the course of the Second World War.

The question of whether they were more significant in the history of [German Fascism] and the world conflict than has generally been allowed, might at least be a useful one to ask.²³

Fascist Italy practised apartheid in East Africa, and it seems that Apartheid South Africa was a source of inspiration for the Fascists, so this perception should be easy to understand.