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Under the headline ‘New bill means slave labour’, AA News exposed the implications of proposed new legislation in South Africa. Former South African political detainee Desmond Francis told of how he had been tortured by the apartheid security police. The centrespread reported on the advances made by MPLA guerrilla fighters in Angola.

AA News deplored Robert Sobukwe's 12-hour house arrest after his release from Robben Island. Its editorial urged the British Government to support the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe instead of negotiating with the illegal Smith regime. It reported on the AAM’s first conference for trade unionists, which urged unions to end the investment of their funds in companies with interests in South Africa. A feature article argued that the time had come for a reassessment of AAM tactics and that it might be necessary to set up a new organisation to undertake direct action against British organisations that collaborated with apartheid.

The AAM marked its 10th anniversary with a conference that discussed guerrilla warfare in Southern Africa and the implications of the armed struggle for the international solidarity movement. AA News reported on widespread disillusion with the British Labour Government.  A feature article by Basil Davidson reported on the advance of the PAIGC liberation movement in Portugal’s colony Guinea-Bissau. In an article on sports apartheid, the President of SANROC, Dennis Brutus, highlighted the forthcoming Springbok cricket tour of Britain.

The September issue reported on the sentencing to life imprisonment of five SWAPO members in the conclusion of a long-running trial under South Africa’s Terrorism Act. It carried an eyewitness account of the forced removal of black South Africans from their farms in Natal to a tented settlement, where they were dumped on the veldt with no sanitation. Its letter column continued the debate on future tactics of the AAM. In a foretaste of the campaign to stop the 1970 Springbok cricket tour, AA News reported on how one activist disrupted a fixture of the all-white South African Wilfred Isaacs cricket team.

The October issue headlined the advances made by FRELIMO guerrilla units in northern Mozambique and plans to stop Western companies involvement in building the Cabora Bassa dam. It reported on a TUC motion urging unions to discourage their members from emigrating to South Africa and carried a first-hand account by former political prisoner David Ernst on the difference in conditions for black and white prisoners. The back page printed the Springbok rugby tour fixture list, with a report of the launch of the Stop the Seventy Tour Committee.

Winnie Mandela and Shanti Naidoo were among the detainees expected to be charged under the Terrorism Act, reported this issue. A report on the Conservative Party conference highlighted a motion calling for an end to all ‘coloured’ immigration and for the ‘repatriation’ of many recent British immigrants. A resolution passed at the AAM’s annual general meeting warned the MCC that the tour by the all-white Springbok cricket team planned for the summer of 1970 would inevitably be disrupted.

‘Stop Apartheid Sport’ demanded this issue of AA News. A centrespread reported ‘One match cancelled, three disrupted, 17 to go’. The newspaper gave a round-up of student action against apartheid and reported on a march to Senate House to protest against the University of London’s links with University College, Rhodesia. A review of a new AAM pamphlet ‘South Africa’s Defence Strategy’ argued that South Africa’s defence programme posed a threat not just to the Southern African liberation movements but to the whole of Africa.

This issue of AA News focused on the build-up to the elections in Zimbabwe following the Lancaster House Agreement, which brought to an end Ian Smith’s illegal white minority regime. The AAM accused the interim British administration of failing to ensure that the elections would be free and fair. AA News launched an AAM membership campaign in response to the intensification of resistance to apartheid within South Africa, and announced plans for a new drive to win support from British trade unions. It reported on the growing movement of young white war resisters who had refused to serve in the South African Defence Force.