Posters

The AAM converted its ‘Boycott Bandwagon’ into a ‘Freedom Bus’ after the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990. The bus toured Britain in the summers of 1990 and 1991 asking people to campaign for support for genuine democracy in the negotiations for a new constitution in South Africa. The bus was destroyed by arsonists in February 1992 and reduced to a burnt-out shell.

The South African government failed to honour the agreement it signed with the ANC in August 1990 to release all political prisoners, and at least 284 were still in prison in June 1991. The AAM campaigned to ensure that the prisoners were not forgotten and for freedom for all political prisoners.

From 1989 the AAM held an annual sponsored Freedom Run and free concert in Brockwell Park, south London. The event raised funds for the AAM and publicised anti-apartheid campaigns. This poster advertised the 1991 event, ‘A Sun-Day Fun-Day. It was sponsored by the London Borough of Lambeth.

In 1990 violence between Inkatha Freedom Party and ANC supporters in KwaZulu spread to the townships around Johannesburg and there were unprovoked attacks on workers travelling on trains from Soweto to Johannesburg. A third force, linked to the South African Defence Force, fomented the killings. The AAM insisted it was the responsibility of the South African government to end the violence. Supporters leafleted commuters at central London stations asking them to protest against the killings.

From 1990 negotiations for a new South African constitution were threatened by violence and repression and the media made much of ‘black-on-black’ violence. The AAM recognised that the responsibility for the violence rested ultimately with the apartheid regime and launched a campaign on the theme ‘Tell de Klerk: Stop the Violence and Repression’.

In October 1992 the civil war in Angola resumed when UNITA President Jonas Savimbi refused to accept the result of the UN-brokered elections, won by MPLA. The Angolan Emergency Campaign was set up by the AAM and the Mozambique Angola Committee to inform people in Britain of the situation in Angola.

Poster advertising a conference in London on 3 April 1993 on the role that the British black community could play in helping to transform education in Southern Africa.

The AAM launched its ‘Peace, Freedom and the Vote’ campaign in June 1993. It called for international pressure on the de Klerk government to drop its demand for permanent power sharing and for a white veto on constitutional change. It insisted that the transitional executive council should have a supervisory, rather than advisory, role in the run-up to the elections, and that the new constitution should be agreed by an elected assembly, rather than by a multi-party negotiating body. The campaign culminated in the AAM’s last major rally in Trafalgar Square on 20 June.