“This brilliant series, on the most important international social justice movement of the 20th century, is a landmark work of global significance.” |
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Abdul Minty British Anti-Apartheid Movement October 1939, Abdul Samad Minty was born in Hartebeesfontein, Northern Transvaal (now known as Limpopo Province). In June 1958 he left for Britain to further his studies. In 1969, eleven years later, he graduated with an MSc in Economics and International Relations at the University College in London. While Minty was abroad he worked for the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa.Between 1962 and 1995 he was the Honorary Secretary of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. Minty played an important role in lobbying the International Olympic Committee in 1963 for the suspension of the South African Olympic Committee from the Olympics. In 1969 he published his study on the defence strategy of the apartheid government in South Africa. His publication helped the Anti-Apartheid Movement to develop a campaign for termination of the Simonstown Agreement between South Africa and Britain on the defence of the seas around Southern Africa. After the fall of apartheid in 1994, Minty was appointed as the Deputy Director-General for Multilateral Affairs in the Department of Foreign Affairs, a position he held till 2004. He also oversaw South Africa's new membership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Commonwealth. On 12 September 2008 South Africa nominated Minty for the post of Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and his nomination was endorsed by the African Union. Minty also served as a member of Troika Group until May 2009. Source: South African History Online |
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Adwoa Dunn-Mouton Southern Africa Support Project; staff of US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa Adwoa Dunn-Mouton first went to Africa as a student abroad from the University of California at Berkeley, and her first impression was of the cultural similarities between black people in Africa and America. This was further enhanced when she attended the African Liberation Day demonstrations in San Francisco in 1972, which strengthened her connection to Africa. She started working with the Southern African Support Project, doing educational outreach and fundraising to support the liberation struggles in Southern Africa.At the beginning of 1986 she started working for Congressman Howard Wolpe, chair of the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and focused on looking at the position the media was taking with regard to South Africa. Dunn-Mouton continued her work on African issues as a member of the board of TransAfrica. |
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Albert Van Den Heuvel Dutch Reform Church; World Council of Churches Rev. van den Heuvel was educated at University Utrecht and Union Theological Seminary in New York, and upon the completion of his studies in 1958, began working for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. In this capacity he began to work on the issue of apartheid, attending the WCC’s Cottesloe Consultation in Johannesburg in December 1960 to address racial injustice in the wake of Sharpeville and the Notting Hill Consultation in 1969 out of which grew the WCC’s Programme to Combat Racism.Influenced by Martin Luther King (whose I Have A Dream speech he attended), he travelled Europe campaigning against hostile church audiences for the PCR, and participated in a number of other campaigns (including the Shell campaign, for which he attended the oil giant’s annual general meeting and confronted the board with questions about their involvement in South Africa.) In 1980 he left his position at the WCC and switched to broadcasting on VARA, a Dutch public broadcasting association, where he served as president for five years, and on NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation), where he served as vice-president until 1993. He is a published author whose works include These Rebellious Powers (1963), The Humiliation of the Church (1966), You Are Hiding God from Me (1973), Shalom and Combat: A Personal Struggle Against Racism (1979), and Common Values in a Global World (2001). Source: Wikipedia |
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Albertina Sisulu African National Congress MaSisulu, as she was affectionately known, was born Nontsikelelo Thethiwe in the village of Camama in the former Transkei on October 21 1918. She graduated from Mariazell College in 1939, and chose a career in nursing. She started training at Johannesburg General Hospital in 1940, and it was there that she first met Walter Sisulu, a young political activist, in 1941. They were married in 1944.br>Albertina got involved in politics when she joined the African National Congress (ANC) Women's League in 1955, and took part in the launch of the Freedom Charter the same year. She was also among those in 1956 who led a women's march to the Union Buildings to protest against the pass laws that prevented free movement of non-whites. Albertina was arrested after her husband skipped bail to go underground, becoming the first woman to be arrested under the then General Laws Amendment Act of 1963. The act gave the police the power to hold suspects in detention for 90 days without charging them. Albertina was placed in solitary confinement for almost two months. She was subsequently in and out of jail for her political activities, but she continued to resist against apartheid, despite being banned for most of the 1960s. She was also a key member of the United Democratic Front in the 1980s. For more than 50 years, Albertina committed herself to The Albertina Sisulu Foundation, which works to improve the lives of small children and old people. She was honoured for her commitment to the anti-apartheid struggle and her social work when the World Peace Council, based in Basel, Switzerland, elected her president from 1993 to 1996. Albertina Sisulu passed away on 2 June 2011. Source: Business Live |
