Race for Sanctions: African Americans against Apartheid, 1946–1994

Abstract

Francis Njubi Nesbitt's Race for Sanctions details a most significant chapter in the longstanding transnational relationship between African Americans and black South Africans that began in the nineteenth century. It is an important study primarily 0because it is the first comprehensive published account of the successful mobilization of African Americans to move an anti-apartheid agenda from the margins of American foreign policy in the 1940s to its very center by the mid-1980s. Its central focus on African Americans distinguishes the book from Robert Massie's exhaustive Loosing the Bonds (1997), which preoccupied itself primarily with predominantly white institutions and individuals. Nesbitt aims to show that the American anti-apartheid movement emerged from the black internationalist politics of the 1940s, survived the anticom-munist crusades and the decline of white liberal support in the 1950s and 1960s, and reemerged as a black-led interracial movement in the 1980s. (p. vii) He begins with the central role of the leftist, anticolonial Council on African Affairs (caa) in inaugurating the American anti-apartheid movement and ends with the persistent, increasingly effective efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus (cbc) and TransAfrica, the premier black lobby for Africa and the Caribbean. These two organizations eventually spearheaded the free South Africa movement, a diverse consortium of anti-apartheid organizations and individuals that eventually succeeded in its main objectives of punitive economic sanctions against South Africa and the divestment of American corporations and universities from the South African economy. This unprecedented ground swell of activity, in conjunction with similar movements in many other countries, complemented the fierce internal domestic resistance of black South Africans themselves and eventually led to South Africa's first democratically elected government in 1994.