This talk, drawn from Mkhize’s current book project A Home-Made Empire: South Africa and the Imperium before World War II, will explore the responses of black South Africans to two events that galvanised their political imaginations: the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Hertzog Bills which effectively brought to an end the liberal franchise for Africans in the Union of South Africa. In reading the two events as part of the same surge of racism, black intellectuals made important connections between state racism in South Africa and European fascism, at times reading them as analogous. This talk explores these resonances of fascism in South Africa and radical black intellectuals’ responses to them.