Between 1961 and 1974, France was South Africa's largest supplier of weaponry.

The two states have strong economic ties; France was South Africa's 9th largest importer as of 2015.

[1] France already maintained strong ties to South Africa during the apartheid era, becoming the foremost arms exporter to the regime from the 1960s onwards.

As the international pressure to sanction and disinvest from South Africa increased, France continued these exports, but sought more covert ways to do so (namely outsourcing its weapons production to South Africa and using third-party countries that had secret agreements with the South Africans).

[2] It also provided substantial assistance to the nuclear research and weapons programme of South Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s.