Photos

Sixty thousand people marched through London from Embankment to Hyde Park on 24 October 1987 to call for sanctions against South Africa. The demonstration took place before the Commonwealth conference in Vancouver. A delegation handed in a letter to 10 Downing Street. The speakers in Hyde Park included SWAPO President Sam Nujoma and the ANC’s Johnstone Makatini. Left to right: Margaret Ling, Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, Glenys Kinnock, Sam Nujoma, Bernie Grant MP, Mike Terry and Norman Willis, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, on march to demand sanctions against South Africa, 24 October 1987.

Sixty thousand people marched through London from Embankment to Hyde Park on 24 October 1987 to call for sanctions against South Africa. The demonstration took place before the Commonwealth conference in Vancouver. A delegation handed in a letter to 10 Downing Street. The speakers in Hyde Park included SWAPO President Sam Nujoma, Johnstone Makatini from the ANC, TUC General Secretary Norman Willis, Glenys Kinnock, Labour MPs Bernie Grant and Joan Lestor, and AAM activist Rekha Patel. In the picture: Trevor Huddleston, Sam Nujoma and Norman Willis.

Children held cards remembering young detainees in South Africa on a march organised by Wales AAM in Cardiff on 24 October 1987. In Sophia Gardens, ANC representative Thando Zuma said the apartheid regime had imprisoned 8,000 young people without charge in the previous 18 months.

Delegates at the AAM’s annual general meeting in Sheffield in 1987. The AGM was the first held under the AAM’s new constitution, under which local groups all over the country elected delegates to the conference.

Outside the annual general meeting of Consolidated Goldfields in London on 4 November 1987. A ‘judge’ holds the scales of justice symbolising South Africa’s ‘rule of law’ in Namibia. In August 1987 ConsGold sacked 4,000 Namibian mineworkers at its Tsumeb mine.

Musicians Little Steven and Jerry Dammers sign the SATIS petition calling for the release of detainees in South Africa. Altogether 30,000 South Africans were held in detention under the national State of Emergency imposed in June 1986. The petition was supported by the British Council of Churches and the TUC and was signed by a third of a million people in Britain. It was presented to the South African authorities, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the UN Secretary-General on Human Rights Day, 10 December 1987.

A petition for the release of all apartheid detainees was delivered to Prime Minister Thatcher on Human Rights Day 10 December 1987 by a  delegation led by AAM President Trevor Huddleston and trade union leader Clive Jenkins. Among the thousands of signatories were the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the leaders of all three British opposition parties and celebrities from the world of the arts like Peggy Ashcroft and Tom Stoppard.

British miners and other local trade unionists marched through Nottingham to protest against the import of South African coal by local company Burnett & Hallamshire.