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Allan Boesak Dutch Reform Church; United Democratic Front Reverend Allan Boesak was born at Kakamas, Northern Cape, as one of eight children. He was raised in Somerset West and as a child worked as a labourer to help support his family. At fourteen, he became a sexton in the separate Coloured sector of the local Nederduitse Gereformeerde Sending-Kerk. After graduating from Bellville Theological Seminary, he worked as a pastor in Paarl between 1967 and 1970. In the early 1970s, he studied at theological institutions in Kampen, Holland, and New York, gaining a PhD in 1975. On his return to South Africa in 1976, his parish was in Cape Town's Bellville South. Boesak was elected as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982, a position he held until 1991.He rose to prominence during the 1980s as an outspoken critic and opponent of the National Party's policies and played a major anti-apartheid activist role as a patron of the United Democratic Front (UDF) from 1983 to 1991. In 1991, Boesak was elected chairman of the Western Cape region of the African National Congress (ANC). In 2008, while serving as the Moderator of the Cape Synod of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, Boesak announced that he would resign all of his positions within the church because of the church's discriminatory position on homosexuality. In December 2008 he left the ANC to join the Congress of the People (COPE). |
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Amanda Kemp Stanford Out Of South Africa Dr. Amanda Kemp has been a lifelong poet-performer and advocate of racial justice and equality since her first anti-apartheid march in 1983. She earned her B.A. from Stanford University where she helped to lead the Stanford Out Of South Africa divestment movement and the successful struggle to revamp the University's Eurocentric humanities requirement. Awarded Stanford's prestigious Gardner Fellowship for Public Service, Dr. Kemp apprenticed with the Honorable Maxine Waters and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. For her work in organizing statewide student movements, including a 10,000 strong March on Sacramento, CA for educational rights, Rainbow/PUSH awarded Kemp their 1989 Citizenship Award.A poet and playwright, Kemp left politics to pursue a doctoral degree in Performance Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. After two years of doctoral work, Dr. Kemp traveled to South Africa to work with the Ford Foundation where she consulted and co-authored on a report on the complex and dynamic women's movements during the transition to democracy. While in South Africa Dr. Kemp also consulted with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights South African Elections project which hosted U.S. elections observers. Coordinating assignments and real time report's, Dr. Kemp also experienced Nelson Mandela's joyful victory dance when the ANC swept the national elections. While there, Kemp also debuted her play Sister Outsider in the Johannesburg Arts Festival and formed Intimate Dread, a trio of women performance poets. Enriched by her South Africa experiences, Dr. Kemp completed her dissertation on African American and South African ties in the 1920s and 1930s. She has since published articles about South African politics as performance and performed a one-woman show on being Black but not African in South Africa. A master teacher, Dr. Kemp has taught at Cornell University, Dickinson College, Millersville University, and Franklin & Marshall College where she served as the chair of Africana Studies. She has keynoted Martin Luther King programs at colleges, high schools, and in elementary school settings. Kemp is currently a Visiting Scholar at Franklin & Marshall College and continues to publish on race and freedom. In 2007 Dr. Kemp founded Theatre for Transformation, a performance method and theatre company whose mission is to create a world of forgiveness, abundance, and peace. Dr. Kemp has earned awards from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is the author of the currently touring plays Show Me the Franklins! Remembering the Ancestors, Slavery and Benjamin Franklin and Sister Friend: Phillis Wheatley and Obour Tanner on Love, Freedom and the Divine.. In addition to creating dynamic interactive performances about the legacy of slavery, Dr. Kemp leads workshops and makes keynote presentations that blend, poetry, song, and stories from her life to inspire others to connect with their ancestors, forgive and create new possibilities. She has presented at faith conferences, women's gatherings, and schools for ages 6 and up. Her Ancestors Workshop and yoga classes can be found at retreat and spirituality centers. A consultant, Dr. Kemp also works with organizations and individuals seeking to create racial justice. Services include researching organizations and programs that work, designing and facilitating workshops that heal racism, and coaching individuals who want to BE the change they want to see in the world. Not your typical diversity trainer, she starts with the assumption that we all have personal power and responsibility, regardless of our access to institutional power. Source: dramandakemp.com |
