‘Anti-apartheid with a Welsh flavour’: national cultures, organisational autonomy, and the Welsh anti-apartheid movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article enhances our understanding of how national considerations shaped and bounded forms of transnational activism. The existing anti-apartheid scholarship acknowledges that activist responses reflected the political, economic, social, and cultural environments in which they operated. However, a dominant British metanarrative exists that marginalises the experiences and developments of anti-apartheid activism across Britain’s constituent four nations. This study provides the first in-depth analysis of the Welsh Anti-Apartheid Movement (WAAM), which in turn, creates an alternative point of reference for understanding the growth of activism in Britain. Based on archival research and oral history interviews, this article demonstrates the significance of the Welsh national context in creating points of divergence, and uniqueness, with the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, including its strong demands for autonomy. A focus on WAAM clearly demonstrates how the anti-apartheid cause was refracted through Welsh national identity, language, and culture, which considerably impacted how it mobilised and campaigned. This article argues that new readings of anti-apartheid activism are derived by recognising that the political and social conditions in Wales created defined spatial differences from the rest of Britain.