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Sanctions, Boycotts and Solidarity in Transnational Anti-Apartheid Activism

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Sanctions, Boycotts and Solidarity in Transnational Anti-Apartheid Activism Rob Skinner “Every Bite Buys a Bullet”: Sanctions, Boycotts and Solidarity in Transnational Anti-Apartheid Activism Abstract This article examines the genesis and development of transnational anti-apartheid activism between the 1960s and the 1980s. Underpinning anti-apartheid was the fundamental principle of “solidarity”, an emotional and ideological connection between the self and a distant oppressed other. It was this concept that served to mediate the transnational dimension of anti-apartheid as a form of humanitarianism. Calls for sanctions against South Africa represented the movement’s most explicit engagement with political systems and structures, and thus the shifting power of humanitarian values in political discourse. Participation in boycotts represented a kind of activism from the ground up, in which individual economic decisions — the refusal to “buy apartheid” — became humanitarian acts. The notion of solidarity marked, moreover, a significant break with the paternalism of ”imperial” humanitarian efforts, while calls for sanctions and disinvestment promoted a global norm of racial equality and a wider sense of humanitarian justice in international relations and global business ethics. Anti-apartheid connected a humanitarian ethos to individual and community action, and the consumer boycott became a primary form in which consciousness-raising and identity-forming functions of “new” social movements were enacted. Keywords: Transnational activism, social movements, boycotts, apartheid, South Africa Shoppers in the northern English town of Blackburn in mid-1989 may have noticed the unusual presence of a protester wedged, a little awkwardly, into a costume resembling an outsized Outspan orange. Alongside him stood a fellow-campaigner whose poster revealed the focus of the campaign — a stylised black and white image of a South African armoured police vehicle of the kind that had been deployed in the country’s black townships since the onset of mass protests against the system of apartheid five years earlier. Emblazoned on the poster in red was the call to “Boycott Apartheid.” Another poster from the 1989 campaign instructed shoppers that purchases of South African fruit directly supported DOI: 10.13154/mts.57.2017.97-114 Moving the Social · 57 (2017) · p. 97 – 114 © Klartext Verlag, Essen , ISSN 2197-0394 (online) 98 Rob Skinner the country’s military with the declaration that “Every Bite Buys a Bullet.”1 Within twelve months of the launch of this campaign, the African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela walked away from prison, symbolically marking the start of a process of negotiation that resulted in fully democratic elections in April 1994. While the British Anti-Apartheid Movement followed the lead of the African National Congress in continuing to call for sanctions and boycotts of South African products through the often fraught process of transition, the “Boycott 1989” campaign was one of the final formal campaigns launched by the Anti-Apartheid Movement in its thirty-year existence. The movement began and ended with a consumer boycott, but campaigns also focussed on sanctions and disinvestment, as well as efforts to raise public awareness of conditions in South Africa and to raise funds for southern African liberation movements. Underpinning all of these efforts was the fundamental principle of “solidarity”, which represented a major conceptual shift in the framing of western support for anti-colonial movements. In its formative years, prior to the launch of the Boycott Movement in 1959, anti-apartheid activism in Britain shifted from a liberal humanitarian concern for the distant others subject to the racial injustices of segregation and apartheid to a movement centred on transnational solidarity. During the 1960s and 1970s, anti-apartheid activists elaborated an ideological platform that supported sanctions and disinvestment campaigns by emphasising the continuing links with — and by implication support of — the South African regime. Support for the anti-apartheid movement in Britain rapidly expanded after 1985 as popular resistance to apartheid intensified within South Africa. As such, anti-apartheid has been viewed in a number of recent accounts as a prime example of a late-20th century transnational social movement. Audie Klotz has argued that the gradual turn towards policies of sanctions against South Africa by western states reflected an “international norm of racial equality” that influenced international relations in the late-20th century.2 Building on the work of Audie Klotz, as well as Margeret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s influential examination of transnational advocacy networks, Hakan Thorn has argued that analysis might be applied to the non-governmental and civil society-based activism of movements such as the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Isolate South Africa Committee in Sweden.3 Anti-apartheid both articulated, and helped constitute, this global norm. More recent works have sought to historicise the emergence of international anti-apartheid movements as an amalgam of moral protest, left-wing politics and anti-colonial sentiment that coalesced in a period of decolonisation, 1 The poster was designed by Keith Piper, 1989. Bodleian Library, Commonwealth and African Collections, Oxford (BLCAC), papers of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, MSS AAM 2512 / 1. 