Global Antiapartheid Movement Research Articles

Moral Contamination, Emotion, and the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement

Moral Contamination, Emotion, and the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement

“Proceed to some other port where our flag may fly in air that is not tainted with the stench of apartheid” – The intersection between the domestic and international anti-apartheid campaign and American naval visits to South Africa, 1948–1967

The introduction of apartheid in 1948 with its extensive suite of discriminatory laws, had a wide-ranging impact on South Africa’s international relations. Despite an ever-growing global anti-apartheid movement and calls for the country’s total isolation, the country succeeded in maintaining naval relations with several nations. As a result, it frequently hosted shipping crews from Europe and Northern America, mostly on flag-displaying missions. During these visits, non-White sailors were subjected to South Africa’s racial laws and entertained separately from their White counterparts. In following the principle of respecting “local law and custom”, commanders of vessels became willing collaborators in enforcing apartheid. Over two decades (1948–1967), racially-defined events and activities at segregated facilities became a standard feature of these visits. Under the influence of the local and American activists who viewed their civil rights- and anti-apartheid struggle as a common one, all forms of collaboration with the racist regime, were roundly condemned. By 1967, as a result of continuous mobilisation and the use of a diversity of mechanisms, the American anti-apartheid movement in co-operation with their local counterparts, succeeded in, among others, forcing a change in their country’s naval policy and its relations with South Africa. Effectively this led to the termination of American naval flag-display visits to South African ports from 1967-1994.

The ‘Casserole’ Constitution: The South African Constitution and International Law

The transition from authoritarianism and apartheid to constitutional democracy in South Africa came at the end of a decades long global struggle to end apartheid. Arguably the global anti-apartheid movement was the most significant human rights movement of the late 20th century. Louis B. Sohn and Henry Richardson, both eminent international law scholars, have noted how the struggle against apartheid influenced and impacted the development of international law, especially then evolving international principles aimed at eliminating racism and apartheid. Indeed, with the passage of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in 1973, apartheid was declared a crime against humanity. In this essay I reflect on the impact and the role of international law in the drafting of the South African constitution as well as in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. I also address the challenges of incorporating international human rights law into the constitutional project, and in particular the possibilities for generating a vigorous democracy and wide respect for human rights through such incorporation. The central question that I raise is whether universality as a value, norm or consensus, as reflected as part of the international law corpus, is sufficient to impel compliance, especially at the local level.

Writing from Johannesburg: Nadine Gordimer in the global anti-apartheid movement

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Nadine Gordimer navigated the political exigencies of being an anti-apartheid writer in Johannesburg as the multiracial literary world of the 1950s was destroyed. In the 1950s, her fiction introduced Johannesburg’s counterculture to a global audience, leading to invitations to provide an inside perspective on apartheid. The global witness role that she assumed grew more awkward as she grew more isolated at home, pushing her toward the central commitment of her political life: advancing the freedom of South African writers and readers, by speaking out against censorship and advocating for a national literature that transcended apartheid’s constraints. Drawing upon her archives at the University of the Witwatersrand and Indiana University, this article examines how Gordimer’s life in Johannesburg in an era of exile both made her career possible and made her politics awkward to enact and to write about, as her position made political purity impossible.

The External Struggle against Apartheid: New Perspectives

Stevens reviews Ryan Irwin’s Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (2012) and Rob Skinner’s The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c. 1919–64 (2010), two of the first published studies from an emerging stream of more detached and critical scholarship on the global anti-apartheid movement. The review essay addresses the questions of periodization, strategy, ideology, and the kinds of actors on which scholars focus, highlighting the ways in which these books advance the study of the external struggle against apartheid and the avenues for future research that they suggest.

Global political iconography: The making of Nelson Mandela

This article offers a cultural sociological approach to analyzing global political iconography. Global political icons function as carriers and embodiments of values cherished by a collective in a given historical period. This article provides a three-step analysis of formation, climax and establishment in the iconic process of Nelson Mandela. The underlying ‘material’ for any iconic process is an exemplary biography. Yet this material needs to be developed and dramatized by political agents. For iconicity to develop on a larger scale, their work in turn must resonate with a wider audience that accepts the icon as the embodiment of cherished values. In the case of Mandela, the time in prison and his conduct while incarcerated served as core elements in his iconic formation (biography). Mandela the icon, however, was largely the ‘product’ of the global anti-apartheid movement (agency). At its climax, from 1988 to 1994, the Mandela icon was enlarged through its correspondence with globally ascendant values of democracy and human rights (audience). The events surrounding his death in 2013 and the enormous number of biographies published after 1990 testify to the deep anchoring of the Mandela icon in global society.

