Anti-apartheid Activism Research Articles

“South Africa is the Mississippi of the world”: Anti-Apartheid Activism through Domestic Civil Rights Law

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of antiapartheid activists, led by the American Committee on Africa and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., launched a campaign against South African Airways' new flights into the United States. Using the legal and political strategies of the American civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of power within the American political system, activists tried to turn South African apartheid into an American civil rights problem that American government institutions could address. The strategy was indebted to the political and legal strategies of the civil rights movement, but framing demands around existing civil rights law necessarily limited what activists could ask for and what domestic institutions could provide. In practice, the campaign's successes were limited and legalistic; where domestic civil rights law directly conflicted with apartheid law, airlines could comply with the former without really challenging the latter. And the foreign policy context meant more failures than successes, as domestic legal institutions were reluctant to involve themselves with foreign policy concerns. Their successes and failures nonetheless tell us much about legal mobilization and institutional behavior in a period of globalization where sovereignty and jurisdictional lines were overlapping and conflicting.

The Evolution and Design of Powers at the UN Commission on Human Rights: The Complex Legacy of Anti-Apartheid Activism

The development of mechanisms to target specific countries for human rights abuses was part of the campaign against apartheid at the UN in the 1960s. This campaign led to reform of the UN Commission on Human Rights, which turned it from a purely “promotional” or precatory body into one with an active mandate to protect individuals from human rights abuses perpetrated by their own state. The institutional politics of human rights at the Commission was plagued by claims of “double standards” and inter-bloc defensiveness. This article argues that the reform of the Commission in the 1960s and the way that its mechanisms were used in the 1970s defined the Commission’s politics in a way that led to its eventual demise in the early 2000s. Keywords: apartheid; decolonization; human rights; Third World; UN General Assembly; UN Commission on Human Rights DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2019.17 © 2019 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

‘Scottish Exceptionalism?’ Trade Unions and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1976–1994

Since the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, historians have begun to explore the role played by the various Anti-Apartheid Movements (AAM) that developed globally in the latter half of the 20th century, although much more work remains to be done. While scholars have begun to explore the history of anti-apartheid opposition in Britain, there has not yet been any systematic study of this within a Scottish context. Such an omission overlooks the fact that activists in Scotland took the decision in 1976 to form the Scottish Committee of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (SAAM), thereby charting their own path within the global struggle to end apartheid. In addressing the question of ‘Scottish exceptionalism’, this article argues for the development of a distinctly Scottish scholarship pertaining to the history of anti-apartheid activism in Britain. It adopts a case-study approach, examining trade union involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle and asking whether this was uniform across Britain. Through a comparative analysis of the responses of both the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), it is argued that, in terms of its support for the liberation movements within South Africa and the AAM in Britain and Scotland, the STUC was, for much of the second half of the 20th century, significantly more forthcoming than its southern counterpart in the cause of anti-apartheid.

‘Bridging the gap between the intellectual and the human’: The awkward biography of anthropologist and scholar-activist Iona Simon Mayer (1923–)

ABSTRACTThis article tracks the coming together of anti-apartheid activism, feminism and humanism in the life and work of the social anthropologist and scholar-activist Iona Simon Mayer (1923–). Her biography is acutely awkward given her inner conflict and subsequent scholarly debate about the degree of acknowledgement that was due to her as a collaborator with her husband Philip during his fieldwork in Kenya in the late 1940s, but especially in the analysis and writing of Townsmen or Tribesmen (1961), a famous ethnography on the resilience of ‘Red’ Xhosa culture in East London. The article seeks to balance a recognition of the creative work that Iona achieved with her much-loved husband across decades of joint fieldwork, analysis and writing with her hitherto entirely unacknowledged independent contributions to African ethnography, closely associated with her involvement in a Black Sash feminist circle in Grahamstown of the 1970s. Iona’s feminism was of a more modern mould than that of the South African-born women who pioneered the field of social anthropology in the region in that it involved a vehement critique of patriarchy in African culture, drawing creatively on a dynamic new literature on the anthropology of performance but articulated in a typically eloquent denunciation of ‘hard-edged’ authoritarian power structures. Above all, the article tracks what Mayer retrospectively identified as an inner tension between ‘the intellectual’ and ‘the human’ across her anthropological career, making a case for a liberating period of resolution through her inter-related work as an anti-apartheid activist and feminist anthropologist.

