As well as being the imperialist power par excellence, Britain had a long counter-cultural history of anti-colonial dissent. OWEN DOWLING sites the Anti-Apartheid Movement in this tradition and argues that in the 1960s and 1970s the AAM was a bridge to the movement that contested the ‘new imperialism’ of the post-colonial era. They argue that together with the campaigns in support of the people of Vietnam, Chile and other Latin American countries, the AAM was part of this wider solidarity movement.
The British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was intimately bound up, in its origins and throughout its three decades of activity, with the history of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in Britain.
This tradition of ‘British dissent’ against colonial rule, exploitation and atrocities, surveyed in works by scholars including Stephen Howe (1993) and Priyamvada Gopal (2019), reaches back to eighteenth-century non-conformist opposition to the slave trade (entailing boycotts of slave-produced goods), or on some accounts to the Levellers’ mutiny against Oliver Cromwell’s genocidal Irish war in 1649.
In the twentieth century, metropolitan mobilisations in support of the Indian Swaraj movement, and engagements with Pan-Africanist interlocutors like Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore and CLR James, helped synthesise a wider anti-colonial impulse among socialists, progressive intellectuals, radical Christians and sections of the labour movement.
The 15 years between 1945 and Harold Macmillan’s 1960 ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town witnessed the fruition of this tradition into a vigorous – albeit consistently minoritarian – national pressure group. While the independence (and partition) of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, followed swiftly by Burmese decolonisation, had represented formidable advances for the anti-colonial cause, brutal imperial repression and terror in Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana, Cyprus and the settler-dominated Central African Federation (comprising today’s Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi) incensed an expanding movement of protest in Britain.
This was the context for the formation in 1954 of the Movement for Colonial Freedom, under pioneering anti-colonial leader Fenner Brockway. It was also the context for a rising metropolitan consciousness around the evil of the apartheid system in South Africa, Britain’s self-governing ‘dominion’ – a system institutionalised by the Afrikaner Nationalist Party since 1948, but which built upon an older foundation of British colonial segregation and exploitation of South Africa’s black majority.
As Christabel Gurney (2000) has documented, popular books by Alan Paton (1948) and Trevor Huddleston (1956) helped expose the British public to apartheid’s inequities, while radical South African exiles joined Britain’s burgeoning anti-colonial ecosystem to build momentum for a movement in solidarity with the demand for majority rule in South Africa. The Treason Trial, Ghanaian independence and the inception of the All-African People’s Conferences provided the international context for the formation in London in 1959 of the Boycott Movement, on the crest of the wave of British anti-colonialism.
Instrumental in the Boycott Movement’s foundation – alongside the MCF and other anti-colonial organisations like Michael Scott’s Africa Bureau, and Christian Action under Canon John Collins (also founding chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) – was the Committee of African Organisations, a network embracing African nationalist students and political leaders in London (including Julius Nyerere), which Elizabeth Williams (2015) takes as reflective of the British AAM’s ‘African origins’.
The Boycott Movement’s reorganisation into the Anti-Apartheid Movement proper came in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960, a paradigmatic atrocity widely conceived as representative of a rejoinder on the part of white South Africa against the onward march of decolonisation and majority rule in Africa – against the ‘wind of change’.
South Africa’s effective expulsion from the British Commonwealth the following year represented the first major victory for the germinal AAM. However, in becoming an independent white republic, Verwoerd’s apartheid state now posed a novel challenge for British opponents of colonialism. No longer a dominion of the British Empire, South Africa was thus notionally extricated from the remit of Britain’s metropolitan anti-colonial tradition: opposition to British colonial rule of subject territories and peoples, and support for their independence.
Yet, in retaining the white minority rule hitherto identified with European colonialism, apartheid South Africa’s socio-political and economic structures continued to be characterised as essentially colonial throughout the discourse of the AAM. Important for this understanding was the South African Communist Party’s 1962 theorisation of apartheid as constitutive of ‘colonialism of a special type’ – a theory which, through the ANC and Communist Party of Great Britain, achieved widespread vernacular subscription throughout the British AAM.
Further, South African capitalism’s structural dependency upon foreign investment from British firms, and the profits derived for British capital from its investment in the apartheid economy, were often conceived as constitutive of a neo-colonial relationship. This was bolstered by the effective continuation of other ‘imperial’ links between Britain and South Africa – in many matters of diplomacy, trade, military and intelligence collaboration, and culture – despite the latter’s departure from the Commonwealth, enshrined in the South Africa Act (1962). As the 1960s went on, moreover, South Africa was increasingly seen as itself representing an ‘imperialist’ power on the African continent, and as the chief guarantor for the ‘unholy alliance’ the AAM identified between Pretoria, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and Portuguese colonialism.
