Anti-Apartheid Movement

On 26 June 1959, South African Freedom Day, a group of South African exiles and their British supporters met in London under the umbrella of the Committee of African Organisations to organize a boycott of goods imported from South Africa. The meeting was addressed by Julius Nyerere, then President of the Tanganyika Africa National Union, and Father Trevor Huddleston and was held in response to a call from the African National Congress (ANC) and the All-African Peoples Conference for an international boycott of South African goods. By the autumn of 1959 the group had evolved into an independent Boycott Movement led by Tennyson Makiwane of the ANC and Patrick van Rensburg of the South African Liberal Party. The group decided to call for a national boycott month in March 1960 as a moral gesture of support for the people of South Africa and gradually won the support of the British Labour and Liberal Parties and the Trades Union Congress.

The month of action began with a rally of 8,000 people in Trafalgar Square on 28 February addressed by the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe and Trevor Huddleston. During the month many local authorities joined the boycott and over five hundred local boycott committees were established all over the country. Leaflets were distributed describing life under apartheid for the black population and three editions of a newspaper, Boycott News, were published. On 21 March the South African police opened fire on men, women and children protesting against the pass laws at Sharpeville in the Transvaal, killing sixty-nine. These shootings, when British-made Saracen tanks had been used, led to strong international protests and, in London, to another rally in Trafalgar Square and demands for the termination of British arms supplies to South Africa. In South Africa itself a state of emergency was declared and the ANC and the recently formed Pan African Congress were banned and went underground. The members of the Boycott Movement realised that a permanent organisation was needed to campaign for the eradication of apartheid and during the summer of 1960 the Movement was restructured and renamed the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). It resolved to work for the total isolation of the apartheid system in South Africa and to support those struggling against the apartheid system.

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