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Nelson Mandela unveiling the plaque to Ruth First and Joe Slovo in Camden Town, as Frank Dobson looks on |
Gut politics key to defeating the evil of apartheid regime
To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Anti Apartheid Movement, Frank Dobson explains how Camden provided its birthplace and inspiration for the struggle
TOMORROW, Friday June 26, it will be 50 years to the day that the Anti Apartheid Movement was founded here in Camden at a public meeting in Holborn Hall (since demolished) on the corner of Gray’s Inn Road and Clerkenwell Road.
The main speaker was Julius Nyerere, later President of Tanzania, together with Tennyson Makiwane representing the African National Congress, Vella Pillay, representing South Africa’s Indian Congress, Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston.
Only the wildest optimist that day could have believed they were present at the inception of the most effective moral and political campaign in modern British history.
Opposition to apartheid had been building up for more than a decade.
In Britain the Committee of African Organisations (CAO) worked in collaboration with the Movement for Colonial Freedom, National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), Christian Action, trades unions, the Labour Party and the Communist Party.
The Holborn Hall meeting called for a boycott of South African goods. The very first pickets and petitions were at Camden Town Tube station in conjunction with St Pancras & Holborn Trades Council and at Hampstead Tube station with the Hampstead Peace Committee organised from the CAO office in the basement of Dr (later Lord) David Pitt’s GP surgery in 200 North Gower Street.
The AAM was forced to leave North Gower Street after it was fire-bombed by right-wing extremists when everybody was out demonstrating against South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.
It found a temporary home in Endsleigh Street, Bloomsbury, and then operated for many years from Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia before moving finally to Selous Street, renamed Mandela Street, in Camden Town.
Ruth First, murdered by South African state terrorists, and Joe Slovo, later in Mandela’s first cabinet, lived in Camden Town.
Our area set an early example of “Think Global, Act Local”.
Throughout 1959 and early 1960 the boycott campaign was building up with a lot of financial and organisational help from trades unions.
The Labour Party nationally stepped up its involvement after the 1959 general election defeat.
In February 1960 Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell addressed a rally in Trafalgar Square which was harassed by Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts – the forerunners of the BNP.
Then on March 21 1960, South African police shot dead 69 unarmed protesters at Sharpeville.
This shocked public opinion and galvanised the campaigners.
How come the British establishment and big business were propping up such a murderous regime and allowing them to remain part of the Commonwealth?
For the next 35 years the Anti Apartheid Movement organised up and down this country to do everything possible to build up what proved to be an unstoppable campaign to bring about the overthrow of the racist regime.
This was all done in collaboration with the African National Congress and others in South Africa who were impoverished and denied their basic rights as citizens and exposed to harassment, imprisonment and death when they demanded a fair deal in their own country.
The Anti Apartheid Movement organised boycotts, marches, protest meetings, publicity campaigns and petitions all over the country with particular help from trade union and Labour Party branches who organised leafleting.
Many, including a Glasgow union branch organised by Michael Martin (later Speaker of the House of Commons) raised funds to help their fellow workers in South Africa.
Some of this money was shifted to South Africa by the Defence and Aid Fund led by Canon John Collins – by devious means which would now break international rules against money laundering.
As time went by more and more people became involved and public opinion shifted.
By the time international and internal pressure forced the South African government to release Nelson Mandela and his colleagues it had become difficult to remember just how widely accepted the apartheid regime in South Africa had been 30 years before.
That consensus acceptance of apartheid hadn’t drained away of its own accord.
It had fallen victim to the stoicism and heroism of black, coloured and Asian and white people in South Africa and the support of decent people the world over, organised by the Anti Apartheid Movement here and similar, though less significant, organisations in other countries.
Having been involved on and off in the campaign since I attended protest rallies about the Sharpeville massacre as a student, I sometimes wondered whether we were doing any good.
Boycotting Outspan oranges, Cape apples and South African wine, getting wet through on marches, sweltering in the crowd at big rallies, shouting protests outside South Africa House, delivering petitions to 10 Downing Street, attending protracted planning meetings or going to New York to address the UN Special Committee on Apartheid. Did it help?
Did anyone notice?
Since apartheid was overthrown, I have had the privilege of talking about such things with Nelson Mandela and other heroes of the struggle.
They all say they knew what we were doing. That it helped sustain their hope.
That it chipped away at the edifice of apartheid.
That it helped make possible their bloodless revolution.
So to be in Westminster Hall with my wife when Nelson Mandela addressed both Houses of our Parliament as President of the new, democratic, non-racial South Africa was one of the proudest and happiest moments of my life.
The Anti Apartheid Movement harnessed the spontaneous outpouring of disgust at the horrors being perpetrated in South Africa. It involved all sorts of people – decent people.
Trade unions, human rights and political activists, students, people of all religions and no religion.
It wasn’t the politics of triangulation or of think tanks of compromise or consensus. It wasn’t the politics of big business or press barons.
It was gut politics – the politics of right and wrong.
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