1980s

Musicians Little Steven and Jerry Dammers sign the SATIS petition calling for the release of detainees in South Africa. Altogether 30,000 South Africans were held in detention under the State of Emergency imposed in June 1986. The petition was supported by the British Council of Churches and the TUC and signed by a third of a million people. It was presented to the South African authorities, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the UN Secretary-General on Human Rights Day, 10 December 1987.

A petition for the release of all apartheid detainees was delivered to Prime Minister Thatcher on Human Rights Day 10 December 1987 by a  delegation led by AAM President Trevor Huddleston and trade union leader Clive Jenkins. Among the thousands of signatories were the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the leaders of all three British opposition parties and celebrities from the world of the arts like Peggy Ashcroft and Tom Stoppard.

British miners and other local trade unionists marched through Nottingham to protest against the import of South African coal by local company Burnett & Hallamshire.

Report showing the impact of international sanctions on the apartheid economy.

Tyneside AA Group supporters told Zola Budd she should not run for England at Gateshead Stadium on 30 January 1988. The sprinter continued to live in South Africa but obtained a British passport to get round the sports boycott against apartheid.

The apartheid government escalated its repression of trade unionists in 1988 – four trade union leaders were sentenced to death and hundreds were detained. In response the AAM and SATIS (Southern Africa the Imprisoned Society) launched a campaign to defend trade unionists in South Africa and Namibia. It was launched at a demonstration outside the South African Embassy on 1 February 1988 on the day the trial of Moses Mayekiso, General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) reopened in Johannesburg.

Glenys Kinnock opened Sheffield’s Southern Africa Resource Centre in February 1988. The Centre provided educational resources on Southern Africa for the city’s schools and community groups, as well as a headquarters for Sheffield Anti-Apartheid Group. Sheffield AA was one of the most active of the AAM’s local groups throughout the 1980s. With Glenys Kinnock are the Provost of Sheffield, Rev. Frank Curtis, and the Centre’s Co-ordinator, David Granville.

Members of Halkevi Turkish Community Centre in Hackney, north London, joined a picket of a Shell garage on 8 February 1988. On 1 March 1987 the AAM launched a boycott of Shell as part of an international campaign organised with groups in the USA and the Netherlands. Shell was joint owner of one of South Africa’s biggest oil refineries and a lead company in its coalmining and petrochemicals industries.