structural:expansion, structural:scholar_edition
Impact on southern Africa

Three of the nations targeted by the embargo were located in southern Africa or had colonies there. Portugal which ruled the colonies of Angola, Portuguese Guiana (modern Guinea-Bissau), and Portuguese East Africa (modern Mozambique) had fighting colonial wars in all of its African colonies since the 1960s with Angola being the first to rise up in 1961. Angola is rich in oil, which protected Portugal from the worse of the embargo. But the economic stability of the Estado Novo regime was damaged by the worldwide inflation, which help cause the Carnation Revolution which toppled the Estado Novo regime in April 1974 and led to the restoration of democracy. Portugal granted independence to all of its colonies except for Macau in 1975.

The British historian Rob Skinner wrote the embargo had a "significant impact" on the South African economy. The inflationary rise in commodity prices increased the input costs of South African manufacturing, making South African manufactured goods uncompetitive on the world market. The rise in the price of gold as a hedge against inflation (South Africa has the world's largest gold mines) caused the rand to increase in value, which caused further problems for South African manufacturing. The strategy pursued by the National Party government since 1948 of sponsoring the industrialization of South Africa was derailed by the "oil shock" with what Skinner described as "important social and political consequences" for the apartheid regime. The Soweto uprising of 1976 was at least in part caused by anger at the high unemployment rate in black South African community.

Even worse hit than South Africa was Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), where oil was already expensive as the white supremacist government of Rhodesia had been under United Nations sanctions since 1965, and thus the smugglers who sold Rhodesia oil charged a premium for their services. The premium charged by the "sanctions busters" such as Iran increased after the embargo, which threw the Rhodesian economy into recession. Despite the United Nations sanctions, Rhodesia was a major exporter of chrome, steel and tobacco with the United States exempting "strategical" Rhodesian products such as chrome from the sanctions. The global recession of 1973-1975 proved more effective than the United Nations in ending the global demand for Rhodesian products, which made the Rhodesian recession especially severe. Unlike South Africa, which had a sizable and long-standing white population, the white population of Rhodesia was much smaller and more recent. Rhodesia depended considerably more than South Africa on white immigration to provide enough soldiers for its army while most of the Rhodesian whites had only arrived in the 1950s and did not have very deep roots in the country. The "white flight" caused by the recession put the Rhodesian Army at a major disadvantage in its war against the black guerrillas. The war costed the Rhodesian government one million Rhodesian dollars per day by 1975, and the costs of the war threatened to bankrupt Rhodesia. In 1979, Rhodesia signed the Lancaster House Agreement, which led to majority rule in 1980.