Trade unionists

Newsletter of Reading Anti-Apartheid Campaign. Issue 7, dated September 1987, focused on the South African National Mineworkers strike and called for an international boycott of South African coal. It also highlighted a strike by Namibian copper miners.

Reading Anti-Apartheid Campaign leaflet asking local people to take action in support of the campaigns for the reprieve of the Sharpeville Six, sentenced to death in South Africa, and the release of trade unionist Moses Mayekiso, one of five people charged with sedition. The leaflet also advertised the Shell boycott and the AAM’s national ‘Sanctions Now!’ demonstration on 24 October 1987.

There was widespread support among British trade unionists for striking miners in South Africa and Namibia in September 1987. AAM supporters and the British NUM held daily protests outside the London headquarters of Anglo-American, Consolidated Goldfields and other South African mining conglomerates. Over £75,000 was raised for the miners. In the picture Labour MPs Tony Banks and Jeremy Corbyn hold leaflets that the police stopped them distributing outside the offices of the Anglo-American Corporation.

Poster advertising the SARMCOL Workers Co-op’s play ‘The Long March’ at the Hackney Empire, in September 1987. The play was put on by workers from the British-owned BTR factory in Howick, Natal, who were sacked after going on strike in 1986. It toured all over Britain, September–November 1997. The tour was sponsored by the British TUC.

British miners and other local trade unionists marched through Nottingham to protest against the import of South African coal by local company Burnett & Hallamshire.

Jason Angula, Labour Secretary of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), was detained without trial in October 1987. British civil service unions campaigned for his release, together with the Joint Campaign Against the Repression of Trade Unionists. Angula was released at the end of 1988.

The apartheid government escalated its repression of trade unionists in 1988 – four trade union leaders were sentenced to death and hundreds were detained. In response the AAM and SATIS (Southern Africa the Imprisoned Society) launched a campaign to defend trade unionists in South Africa and Namibia. It was launched at a demonstration outside the South African Embassy on 1 February 1988 on the day the trial of Moses Mayekiso, General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA) reopened in Johannesburg.