2 Audie Klotz: Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid, Ithaca 1995, p. 5. 3 Håkan Thörn: Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society, Basingstoke 2006; Margaret E. Keck / Kathryn Sikkink: Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca 1998. Sanctions, Boycotts and Solidarity in Transnational Anti-Apartheid Activism 99 heightened public awareness of international affairs and the radicalisation of civil society.4 Others have explored the alliance between anti-apartheid and South African liberation movements, and the ways in which anti-apartheid emerged from black community politics.5 The following sections explore how solidarity was expressed as tangible forms of action within the transnational anti-apartheid movement. Calls for sanctions against South Africa represented the movement’s most explicit engagement with political systems and structures, often predicated on the belief that external pressure would be the most effective way of achieving change within South Africa. Through calls for sanctions and disinvestment, the humanitarian desire to alleviate suffering was politicised, and the focus of activism was transferred from the immediate relief of physical harm to the achievement of longer term goals of civic and social justice. Participation in the consumer boycott against South Africa, moreover, was the process through which an individual’s economic decision — the refusal to “buy apartheid” — became a humanitarian act. It was the boycott, it is argued, that constituted the tangible form of transnational action, which connected concerned individuals with “distant others” in South Africa. “Solidarity”: the Fundamental Principle of Anti-Apartheid As it emerged in the years after 1948, anti-apartheid combined anti-racism and humanitarian concerns, which developed over the course of the 1950s into an ideological affinity and solidarity with African nationalism. The pioneering role of “turbulent priests”, such as Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston in the development of public critiques 4 Christabel Gurney: A Great Cause: The Origins of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, June 1959-March 1960, in: Journal of Southern African Studies 26:1 (2000), pp. 123 – 144; Christabel Gurney: In the Heart of the Beast: The British Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1959 – 1994, in: South African Democracy Education Trust (eds.): The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Vol. 3 Part 1, International Solidarity, Pretoria 2008; Rob Skinner: The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarianism and Transnational Activism in Britain and the United States, c. 1919 – 64, Basingstoke 2010; Kevin O’Sullivan: Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire : Small State Identity in the Cold War, 1955 – 75, Manchester 2012. 5 Arianna Lissoni: The South African Liberation Movements in Exile, C. 1945 – 1970, Ph.D, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 2008; Genevieve Klein: The Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain and Support for the African National Congress, 1976 – 1990, DPhil, St. Antony’s College (University of Oxford), 2007; Elizabeth Williams: The Politics of Race in Britain and South Africa: Black British Solidarity and the Anti- Apartheid Struggle, London 2012. 100 Rob Skinner of apartheid in Britain in the 1950s furnished anti-apartheid with the characteristics of moral protest in the mould of “classical” forms of liberal humanitarianism. Michael Scott, an Anglican minister and estranged Communist, came to prominence in the late 1940s with a series of appearances at the United Nations, championing the cause of the Herero people of South-West Africa and calling for international action against the incorporation of their country into apartheid South Africa.6 In his contacts with the United Nations Trusteeship Committee, Michael Scott was presented as a witness for the Other, whose brief high-profile in the British public eye might be read as a precursor to the “celebrity humanitarianism” of the early 21st-century.7 Michael Scott’s celebrity in the late 1940s did, on one level, serve to legitimise the agenda of the United Nations as it sought to establish its competence over former League
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