“Every Bite Buys a Bullet”: Sanctions, Boycotts and Solidarity in Transnational Anti-Apartheid Activism

This article examines the genesis and development of transnational anti-apartheid activism between the 1960s and the 1980s. Underpinning anti-apartheid was the fundamental principle of “solidarity”, an emotional and ideological connection between the self and a distant oppressed other. It was this concept that served to mediate the transnational dimension of anti-apartheid as a form of humanitarianism. Calls for sanctions against South Africa represented the movement’s most explicit engagement with political systems and structures, and thus the shifting power of humanitarian values in political discourse. Participation in boycotts represented a kind of activism from the ground up, in which individual economic decisions — the refusal to “buy apartheid” — became humanitarian acts. The notion of solidarity marked, moreover, a significant break with the paternalism of ”imperial” humanitarian efforts, while calls for sanctions and disinvestment promoted a global norm of racial equality and a wider sense of humanitarian justice in international relations and global business ethics. Anti-apartheid connected a humanitarian ethos to individual and community action, and the consumer boycott became a primary form in which consciousness-raising and identity-forming functions of “new” social movements were enacted.

The Power of Solidarity: Anti-Apartheid Activism on US Campuses and at UNC-Chapel Hill

The Power of Solidarity: Anti-Apartheid Activism on US Campuses and at UNC-Chapel Hill

Revisiting Colonial Dismemberment in South Africa: On Cultural Text and the Mandela Nuclear Family

For many years, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—in a number of his public statements and writings—frankly expressed his regrets regarding the strain that his anti-apartheid activism put on his immediate and nuclear family. From his marriage to Evelyn Mase, and later to his second marriage to Nomzamo “Winnie” Madikizela, one central thread that permeates both is the impact of colonial-apartheid dismemberment on the Mandela nuclear family. Thus, the focus of this article is on the critical analysis of a cultural text that was authored by the late former statesman to reflect on various aspects of his life. Relying on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, the objective of the article is to understand how such a cultural text registers the idea of colonial-apartheid dismemberment as lived by the Mandela nuclear family under colonial-apartheid oppression. Besides the 27 years spent at Robben Island prison, much of Mandela's life was characterised by his neglect of family responsibilities, as a result of the lived realities of his activism against colonial-apartheid South Africa. Thus, using the case of Mandela's nuclear family structure, the article critically analyses the role of cultural texts such as autobiographies in registering colonial-apartheid dismemberment in South Africa.

Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960 by Nicholas Grant

Reviewed by: Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960by Nicholas Grant Thomas J. Noer Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945–1960. By Nicholas Grant. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xviii, 306. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-l-4696-3528-6; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3527-9.) Historians strive for relevance, making a connection between their study of the past and current issues and events. Given the recent resurgence of white supremacist parties and individuals in the United States and Europe, this study of the interaction between black Americans challenging segregation and black South Africans attempting to resist the imposition of apartheid speaks directly to the present. Many historians have examined the relationship between the American civil rights movement and the struggle against apartheid, but Nicholas Grant's book offers a number of new perspectives on the issue. First, he focuses on the era before 1960, while most others have concentrated on later decades. Second, he examines some unique areas neglected by other scholars: travel, consumer magazines, political prisoners, and gender. The result is an extremely interesting but disjointed book. The author has some fascinating material and analysis but often fails to connect individual chapters into a unified narrative. The author states clearly his main argument: "Although limited by the dual forces of racism and anticommunism, activists in both countries collaborated to critique and challenge the ties that existed between the United States and apartheid governments" (p. 2). The first section examines the impact of the Cold War on U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa and on black leaders in the United States. Grant documents the awareness of the systematic racism in South Africa within the American black community but notes that many American black leaders were reluctant to openly challenge U.S. policy. Many feared that criticism of foreign policy would lead to charges of being pro-communist and that a focus on foreign affairs might erode efforts for racial equality at home. As a result, the most outspoken critics of the American response to apartheid were often radical groups and leaders rather than mainstream civil rights activists. Grant is very good on the reciprocal relationship between white South Africans and U.S. segregationists. He notes how both saw the other as potential allies in their efforts to restrict racial equality. South Africa launched a successful effort to sell apartheid to America as an alternative to radicalism and [End Page 1050]communism, while white leaders in the U.S. South hailed Pretoria's efforts as a model to restrict black activism at home. As the author notes, "White supremacist and anticommunist ideologies were folded into each other" (p. 42). This is not a new topic, but the author does an excellent job of documenting the interactions between black people in both nations and white supremacists in each country. The rest of the book moves away from foreign policy and the Cold War to examine a number of areas of contact between black people in the two nations. The results are rather mixed. The chapter "Crossing the Black Atlantic: Travel and Anti-Apartheid Activism" ranges from a discussion of musician Miriam Makeba, to the debate over Paul Robeson's passport, to a nine-page critique of the 1951 movie based on Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country(1948). The next chapter concentrates almost exclusively on the white-owned but black-targeted magazine Zonk!. Much of this section is interesting but unclear on the significance of the material. The final three chapters focus on political prisoners and gender issues. South African political prisoners were symbols of a "heroic masculinit[y] that politically empowered black men," while "black women in the United States and South Africa drew on their domestic experiences in order to move beyond the private sphere and publicly challenge race and gender discrimination" (pp. 140, 159). These chapters have some fascinating material but too often lapse into jargon. Grant's intent is to move away from the focus on governmental leaders and policies and to look at the history of opposition to white supremacy from the ground up. In...

