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Leaflet publicising an event held to celebrate South African Women’s Day, 9 August 1982. The African National Congress Women’s Section was very active in London in the 1980s. It collected goods for the Charlotte Maxeke crèche and Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania and organised activity days for children from families of South African exiles in London.

Sticker displayed in shops that agreed not to stock South African goods.

Ruth First was assassinated by South African agents in Mozambique in August 1982. The AAM wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher showing that the killing was part of an escalating pattern of South African aggression, including the bombing of the ANC’s London office in March 1982. It asked her to instruct the British Ambassador in Cape Town to make a formal protest to the apartheid government.

These three young men were among the hundreds who left South Africa after the 1976 Soweto student uprising and returned secretly after military training. They were intercepted by the South African Security Forces and sentenced to death in August 1981. This leaflet advertised a 12-hour vigil outside the South African Embassy as part of a long-running international campaign to save their lives. As a result of the campaign the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.

South Africa was still occupying large areas of southern Angola a year after its invasion in August 1981. On the anniversary of the invasion demonstrators picketed the British Foreign Office and the US, French, West German and Canadian embassies in protest against Western governments’ refusal to act against the apartheld government. 

A north London community bookshop hosted a photo exhibition and collection box for the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in the summer of 1982. Left to right: ANC representative Ruth Mompati, Jim Corrigall of Haringey AA Group, local councillor Pat Tonge, Dave Palmer of Reading Matters bookshop and local councillor Ernie Large.

Members of City of London Anti-Apartheid Group call for the release of South African political prisoner David Kitson. The Group launched a non-stop picket of South Africa House in August 1982. Kitson served 20 years imprisonment in South Africa and was released in 1984. In the picture on the right are David Kitson’s wife Norma Kitson and son Steve.

Three young anti-apartheid supporters joined a demonstration at the opening of an ‘embassy’ for the Bophuthatswana Bantustan in Holland Park, West London on 7 September 1982. ‘President’ Lucas Mangope was given a special travel document by the British government to attend the opening. The government refused to recognise Bophuthatswana as an independent state and ‘Bop House’ had no diplomatic status.