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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.

The AAM depended on membership subscriptions and fundraising events to pay for its campaigns. It received no government grants and no significant funding from grant-giving organisations. It depended on grassroots supporters to raise money with initiatives like this annual Grand Raffle. In the photograph is actor and Labour MP Glenda Jackson.

From August 1985 the Scottish AA Committee held a weekly Friday picket of the South African consulate in Glasgow. The consulate was on the fifth floor of the Glasgow Stock Exchange. In 1986 the street was renamed Nelson Mandela Place, and the consulate set up a post office box number to avoid using the new address. The consulate was shut down in the early 1990s.

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.

William Ntombela was one of several South African trade unionists sentenced to death in 1989. The British shopworkers union USDAW launched a petition for his release, signed by 5,000 members.  In the photograph USDAW General Secretary Garfield Davies (left) displays the petition. Partly as a result of the campaign the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Actor Glenda Jackson launched the AAM Prize Raffle in 1989, with first prize of a Citroen car. Fundraising was an important part of the AAM’s activities – it depended entirely on small donations and fundraising projects and received no grants from government or major donor institutions.

Troops in armoured personnel carriers terrorised young people living in South Africa’s black townships in the mid-1980s. This T-shirt was produced by Artists Against Apartheid, set up by Jerry Dammers and Dali Tambo in 1986.