‘Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions Against Apartheid

The participation of trade unions in the anti-apartheid movement is a subject which arguably merits more attention. This article brings into focus a group of unionists whose activism against apartheid was in the forefront of key initiatives. Drawing on new research the argument recounts the role of Australian seafarers on the international stage, particularly its association with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and shows how knowledge of events in South Africa passed from the WFTU to educate the union membership. By the 1980s, Australian seafarers were taking the lead in bringing European unionists together in united action to enforce the United Nations' embargo on oil supplies to South Africa by founding a new organization, the Maritime Unions Against Apartheid (MUAA). Reconstructing these events demonstrates two aspects of significance: the growing importance of monitoring shipping as an anti-apartheid strategy coordinated and led by European unions, which we point out relied on ships’ officers and crews for knowledge, and the breaking down of the ideological divide between the WFTU and the anti-Communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) working together in the MUAA. The article contributes new understanding of connections between anti-apartheid activism and its Cold War context.

Hooks down! Anti-apartheid activism and solidarity among maritime unions in Australia and the United States

Our research compares and contrasts the transnational activism of maritime unions in Australia and the United States in what became the first and longest example of global solidarity in the post-World War II era – the anti-apartheid movement. Dockworkers, with a deep history of solidarity, occupied a strategic position to exert real influence on the South African state by refusing to unload South African cargo. We analyze the actions of the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) in Australia and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the US, namely by exploring notions of solidarity and political unionism among marine transport workers, ideological motivations for solidarity activism, ethnic and race relations among workers, and labor connections these maritime unions made beyond the waterfront. We find and account for similarities and differences in Australian and US labor activism that often is underrepresented and incompletely explained in the literature.

Making Southern theory? Gender researchers in South Africa

This article examines the work of six South African gender researchers working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It suggests that their work should be understood as situated in terms of politics, educational histories, theoretical connections and transnational engagements. It reflects on whether this work can be considered an example of Southern theory, and in turn suggests that Southern theory should itself be understood in relational terms that acknowledge both geopolitical connection and distance. The researchers who were interviewed by the author all draw on a feminist language and conceptual toolbox initially developed in Northern contexts, but in the recent period modified and extended by engagements with postcolonial and other feminisms. The article shows how South Africa’s repressive political conditions and deep racial and social class inequalities influenced the research. There was a strong link between anti-apartheid activism and research choices which reflected a battle for the inclusion of gender in struggles that prioritised the focus on race and class inequalities. Research was also shaped by the researchers’ relationship to activism and their engagement with marginality stemming from histories of colonialism and imperialism.

A Luta Continua: radical filmmaking, Pan-African liberation and communal empowerment

While the anti-apartheid movement has emerged as the premier illustration of transnational solidarity activism, little attention has been paid to the earlier success of the Portuguese African liberation movements. During the 1970s, parties like Mozambique’s FRELIMO established global alliance networks that helped sell their revolutions to ambivalent western societies. In the African American community, the construction of these transnational linkages was aided tremendously by radical filmmaking in the form of American Robert Van Lierop’s A Luta Continua. This transnational collaboration created a film that captured the universal and practical elements of FRELIMO ideology in a way that became a model for local organising, particularly in the African American community. Activists concerned about solidarity with southern Africa, communal control of resources and racial equality all used Van Lierop’s interpretation of FRELIMO’s socialism in A Luta Continua to construct grassroots movements that would spread nationally in the 1970s and lay the groundwork for more familiar anti-apartheid activism in the next decade.

El Movimiento afro-estadounidense contra el Apartheid sudafricano: un reflejo de la lucha de la comunidad negra a nivel doméstico y su impacto sobre la política exterior de los EE.UU.