All these dimensions contributed to a conception in AAM and British left circles of the apartheid republic as still intrinsically bound up with ‘imperialism’ – specifically, what was widely dubbed as a ‘new imperialism’ specific to the increasingly (formally) post-colonial era of the global Cold War, dominated by the USA. Indeed, backed by the capitalist West, apartheid was seen among many British leftists as basically expressive of the same ‘imperialist’ interests internationally as Washington’s war in Vietnam and the US-backed counter-revolutionary juntas of Latin America.
Correspondent with this conception came an understanding of anti-apartheid as representing an expression of anti-imperialist politics: not merely in terms of the older anti-colonial tradition that had produced the Boycott Movement, but as of a piece with the new forms of militant western solidarity with ‘third world’ national liberation movements and guerilla struggles that characterised the era of Che Guevara, the Tet offensive and Tricontinentalism.
In Britain, these years saw the formation of diverse international solidarity campaigns which characterised their politics as variously ‘anti-imperialist’: the British Council for Peace in Vietnam (established in 1965) and more militant Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (1966); Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guine (1968); Friends of Namibia/Namibia Support Committee (1969); Irish Civil Rights Solidarity Campaign (1969), Irish Solidarity Campaign (1970), and Troops Out Movement (1973); Chile Solidarity Campaign (1973); and Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign (1978), among others.
In my doctoral research, I dub this Cold War-era British political tradition as that of ‘anti-imperialism after empire’. The British AAM was foundational for this tradition, and indeed its formative years can be considered as a bridge within the history of Britain’s internationalist left, connecting the period of what can be called ‘classical anti-colonialism’ and that of this ‘new anti-imperialism’.
From championship of armed guerilla struggle by the ANC and fellow Southern African liberation movements ZAPU, SWAPO, MPLA, FRELIMO and PAIGC as ‘the most important instrument for change in the sub-continent’, to radical student occupations and direct actions inspired by the anti-imperialist zeitgeist of 1968, and new theorisations of the role of British ‘imperialist capital’ in the apartheid economy and the prospect that Southern Africa might prove to be ‘Britain’s Vietnam’, explicit anti-imperialism in this new sense became an increasingly prominent dimension of the AAM’s public profile into the mid-1970s.
The broad-front AAM’s anti-imperialist rhetoric was always able to be outmatched in its militancy by anti-apartheid bodies on the specifically revolutionary left, like the Southern Africa Solidarity Campaign, set up in 1976 by the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party, and the Revolutionary Communist Group, which contrasted its own ‘anti-imperialist’ anti-apartheid strategy with the alleged moderation of the AAM – and in the 1980s provided the predominant ideological force behind the boisterous City of London Anti-Apartheid Group.
Nevertheless, while the AAM’s (and ANC’s) recourse to an explicit anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist discourse did lessen into the 1980s, with greater emphasis placed on humanitarian and cultural appeals, many contemporary anti-apartheid leaders and activists do still remember the movement of those years as an anti-imperialist one, especially in its continued opposition to British capital investment in apartheid, Thatcher’s defence of Pretoria against sanctions and Ronald Reagan’s geopolitical backing of South Africa during the so-called ‘Second Cold War’ on the African continent.
Situating the history of British anti-apartheid within the framework of ‘anti-imperialism after empire’ helps precisely locate the AAM in its proper historical relation to other contemporary international solidarity movements such as those with Vietnam and Chile, and its place within the longer, multi-generational genealogy of internationalist dissent in Britain.
Taken in this light, the AAM’s three campaigning decades can be seen as a vital historical link between the tradition of ‘classical anti-colonialism’ during Britain’s imperial heyday on the one hand, and the UK’s 21st-century anti-war and Palestine solidarity movements on the other.
Owen Dowling is researching a PhD thesis 'Anti-Imperialism After Empire: International Solidarity Campaigns and the British Left, 1960–1990’ at Cambridge University.
Works cited
- Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent(London: Verso, 2019).
- Christabel Gurney, ‘”A Great Cause”: The Origins of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, June 1959–March 1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies,vol. 26 (2000).
- Elizabeth Williams, The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti-Apartheid Struggle(London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country(London: Jonathan Cape, 1948).
- Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort(London: Collins, 1956).