Sanctions

Representatives of British local authorities joined a protest against the inclusion of South Africa and Bophuthatswana in the World Travel Market at Olympia in November 1990. One of the few sanctions Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed to was a voluntary ban on the promotion of tourism to South Africa and Namibia, but the British government did nothing to put this into practice.

Submission to the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee showing Britain’s failure to enforce the limited restrictive measures it had placed on trade and investment in South Africa.

In 1990 the AAM made tourism a major part of its consumer boycott campaign. It wrote to major British holiday companies about their policy on selling trips to South Africa. Local AA groups campaigned to persuade local travel agents to stop promoting South African holidays. In London local activists held a sit-in next to the South African Airways stall at the World Travel Market in the Olympia exhibition centre.

ELTSA (End Loans to Southern Africa) and the AAM insisted that there should be no new loans to South Africa until there was firm agreement on a democratic constitution. In 1992 the parastatal electricity company ESCOM tried to float a new bond issue on international money markets. It was forced to withdraw in the face of reluctance to lend and protests like this one organised by ELTSA.

On 24 September 1993 Nelson Mandela went to the UN in New York to ask for the lifting of international sanctions against South Africa. This was after agreement was reached on setting up a Transitional Executive Council in South Africa and an election date, 27 April 1994. Sanctions were formally lifted two weeks later on 8 October. This AAM statement was timed to coincide with Mandela’s UN visit. It looked forward to new trade relationships that would help build a post-apartheid economy.

Brian Brown is a Methodist Minister who worked for the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, in his birthplace South Africa, and came to Britain after the Christian Institute and he were banned in October 1977. From 1980 he was the Africa Secretary of the British Council of Churches, where he helped to organise a conference on ‘Britain and Southern Africa: The Way Forward’, which led to the setting up of the Southern Africa Coalition in 1989. He served the coalition until democratic South Africa emerged in 1994.

This is a complete transcript of an interview carried out in 2000 by Håkan Thörn.