Faith organisations

Brian Brown is a Methodist Minister who worked for the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, in his birthplace South Africa, and came to Britain after the Christian Institute and he were banned in October 1977. From 1980 he was the Africa Secretary of the British Council of Churches, where he helped to organise a conference on ‘Britain and Southern Africa: The Way Forward’, which led to the setting up of the Southern Africa Coalition in 1989. He served the coalition until democratic South Africa emerged in 1994.

In this clip Brian Brown talks about his experience as Africa Secretary of the British Council of Churches in the 1980s.

This is the transcript of a witness seminar held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in December 2000. Participants included academics Rob Skinner and Kevin Ward; the former Director of the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, Baldwin Sjollema; Pauline Webb, former Head of Religious Programmes, BBC World Service, who took part in the meetings that set up the PCR; Paul Oestreicher, former Director of the British Council of Churches Division of International Affairs; JimWilkie, former Africa Secretary of the BCC; Brian Brown, former Deputy Director of the Christian Institute of South Africa and Africa Secretary of the BCC; David Haslam, founder of End Loans to Southern Africa (ELSTA) and David Craine, ELTSA staff member. The seminar was convened and chaired by Professor Shula Marks.

Iain Whyte volunteered at Christian Action as a school student in London and attended the first meeting of the Boycott Movement in June 1959. He was a student at Glasgow University in the early 1960s and joined Glasgow Anti-Apartheid Committee. He was later ordained as a Church of Scotland minister and served as the Scottish Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Religious Liaison Officer and the convenor of the Church of Scotland’s Africa Committee. Iain has researched and written on enslavement and the abolitionist movement and more recently campaigned for solidarity with Palestinians.

This is a complete transcript of an interview carried out as part of a research project on the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and South Africa’s transition to majority rule, conducted by Dr Matt Graham (History programme, University of Dundee) and Dr Christopher Fevre (International Studies Group, University of the Free State) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13619462.2021.1976154