Shunned during the days of apartheid, South African capital, still mostly white-owned, is greeted with open arms across Africa.
Analysts say there money to be made in Africa and the world's poorest continent needs all the investment it can get.
"Africa needs capital crucially for privatisations to renew operations... and there are high returns out there," said Reg Rumney, director of the Johannesburg-based think-tank Businessmap.
South Africa is by far the continent's biggest economy. The latest big South African move north was AngloGold's takeover of Ghana's Ashanti Goldfields.
At around $1.5 billion, it is also the largest South African investment on the continent to date.
Founded in 1897 in what was then known as the Gold Coast, Ashanti is a national treasure in Ghana. The thought of a white-owned South African company acquiring it would have been ludicrous just a few years ago.
Almost a decade after apartheid rule ended, South African companies are no longer treated like pariahs.
South African investments on the continent have soared although, according to BusinessMap, they still accounted for only around 25 per cent of all foreign investment into the rest of the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 1994 and 2003.
BusinessMap estimates that South African companies invested an average of $435 million a year into SADC from 1994 to 2003.
The low was $23 million in 1994 - when white-minority rule ended - and the high of $1.7 billion was hit in 2001.
From 1994 to 2003, BusinessMap estimates that Mozambique got the lion's share of South African investments into SADC with 51 per cent. This includes $1.2 billion sunk into Mozambique's Pande and Temane gas fields by fuel group Sasol.
Retailer Shoprite has opened more than 90 stores in 15 African countries, most recently in Angola, which is emerging from almost three decades of savage civil war.
In its last financial year the group said its capital expended elsewhere in Africa amounted to 134 million rand, for a total investment of 544 million rand, on which a return of 19 per cent has been earned.
Africa's biggest mobile phone operator, South Africa-based Vodacom, launched its network in Mozambique this month (eds: December) and said it aimed for a market share of 45 per cent within three years.
It also operates in Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Lesotho, with combined investments of $337 million.
Rival MTN provides mobile phone services in Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Cameroon and Swaziland.
This is helping to blaze a trail for other entrepreneurs as many businesses are reluctant to invest in an African country before it has a proper cellphone network - especially since fixed-line operations on the continent are often poor.
South African banks are also forging north, led by Standard Bank which has operations in 16 other African countries.
The government is encouraging local companies to invest in Africa's future, allowing them to take two billion rand out of the country per approved new investment on the continent.
Outside Africa, exchange rules limit them to one billion rand per approved new investment.
The trickle of foreign direct investment (FDI) that reaches Africa was reduced still further in 2002, according to the UN's latest World Investment Report.
"Africa's FDI inflows declined to $11 billion in 2002 after a surge to $19 billion in 2001," it said. "As a result, the region's share in global FDI inflows fell from 2.3 per cent in 2001 to 1.7 percent in 2002."
Trade flows are also not great but if South African companies can get a beachhead in other countries on the continent, this could change.
According to South African Revenue Service data, the rest of the continent accounted for only 8.9 per cent of South Africa's total global trade - imports and exports - of 447.8 billion rand in the first 10 months of 2003.
This is down from 9.2 per cent in the same period last year. The trade data also underscores Pretoria's economic muscle. South African exports to the rest of the continent in the first 10 months of 2003 were 32.4 billion rand but it imported only around 7.4 billion rand worth of goods from the rest of Africa over the same period.
Investing on a continent that is ravaged by war, AIDS and corruption is not for the faint of heart.
In Transparency International's 2003 "Corruption Perceptions Index", four of the 12 countries with the worst scores - Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola and Kenya - were African.
"If you do your research thoroughly then there's a lot of money to be made (in Africa)," said Henry Flint, senior economist African research at Standard Bank. (Reuters)