En el siguiente trabajo nos proponemos analizar cómo y en qué medida el activismo afro-estadounidense contra el Apartheid sudafricano, luego de décadas de militancia y organización, comenzó a influir – y en qué medida – en las relaciones diplomáticas entre EE.UU. y Sudáfrica. Exploraremos el devenir del movimiento en EE.UU. contra el Anti- apartheid sudafricano, concentrándose particularmente en las causas y estrategias ulteriores de lucha y activismo de base de la comunidad negra. Esto nos permitirá examinar cómo el movimiento negro contra el Apartheid fue percibido durante la Administración Reagan, cuál era la visión acerca de la real influencia que podría tener a la hora de desafiar y modificar ciertos aspectos de la política exterior del gobierno estadounidenses hacia Sudáfrica, y cómo el movimiento afro-estadounidense utilizó su activismo contra el régimen sudafricano y su lucha contra la política exterior de EE.UU. como una forma de canalizar sus propias demandas y exponer sus reivindicaciones por la situación de la comunidad negra a nivel doméstico.

Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa

In 1957, American filmmaker Lionel Rogosin arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, determined to make a film about apartheid. “Anti-apartheid Solidarity Networks and the Production of Come Back, Africa” discusses the film’s historical and cultural significance, and— a topic which deserves more attention— the film’s production. The article examines the interconnected and international nature of early anti-apartheid activism. International movements against apartheid may have been relatively small between 1957 and up until March of 1960, but Come Back Africa’s production shows that anti-apartheid activists and artists were becoming increasingly connected in a transnational web spanning the Atlantic with hubs in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. In the case of Come Back, Africa, relationships forged between Rogosin, black South African artists-activists (such as Lewis Nkosi, William “Bloke” Modisane, and Miriam Makeba) and white liberal anti-apartheid activists (including Father Trevor Huddleston, Reverend Michael Scott, and Mary Benson) proved mutually beneficial.

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa: A “usable past”?

Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa:A “usable past”? Poppy Fry Imagining the Cape Colony: History, literature, and the South African nation. By David Johnson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Settler Colonialism and Land Rights in South Africa: Possession and dispossession on the Orange River. By Edward Cavanagh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The extermination of the Cape San people. By Mohamed Adhikari. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. The Farmerfield Mission: A Christian community in South Africa, 1838-2008. By Fiona Vernal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Thomas Pringle: South African pioneer, poet and abolitionist. By Randolph Vigne. Woodbridge, Suffolk: David Currey, 2012. The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856. By Robert Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. The rise of African history as a distinct academic discipline coincided with a shift away from formal colonial control and towards independent African nation states. It is not surprising, then, that the first generation of historians of Africa took very seriously the potential for historical narratives and analyses to produce and shape political change. The writing of Africans’ history was, to many of them, an explicitly anti-colonial act—asserting the complexity and humanity of the continents’ residents against an image of Africa as “without history.” In the early 1970s, Terence Ranger distilled this approach to two commitments: “firstly, to African agency in… historical analysis, and, secondly, to the production of ‘usable history’ for the newly independent nation states of Africa.”1 Although the imbrication of historical scholarship and nationalism proved problematic in some cases, Ranger’s invocation of a “usable past” continues to resonate, and historians of Africa continue to operate with the “added urgency” that their work must speak to the continent’s pressing concerns.2 In South Africa, in particular, it seemed obvious that historians needed to engage with the political present. The apartheid state justified its legitimacy through a particular historical narrative—the production of alternative histories was, by definition, anti-apartheid activism. Julian Cobbing’s 1988 article “The Mfecane as Abili: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo” is one of the more extreme—and influential—examples of South African historians addressing themselves as much to the contemporary political landscape as to historical events. In it, Cobbing argued that British missionaries and officials’ claims of having rescued refugees following an 1833 battle masked their actual purpose—slave raiding. He further suggested that violence in the early nineteenth-century South African interior originated not from the conquests of the Zulu kingdom (as earlier historians had argued), but from the labor-hungry machinations of Europeans—machinations which were hidden in the colonial record.3 This theory of secret interests driving conflict amongst Africans was influenced by and ultimately directed towards so-called “third force” violence in late 1980s and early 1990s South Africa, in which the apartheid state secretly funded and fomented brutal hostilities between African National Congress supporters and other black South Africans. In the end, “The Mfecane as Abili” proved to be trenchant political commentary but problematic history. In the bloody context of late-apartheid South Africa, this may be understandable. Cobbing’s account of events has not held up to scrutiny, but more than a few scholars defend, if not the specific argument of the article, the idea that political usefulness might outweigh historiographical or methodological concerns. Twenty years into the “new South Africa,” historians might be expected to take a somewhat more clear-eyed approach. Yet the question of how, if at all, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century history of the region speaks to its twenty-first-century present and future remains a contentious one. Clifton Crais, for example, has offered increasingly explicit political critiques in his work, but he has done so by shifting his focus towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining events and trends wherein the chain of contingency and causality to the present can be more easily demonstrated. Norman Etherington, on the other hand, has argued for a “struggle history” of the early nineteenth century, framed but not determined by South Africa’s post-apartheid political and social needs.4 For better or worse...

