Browse the AAM Archive

Poster produced for placards on a demonstration calling for sanctions against South Africa held in central London on 24 October 1987. Around 60,000 people marched from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park to a rally addressed by SWAPO President Sam Nujoma, Johnstone Makatini of the ANC, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, Labour MP Bernie Grant and Glenys Kinnock.

Children held cards remembering young detainees in South Africa on a march organised by Wales AAM in Cardiff on 24 October 1987. In Sophia Gardens, ANC representative Thando Zuma said the apartheid regime had imprisoned 8,000 young people without charge in the previous 18 months.

Between 1977 and 1985 half of Britain’s uranium imports came from the Rossing mine in Namibia. RTZ operated the mine in defiance of UN resolutions declaring South African rule illegal. This leaflet called attention to the British government’s implicit admission that Namibian uranium was used in its nuclear weapons programme. It was distributed in the 1987 Week of Action on Namibia organised by the AAM and the Namibia Support Committee. 

Shell co-operated with the South African authorities in Namibia, in defiance of the UN termination of South Africa’s mandate. It also supplied fuel for the South African Defence Force in its war against guerrilla fighters from the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in northern Namibia. This leaflet was distributed during the international Week of Action on Namibia organised by the AAM and Namibia Support Committee, 27 October–3 November 1987.

Letter from Richard Caborn MP asking Prime Minister Thatcher to withdraw her remark describing the ANC as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’.

Letter from Prime Minister Thatcher defending her description of the ANC as a ‘typical terorrist organisation’ and reiterating her opposition to sanctions.

Delegates at the AAM’s annual general meeting in Sheffield in 1987. The AGM was the first held under the AAM’s new constitution, under which local groups all over the country elected delegates to the conference.

In 1987 a report published by Sheffield AA Group, ‘Steel, South Africa & Sanctions’, called for an end to British steel imports from South Africa. The report, based on research by Sheffield City Council’s Employment Department, showed that Sheffield steelmakers could import the minerals they needed from other sources. This brochure summarises the report’s conclusions.