“Free at Last”

“Free at Last” chronicles the use of multimodal teaching exercises in a three-week class on the global antiapartheid movement. The class drew on, in particular, Connie Field's seven-part documentary Have You Heard from Johannesburg, which proved to be an excellent tool for content delivery and for sparking discussions. Also used were “passbooks” to simulate, though not re-create, the way the apartheid regime used identification books to oppress black South Africans. Two of the most challenging discussions for the students were the idea of the proper use of international intervention and the choice to use violent or nonviolent resistance. The class succeeded in stimulating student interest in South Africa and in racial oppression, challenging students to present their own ideas on those subjects, and opening deep moral quandaries to student discussion.

The Global Antiapartheid Movement

This article surveys collections and archives of antiapartheid movements across the globe, covering organizations and activists, and not only print but also image, sound, and film materials. Particular attention is given to archives with a global span. The countries covered have a global sweep across five continents and include archives in South Africa, the United States, Sweden, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, and Australasia. International organizations also are included. The state of the art of digitization of such collections is directly addressed and briefly contextualized in terms of important questions on the development and application of primary sources in writing history, as well as recent trends and emerging models of digital repositories as they affect the history of antiapartheid movements. The article will be of considerable practical and theoretical use to scholars of the global antiapartheid movement.

Some Early Roots of the Global Antiapartheid Movement?

Book Review| May 01 2014 Some Early Roots of the Global Antiapartheid Movement? Vinson, Robert Trent, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); xv + 235 pp. ISBN 978–0–8214–1986–1, paper US$32.95 Peter Limb Peter Limb Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2014) 2014 (119): 232–235. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2402135 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Peter Limb; Some Early Roots of the Global Antiapartheid Movement?. Radical History Review 1 January 2014; 2014 (119): 232–235. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2402135 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search Peter Limb reviews Robert Trent Vinson's The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.2014 Issue Section: (RE)VIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Film Review ofHave You Heard from Johannesburg: Seven Stories from the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement

Film Review of<i>Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Seven Stories from the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement</i>

Introduction: Turning the Lens on Film and Foreign Relations

In July 2009, my partner and I boarded a “ferry” traveling from Zanzibar to the eco-resort Chumbe Island. About midway through the trip, a huge wave doused a blond woman sitting near the front of the boat. We began chatting and I soon figured out that she was Connie Field, the award-winning filmmaker best-known for The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) and Freedom on My Mind (1994). That soggy conversation has taken Field and me on a circuitous journey to this forum on her Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Seven Stories of the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement (2010).1 Fusing a lifelong commitment to human rights and her filmmaking expertise, Field has traversed the world documenting social movements. She originally planned to do a four-hour film about the movement to end apartheid but greatly expanded her vision following her first trip to South Africa in 1996. The result is an eight and a half hour opus that takes its name from a lyric in a 1976 Gil Scott-Heron song. Drawn from more than 150 interviews conducted in eight countries, Have You Heard from Johannesburg spans five decades and takes viewers to stadiums and churches, street protests and corporate boardrooms, political debates and rock concerts. It captures the political, moral, spiritual, economic, and cultural dimensions of the anti-apartheid movement.2

The Meaning(s) of Solidarity: Narratives of Anti-Apartheid Activism

The global anti-apartheid movement mobilised millions of people who took part in boycotts and demonstrations. Despite the significance of the anti-apartheid movement, actual research on its nature as a transnational movement has been meagre. Most research on the anti-apartheid movement has focused on its national aspects, looking, for example, at the Australian, American, British or South African anti-apartheid movements. In this article, I argue that the most crucial aspect of this movement was its construction of transnational networks and forms of action. The central dimensions of the action forms and identification processes of the anti-apartheid struggle are analysed; historical continuities as well as discontinuities are investigated; and the movement is related to relevant political and historical contexts. The analysis is based on historical documents and interviews with 52 activists in four countries, and intends to make a contribution to the interrelated theoretical debates on (a) the relations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social movements, and (b) transnational activist networks and social movements in a globalising world.