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Anti-apartheid demonstrators marched through Birmingham on 21 March 1987 in support of the AAM’s March Month of People’s Sanctions. They were remembering the South Africans shot by the police at Sharpeville in 1960 and at Langa in the Eastern Cape in 1985.

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

The Scottish Namibia Committee was set up in the 1980s to campaign In support of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). This petition called attention to the brutality with which Namibian political prisoners were treated. It urged the British government to intervene with the apartheid government for their release.

In March 1987 the AAM launched a campaign for a boycott of Shell products as part of an international campaign to make Shell withdraw from South Africa. This report showed how Shell supported the South African Defence Force and collaborated with the apartheid government’s illegal occupation of Namibia. It was a revised British edition of a report originally produced by Dutch anti-apartheid organisations.

Leaflet distributed by Exeter AA Group advertising events held as part of the AAM’s March month of action for people’s sanctions in 1987.

Waltham Forest AA Group organised this meeting in north-east London to win local support for the AAM’s month of action for people’s sanctions in March 1987. 

Hounslow AA Group was formed at the end of 1985. Its 1987 AGM report highlighted the AAM’s 24 March day of protest action and reported on the local council’s funding for an anti-apartheid campaign event as part of the national ‘ten days of anti-apartheid action’ planned to take place in June 1987.

British railworkers union General Secretary Jimmy Knapp with Zola Zembe from SACTU. They joined a protest outside the South African Embassy on 6 April 1987.