1980s

Sheffield MP Richard Caborn and Lord Mayor Tony Damms with Sheffield AAM supporters outside Tesco on 13 October 1989. Over 2,000 shoppers signed Sheffield AA Group’s petition asking Tesco to stop selling South African goods. Earlier in the year, 320 of Tesco 380 stores all over Britain were picketed in a special Day of Action on 22 April.

The AAM campaigned to stop the 1990 rebel cricket tour of South Africa, led by Mike Gatting. It picketed 40 county cricket matches involving members of the team. These demonstrators are outside the Oval. The tour was cut short by protests inside South Africa and made a big financial loss.

This poster reproduced an press advertisement calling on the 1989 Commonwealth  Heads of Government meeting to impose further sanctions on South Africa. In 1986 the Commonwealth imposed limited sanctions, constrained by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to agree to more wide-ranging measures. The Southern Africa Coalition was a broad coalition of British organisations, including churches, trade unions, overseas development organisations and the AAM, launched on 1 September 1989 to pressure the British government ot impose targeted sanctions against South Africa.

This report analysed the actions taken by F W de Klerk during his first 100 days as President of South Africa. It argued that he had made no significant changes to the apartheid system.

COSATU General Secretary Jay Naidoo was the main speaker at the AAM’s annual general meeting in November 1989. He warned that since F W de Klerk was inaugurated as State President in September 1989, there had been an increase in violence and repression against South African trade unionists.

Operation Orange was an AAM fundraising initiative designed to promote the consumer boycott campaign. This leaflet asked people to send a message to Prime Minister Thatcher asking her to impose sanctions against South Africa. At the same time it asked them to send a donation to the Anti-Apartheid Movement.

The AAM’s ‘Boycott Apartheid 89’ campaign extended the consumer boycott to tourism. London students and the London Anti-Apartheid Committee called for South Africa to be excluded from the World Travel Market at Kensington’s Olympia exhibition centre, 28 November 1989. The AAM wrote to the ten top British travel agents asking them not to book holidays in South Africa.

The AAM depended on membership subscriptions and fundraising events to pay for its campaigns. It received no government grants and no significant funding from grant-giving organisations. It depended on grassroots supporters to raise money with initiatives like this annual Grand Raffle. In the photograph is actor and Labour MP Glenda Jackson.