Photos

COSATU General Secretary Jay Naidoo was the main speaker at the AAM’s annual general meeting in November 1989. He warned that since F W de Klerk was inaugurated as State President in September 1989, there had been an increase in violence and repression against South African trade unionists.

The AAM’s ‘Boycott Apartheid 89’ campaign extended the consumer boycott to tourism. London students and the London Anti-Apartheid Committee called for South Africa to be excluded from the World Travel Market at Kensington’s Olympia exhibition centre, 28 November 1989. The AAM wrote to the ten top British travel agents asking them not to book holidays in South Africa.

South Devon AA Group mounted an exhibition about the lives of women and children under apartheid in the high street in Totnes, Devon in 1989.

William Ntombela was one of several South African trade unionists sentenced to death in 1989. The British shopworkers union USDAW launched a petition for his release, signed by 5,000 members.  In the photograph USDAW General Secretary Garfield Davies (left) displays the petition. Partly as a result of the campaign the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Two workers at the Leicester-based company Granby Plastics, Ross Galbraith and Gary Sherriff, were sacked in December 1989 for refusing to work on a South African export order. The company exported Nyoil to South Africa, a product that could be used as a lubricant for guns issued by the South African Defence Force. The photo shows the two men leading a solidarity march through Leicester town centre on 9 December 1989.

Actor Glenda Jackson launched the AAM Prize Raffle in 1989, with first prize of a Citroen car. Fundraising was an important part of the AAM’s activities – it depended entirely on small donations and fundraising projects and received no grants from government or major donor institutions.

Thousands of people gathered spontaneously outside South Africa House in London on 11 February 1990 to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s release.

Thousands of people gathered spontaneously outside South Africa House in London on 11 February 1990 to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s release.