Posters

Poster produced for the campaign to save the lives of the Sharpeville Six, who were sentenced to death after joining a demonstration at which a black deputy mayor was killed. The six were reprieved in July 1988 after spending two and a half years on death row.

Oscar Mpetha was a South African trade union leader and founder member of SACTU (South African Congress of Trade Unions). In 1980 he was arrested after taking part in protests in Nyanga, Cape Town, in which two people were killed. After a long trial he was sentenced to five years imprisonment. He was eventually released in 1989 soon after his 80th birthday. 

Repression of trade unionists intensified from the end of 1987, with four union activists held on death row. On 1 February 1988 the AAM and SATIS launched the Joint Campaign against the Repression of Trade Unionists at a demonstration outside South Africa House that coincided with the reopening of the trial of NUMSA General Secretary Moses Mayekiso. In the following months most British trade unions launched their own actions, including the National Union of Mineworkers’ petition for the release of three South African mineworkers sentenced to hang. The petition was signed by over 30,000 people in Britain’s coalfield communities.

The AAM mobilised widespread public protests in Britain in response to the banning of the UDF and 16 other anti-apartheid organisations in 1988. It called a press conference in London, addressed by Thabo Mbeki. The AAM’s President Trevor Huddleston and the General Secretary of the TUC, Norman Willis, met the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. This poster advertised a day of protest on 21 March, when the AAM distributed half a million stickers with the slogan ‘Ban Apartheid: Sanctions Now!’.

Poster publicising an anti-apartheid conference organised by a coalition of groups in south London in April 1988. 

South Africa’s rule over Namibia was illegal under international law. The AAM focused on this in calling for the British government to support UN mandatory sanctions against the apartheid regime.  

On 4 May 1978 South African troops massacred over 600 Namibian refugees at Kassinga in southern Angola. Hundreds more were abducted and detained at a South African military base in northern Namibia. This poster commemorated the tenth anniversary of the massacre.

Poster advertising the concert held at Wembley Stadium on 11 June 1988 as part of the AAM’s ‘Nelson Mandela: Freedom at 70’ campaign. The concert was attended by a capacity audience of 92,000 and broadcast to ove 60 countries with a potential audience of a billion people. Oliver Tambo was the guest of honour and Stevie Wonder, Whitney and Sting were among the performers.