Women and national liberation in South Africa: an oral history perspective

The historiography of the national liberation struggle in South Africa is dominated by the feats of heroic male activists, in which women’s activism and the impact of the antiapartheid struggle on women and families are largely occluded. The past decade has witnessed the growth of a more inclusive ‘struggle’ historiography due to the mushrooming of women’s biographies and autobiographies. This article is based on interviews with five women whose partners were involved in anti-apartheid activism and who were either banned, forced into exile or incarcerated on Robben Island. Focusing on ‘ordinary’ women who had to see to the subsistence of family and household for extended periods contributes to a more inclusive narrative of anti-apartheid struggles. These gendered biographies highlight the multiple forms of oppression to which women were subjected and their multiple roles in the anti-apartheid struggle, and stress that gender should be a key part of one’s analytical toolbox.

Fighting talk: Ruth First's early journalism 1947–1950

While celebrated for her anti-apartheid activism, Ruth First's early journalism has received limited attention by scholars. The result has been an incomplete understanding of her political and intellectual development. Drawing from First's scrapbooks, this article examines some of the themes that preoccupied her from 1947–1950 while situating her work within the broader political context. Her journalism played a crucial role in chronicling resistance to segregationist policies in the pre-apartheid period and the role of cheap labour in capitalist development. Many of the themes that dominated her work on labour and development in Mozambique can be glimpsed in these scrapbooks.

The South African Student Exchange Program: Anti-Apartheid Activism in the Era of Constructive Engagement

After the Soweto Uprising and the murder of Steve Biko, activists in South Africa and the United States created the South African Education Program (SAEP) in 1979 to bring black South African students to the US for university education to prepare them for leadership in post-apartheid South Africa, bringing over 1,500 students by 1995. Some of these students were activists in South Africa; others encountered the liberation movements for the first time at the orientation in the US. Many of them contributed, along with other South Africans, to the divestment movement on US campuses. SAEP students also gained intellectual confidence from their US studies, with alumni now playing prominent roles in transforming post-apartheid South African society. While this program did not directly contradict the Reagan policy of Constructive Engagement with apartheid South Africa, it enabled personal liberation and activism that contributed to ending apartheid. The SAEP provided a space for American universities to contribute to South Africa’s democratic future and nurtured young black South Africans in the history of apartheid and the struggle against it and provided them with language to speak truth to power.

'A matter of conscience': the moral authority of the World Medical Association and the readmission of the South Africans, 1976-1994.

This article describes the role of transnational anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, Britain and the United States in generating international moral outrage over the readmission of the Medical Association of South Africa (MASA) to the World Medical Association (WMA), which had taken place in 1981 after it had withdrawn from that body in 1976. It discusses an example of a controversy where an international health organisation (IHO) lost moral authority as a result of being accused of white supremacy and a pro-American engagement in Cold War politics. At the time of its readmission to the WMA, the MASA was controversial because of its failure to strike off its membership roll one of the doctors implicated the death in detention of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in 1977. It details how these activists viewed the American Medical Association as having campaigned for the MASA’s readmission. The WMA’s readmission of the MASA cost the former its relationships with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the British Medical Association – a dispute which continued until South Africa’s democratic transition of 1994. With its focus on transnational activism in relation to the WMA and the effects of activists’ allegations of racism on its internal politics, this article contributes to the literature on the history of IHOs. Ultimately, this controversy shows the deficiency of international medical professional associations as ethical arbitrators of last resort.

Students, Apartheid and the Ecumenical Movement in South Africa, 1960–1975

This article examines ecumenical endeavour and student politics in South Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s to bring into fresh perspective sources of antiapartheid activism. The article explores Christian ecumenical developments in the twentieth century and specifically the crisis point reached in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre. It turns to discuss the formation of two key black student leaders, Steve Biko and Barney Pityana, in the Eastern Cape and discusses their creation of the black-led South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968. I explore a fraught but productive relationship between the growth of Black Consciousness and a developing commitment to social justice by student Christian organisations. A political culture of dialogue enabled the message of Black Consciousness to be quickly communicated to a broad cross section of progressive political actors in the early 1970s. A prime legacy of the ecumenical endeavour of the 1960s was its emphasis on unity and muting of strict orthodoxy, an approach that facilitated such cooperation. I argue that the theological radicalism of the ecumenical movement provided a reference point from which to understand and come to terms with the challenge of the emergent Black Consciousness movement.