Local AA groups

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.

This booklet was produced by the London Borough of Lambeth in south London. It gave advice to Lambeth residents on how to check if goods on sale in local shops came from South Africa or Namibia. It was carefully worded so as not to break new laws restricting the powers of local authorities to support consumer boycott campaigns.

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.

The Southern Africa Coalition brought together a wide range of organisations, including trade unions, churches, overseas aid agencies and the AAM. In Tyneside, north-east England, local branches of the organisations that made up the coalition organised a week of anti-apartheid events in February 1990.

All over Britain people celebrated Nelson Mandela’s release on 11 February 1990. These two young women were taking part in a vigil on the steps of Sheffield Town Hall.

Sheffield Southern Africa Resources Centre provided educational resources on Southern Africa for the city’s schools and community groups, as well as a headquarters for Sheffield AA Group. Sheffield AA was one of the most active of the AAM’s local groups throughout the 1980s.

This festival was organised by Glasgow North-West AA Group as part of Glasgow’s 1990 European City of Culture celebrations.

Leeds Women Against Apartheid was formed in 1986 to bring together women in support of their sisters in South Africa and Namibia. The group reached out to women’s organisations in West Yorkshire, raising funds for women in Southern Africa, boycotting apartheid goods and holding day schools publicising the situation of women under apartheid. It was linked to a women’s group in Soshunguve township, near Pretoria. This leaflet advertised a meeting with women from the African National Congress and South West Africa People’s Organisation in 1990.