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Amina Cachalia Federation of South African Women; South African Indian Congress; African National Congress Amina Cachalia was born in Johannesburg to a politically conscious family which played a meaningful role in the struggles led by Mahatma Gandhi. From an early age, Cachalia was a member of the Transvaal Indian Congress and her father was Chairperson of its forerunner, the Transvaal British Indian Association. Through the political work of this organisation she soon became involved with the African National Congress (ANC).As a member of the ANC, in the early 1950s, Cachalia worked hard to make the Defiance Campaign a success by distributing leaflets, making home visits and recruiting volunteers. She was arrested and sentenced to 14 days in Boksburg Prison for her participation in the Germiston March. Cachalia was particularly concerned about the oppression of women. This concern led her instrumental role in launching the Women’s Progressive Union in 1948, an organisation that aimed to make women financially independent. In 1954, she took the lead in launching, together with other leading women of the movement, the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) of which she became Treasurer. FEDSAW’s immediate objective was to oppose the proposed extension of pass laws to Black women, a campaign which culminated on 9 August 1956 in a national march of 20 000 women of all races to the Union Buildings to present their petition against pass laws – a day celebrated in South Africa as Women’s Day. In the early 1980s, after three consecutive banning orders amounting to 15 years of house arrest, Cachalia supported the campaign to oppose the Tricameral Parliament, a sham institution through which the nationalist Government hoped to co-opt Coloured and Indian communities by giving them a limited measure of political rights. The Transvaal Indian Congress was revived and the United Democratic Front was formed to oppose the new dispensation. As a measure of the high regard with which Amina Cachalia is held, she was offered high office by the first democratic Government, which she modestly declined. |
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Barbara Castle British Anti-Apartheid Movement; Member of Parliament (UK) The youngest of three children, Dame Barbara Castle was born at 67 Derby Road, Chesterfield to Frank and Annie Betts, and raised in Pontefract and Bradford. Castle was introduced to socialist politics and beliefs from a young age. Following her marriage to Ted Castle (1907-1979) in 1944, Barbara became a journalist on the Daily Mirror, which by this time had become strongly pro-Labour. In the 1945 general election, which Labour won in a landslide, she became MP for Blackburn, Lancashire.She soon achieved a reputation as a left-winger and a rousing speaker. During the 1950s she was a high-profile Bevanite and made a name for herself as a vocal advocate of decolonisation and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Barbara Castle supported and encouraged both the anti-apartheid movement (AAM) and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa at a particularly difficult period. A frequent speaker at Trafalgar Square rallies, and heading up the AAM marches of that time, she helped organise the 72-hour "black sash" vigil outside Lancaster House during the 1961 commonwealth prime ministers' conference, which ended with South Africa leaving the Commonwealth. She also agreed to become an honorary president of AAM. To help with their membership drive, she personally signed letters to all Labour MPs, including Harold Wilson, most of whom became AAM's first individual members. In the closing stages of the Rivonia treason trial in June 1964, with Woodrow Wyatt, Humphry Berkeley, and at least 50 other MPs, Barbara Castle headed an impressive march to Trafalgar Square, where a petition, signed by 100 MPs, was presented to the South African embassy demanding no death penalties and the freeing of the accused. Earlier, in March 1963, Harold Wilson addressed a rally to protest at the trial - and the arms trade with South Africa - at Barbara Castle's request. Dame Barbara Castle passed away on May 3, 2002. Source: The Guardian | Wikipedia |
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Barbara Masekela African National Congress Born in Johannesburg, South Africa Babara was an ardent anti-apartheid activist who helped to bring freedom to her homeland, she has also proved herself a fiery and fearless speaker as well as a pragmatic diplomat. She is the sister of Hugh Masekela, the famous South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer. In the early 1980s, when the African National Congress’ name started appearing more and more often in the headlines, Masekela became involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.At the urging of Johnny Makatini, an old acquaintance who was the African National Congress representative at the United Nations, Masekela joined demonstrations in America, gave anti- apartheid speeches, and generally gained a reputation as a