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ANC President Oliver Tambo was the main speaker at a rally held in London to mark South Africa Freedom Day on 26 June 1981. He told AAM supporters ‘It is your struggle as it is ours’. Also on the platform were ANC representative Ruth Mompati, FRELIMO leader and future Mozambique President Armando Guebuza, SACTU General Secretary John Gaetsewe and SWAPO Deputy Secretary for Labour P Munyaro.

This banner saying ‘No Shell-BP Oil for Apartheid’ was suspended from a footbridge in Southampton in June 1981. The action was part of a national Month of Boycott of Shell and BP organised by the AAM. Southampton AA Group members picketed local Shell and BP garages throughout the month. 

Disabled AAM supporters picketed the opening day of the International Stoke Mandeville Games, forerunner of the Paralympics, in July 1981. They were calling for South Africa to be barred from the Games. The following year a new group, Disabled People Against Apartheid was formed with support from all the main organisations representing disabled people in Britain. South Africa was expelled from the Games in 1985.

In 1981 the South African Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand provoked mass opposition and the biggest demonstrations in New Zealand’s history. New Zealanders in London picketed the New Zealand High Commission to show their support for the protests back home. 

Poster publicising a meeting organised by Hackney AA Group and Hackney CND on 21 July 1981.

The tenth NUS/AAM annual student conference, held at Queen Mary College, London in July 1981, focused on campaigning for the isolation of South Africa and placed renewed emphasis on the consumer boycott. This paper highlighted campaigns for an oil embargo, against South Africa’s nuclear bomb, against Barclays Bank’s involvement in South Africa, for disinvestment and an academic and recruitment boycott. The conference was attended by around 100 students from 50 colleges.

Nelson Mandela was given the Freedom of the City of Glasgow on 4 August 1981. Glasgow was the first of many British cities to honour Mandela in this way. The photograph shows ANC representative Ruth Mompati speaking at a meeting in Glasgow City Chambers held after the award ceremony. Also in the picture are Nigerian Vice-President Alex Ekwueme,  the Lord Provost of Glasgow Michael Kelly and the Chair of the Scottish AA Committee, Brian Filling.

Three young men, Johannes Shabangu, Anthony Tsotsobe and David Moise, were sentenced to death in Pretoria on 19 August 1981. They were charged with taking part in attack on the SASOL oil-from-coal power station and a Johannesburg police station. All three were school students who left South Africa to join Umkhonto we Sizwe after the Soweto uprising in 1976. After an international campaign the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on 7 June 1983.