Browse the AAM Archive

This is the transcript of a witness seminar held at St Antony’s College, Oxford in 1999. Participants included Rivonia trialists Ahmed Kathrada and Rusty Bernstein, Mandela’s biographer Anthony Sampson, the producer of the 1988 Nelson Mandela tribute concert Tony Hollingsworth, former Executive Secretaries  of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Mike Terry and Ethel de Keyser, and the AAM’s Deputy Director Alan Brooks and Campaign Organiser Clive Nelson. The seminar was convened and chaired by Professor William Beinart.

This is the transcript of a witness seminar held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in December 2000. Participants included academics Rob Skinner and Kevin Ward; the former Director of the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, Baldwin Sjollema; Pauline Webb, former Head of Religious Programmes, BBC World Service, who took part in the meetings that set up the PCR; Paul Oestreicher, former Director of the British Council of Churches Division of International Affairs; JimWilkie, former Africa Secretary of the BCC; Brian Brown, former Deputy Director of the Christian Institute of South Africa and Africa Secretary of the BCC; David Haslam, founder of End Loans to Southern Africa (ELSTA) and David Craine, ELTSA staff member. The seminar was convened and chaired by Professor Shula Marks.

Victoria Scott tells how her involvement in the London AA Committee changed her life – and how she told Nelson Mandela about it in 2004.

Postcard sold to raise funds for the liberation movements in the Portuguese-occupied territories of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The colonies won their independence in 1975.

For three decades the apartheid government sponsored undercover activities to subvert anti-apartheid action within the UK. Its illegal activity included a bomb attack on the ANC’s London headquarters, and arson and break-ins at the AAM, ANC and SWAPO offices. It tried to infiltrate anti-apartheid organisations and spread misinformation about their campaigns. South African embassy officials were also implicated in illegal arms deals. In 1997 these activities were documented in evidence submitted to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Lord Hughes of Woodside on behalf of the AAM Archives Committee. [NB Appendices 3–7 are missing from this document]

After the date had been agreed for South Africa’s first one person one vote election on 27 April 1994 the AAM looked forward to the future. It asked its supporters to help build a new South Africa free from racial division and gross inequality. This T-shirt featured the new South African flag.

T-shirt calling for support for the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), featuring a woman guerrilla fighter with a baby on her back.

Wales AAM was set up in 1981 to co-ordinate anti-apartheid campaigns by local anti-apartheid groups, trade unions and churches in Wales. All its campaign materials were bilingual, in Welsh and English.