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The AAM celebrated its 15th anniversary with a Freedom Convention at Camden Lock, London on 30 June 1974. Ray Buckton, General Secretary of the rail union ASLEF, was one of the speakers at a rally held during the afternoon. Stalls displayed information about South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Portugal’s African colonies. In the photograph (left to right): Labour MP Jo Richardson, Nigerian Ambassador Edwin Ogbu, Chair of the UN Special Committee on Apartheid, AAM President Bishop Ambrose Reeves, AAM Hon. Secretary Abdul Minty and Joan Hymans of the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

The AAM celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with a ‘Freedom Convention’ at Camden Lock, London on 30 June 1974. Stalls displayed information about South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Portugal’s African colonies. A petition for the release of South African prisoners with 30,000 signatures was presented to Nigeria’s UN Ambassador Edwin Ogbu, Chair of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. The Convention also highlighted the call for a boycott of all South African products.

In September 1971 the National Union of Students, AAM and Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guiné set up a student network to coordinate student campaigning on Southern Africa. Every year through the 1970s and early 1980s the network held an annual conference to discuss campaign priorities. This is the report of the third conference, held at Keele University in July 1974. The conference agreed to prioritise raising material aid for the Southern African liberation movements, campaigning for disinvestment from South Africa and for a boycott of Barclays Bank.

In 1974 the newly elected Labour government authorised joint naval exercises with the South African navy. The AAM accused it of failing to honour its election manifesto commitments and campaigned for pressure from Labour supporters against all military and economic links with South Africa.

South African former political prisoners took part in a walk from London to Manchester, 27 October–6 November 1974. They held meetings along the way to publicise the situation of political prisoners. In the photograph the marchers are leaving Banbury, where they were met by Labour councillors and held a meeting in the Town Hall.

In autumn 1974 students at Manchester University disrupted a meeting of the University Council in protest against its refusal to sell all the university’s shares in British companies with investments in South Africa. In response to earlier student demands, Manchester’s Vice Chancellor announced that shares in nine firms had been sold. At Durham University the student union held a vote which resulted a clear majority for the sale of holdings in companies involved in South Africa.

Anti-apartheid campaigners called on the recently elected Labour government to stop all British military collaboration with South Africa and end the Simonstown naval agreement at a demonstration in Whitehall on 31 October 1974. Two months later the government cancelled the agreement.

This letter from Durham University Students Union put the case for total disinvestment from South Africa. It asked Durham students to back the union’s call for the sale of the university’s holdings in all companies with South African interests by supporting it at special meetings of their Junior Common Rooms.