1960s

AA News revealed the growing trade links between Britain and South Africa with details of visits by South African government representatives to most major British cities. This issue reported on a memorial meeting for assassinated FRELIMO leader Eduardo Mondlane. Former political prisoner Jean Middleton described her life as a banned person in South Africa. An advertisement promoted a meeting organised by the AAM for British trade unionists, the first in a long series of AAM annual trade union conferences.

The April issue featured a report on the relaxation of the US arms ban against South Africa. It reported on student action against apartheid and on a show organised by the AAM at London’s Roundhouse on the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. A feature article revealed the role that the Cabora Bassa dam project was intended to play in consolidating white minority rule throughout Southern Africa. The newspaper’s centrespread exposed the horrific living conditions of people dumped in South Africa’s ‘resettlement camps’. 

Under the headline ‘New bill means slave labour’, AA News exposed the implications of proposed new legislation in South Africa. Former South African political detainee Desmond Francis told of how he had been tortured by the apartheid security police. The centrespread reported on the advances made by MPLA guerrilla fighters in Angola.

AA News deplored Robert Sobukwe's 12-hour house arrest after his release from Robben Island. Its editorial urged the British Government to support the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe instead of negotiating with the illegal Smith regime. It reported on the AAM’s first conference for trade unionists, which urged unions to end the investment of their funds in companies with interests in South Africa. A feature article argued that the time had come for a reassessment of AAM tactics and that it might be necessary to set up a new organisation to undertake direct action against British organisations that collaborated with apartheid.

The AAM marked its 10th anniversary with a conference that discussed guerrilla warfare in Southern Africa and the implications of the armed struggle for the international solidarity movement. AA News reported on widespread disillusion with the British Labour Government.  A feature article by Basil Davidson reported on the advance of the PAIGC liberation movement in Portugal’s colony Guinea-Bissau. In an article on sports apartheid, the President of SANROC, Dennis Brutus, highlighted the forthcoming Springbok cricket tour of Britain.

The September issue reported on the sentencing to life imprisonment of five SWAPO members in the conclusion of a long-running trial under South Africa’s Terrorism Act. It carried an eyewitness account of the forced removal of black South Africans from their farms in Natal to a tented settlement, where they were dumped on the veldt with no sanitation. Its letter column continued the debate on future tactics of the AAM. In a foretaste of the campaign to stop the 1970 Springbok cricket tour, AA News reported on how one activist disrupted a fixture of the all-white South African Wilfred Isaacs cricket team.

The October issue headlined the advances made by FRELIMO guerrilla units in northern Mozambique and plans to stop Western companies involvement in building the Cabora Bassa dam. It reported on a TUC motion urging unions to discourage their members from emigrating to South Africa and carried a first-hand account by former political prisoner David Ernst on the difference in conditions for black and white prisoners. The back page printed the Springbok rugby tour fixture list, with a report of the launch of the Stop the Seventy Tour Committee.

Winnie Mandela and Shanti Naidoo were among the detainees expected to be charged under the Terrorism Act, reported this issue. A report on the Conservative Party conference highlighted a motion calling for an end to all ‘coloured’ immigration and for the ‘repatriation’ of many recent British immigrants. A resolution passed at the AAM’s annual general meeting warned the MCC that the tour by the all-white Springbok cricket team planned for the summer of 1970 would inevitably be disrupted.