Posters

From 1970 the National Union of Students worked closely with the AAM, and students all over Britain joined anti-apartheid campaigns. This poster, showing South African school students in Soweto in 1976, called for a boycott of South African goods and support for the ANC.

Poster published by the British Communist Party asking shoppers not to buy South African goods. From the formation of the Boycott Campaign in the summer of 1959 the Communist Party supported the boycott of South Africa. Its newspaper, the Morning Star, continued to give full coverage to Anti-Apartheid Movement demonstrations and campaigns. 

Poster for a seminar organised by the AAM and the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid, 2–4 November 1979. The seminar planned internationally co-ordinated campaigns against corporations that exported arms and oil to South Africa and against banks and financial institutions.

The AAM launched the World Campaign Against Military and Nuclear Collaboration in 1979. Its aim was to expose military and nuclear collaboration with South Africa and strengthen the UN arms embargo. Much of AAM’s international activity in the 1980s was through this campaign, collaborating with national anti-apartheid groups worldwide. Action included presenting detailed evidence to the UN about breaches of its mandatory embargo.

Under apartheid 87 per cent of South Africa’s land was reserved for whites. Rural Africans were confined to the overcrowded Bantustans and urban Africans were treated as migrant workers. This poster shows how the Bantustans were made up of small fragmented parcels of land. 

The Freedom Charter was adopted by the Congress of the People held in South Africa in 1955. In the 1980s it once again became a rallying point for anti-apartheid organisations within the country. The ANC declared 1980 the ‘Year of the Charter’ and the AAM distributed thousands of copies of the Freedom Charter during the year.

In the run-up to the elections in Zimbabwe in 1980 there were fears that there would be intimidation and vote-rigging in favour of Bishop Muzorewa’s United African National Council. The Zimbabwe Emergency Campaign Committee asked the British government to ensure that the election was free and fair. This poster publicised the campaign.

Poster advertising a rally on 17 April 1980 to celebrate the conclusion of the Lancaster House talks agreeing the settlement that led to one-person one-vote elections in Zimbabwe.