serious activist. She was well-entrenched by the time the ANC chose to launch a new weapon called "political protest through the arts." Masekela was asked to head the ANC’s department of Arts and Culture in Lusaka, Zambia in the early 1980’s.In line with support for the economic boycott, she helped to institute a cultural boycott that would prevent dancers, movie stars, musicians, and actors from setting foot in the country.In 1994, in one of the most optimistic periods South Africa had ever known, the country held its first multiracial elections. When the African National Congress swept to victory in the first multiracial elections in1994, Barbara Masekela took her place as a member of the Government of National Unity. In 1995 she was offered the chance to become South Africa's ambassador to France. Masekela took up her duties on January 1, 1995. Source: answers.com |
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Beyers Naude Dutch Reformed Church; Christian Institute of Southern Africa; South African Council of Churches Naude was a South African cleric, theologian and the leading Afrikaner anti-apartheid activist.The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 ended his support for his church's political teachings. In the three decades after his resignation from the denomination, Naudé's vocal support for racial reconciliation and equal rights led to upheavals in the Dutch Reformed Church. In response to Sharpeville, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sent a delegation to Johannesburg to meet with clerics. Naudé, by then the moderator of his church district, helped to organize a consultation between the WCC and eighty South African church delegates in Cottesloe, a Johannesburg suburb. The consultation's resolutions rejected race as the basis of exclusion from churches, and affirmed the right of all people to own land and have a say in how they are governed. Naudé alone among his church's delegates steadfastly continued to reject any theological basis for apartheid after Prime Minister Verwoerd forced the DRC delegation to repudiate the consultation.The Dutch Reformed Church later left the World Council of Churches.In 1963 Naudé founded the Christian Institute of Southern Africa (CI), an ecumenical organization with the aim of fostering reconciliation through interracial dialogue, research, and publications. The DRC forced Naudé to choose between his status as minister and directorship of the CI. He then resigned his church post and resigned from the Broederbond in 1963. As a result, he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. From 1977 to 1984 the South African government "banned" Naudé — a form of house arrest with severe restrictions on his movements and interactions. In 1980 Naudé and three other DRC theologians broke with the DRC and was accepted as clergy by the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa, the black African denomination established by the white Dutch Reformed Church. After his unbanning in 1985, he succeeded Archbishop Desmond Tutu as secretary general of the South African Council of Churches. In this role he called for the release of political prisoners (especially Nelson Mandela) and negotiation with the African National Congress.In 1987 the apartheid regime outlawed public pleas for the release of detainees. But Naudé pressed Christians to continue to publicly pray for detainees, despite government threats of imprisonment. Naude passed away on September 7, 2004. Source: Wikipedia |
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Bill Sutherland American Committee on Africa Bill Sutherland, African American pacifist and Pan African activist, graduated from Bates College in 1940. A member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he was instrumental in forming (with George Houser) Americans for South African Resistance in 1952, which became the American Committee on Africa the following year. But his most consistent organizational link in the United States was with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), beginning with a summer stint in its student peace service after graduation from Bates College in 1940. Sutherland lived in Ghana from 1953 to 1961.For more than 50 years, Sutherland served as an " unofficial ambassador," making links between Americans and African liberation struggles. He was sentenced to four years in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II and maintained close ties over the years with fellow radical pacifists who were his colleagues in that era, such as antiwar leader David Dellinger, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and George Houser. From the 1960s through the 1990s he was based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In both places, his house was always a point of call for African American visitors making contact with struggles on the African continent. Sutherland also put the AFSC in touch with Desmond Tutu. The AFSC used its position as 1947 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to repeatedly nominate Tutu for the prize, which he eventually received in 1984. Sutherland died peacefully on the evening of 2 January, 2010, at the age of 91. Source: noeasyvictories.org | Pambazuka News |
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Billy Modise African National Congress Billy Modise was born in Bloemfontein, in the then Orange Free State. He received an Anglican scholarship to attend secondary school in Modeerport. From 1950 to 1955, just after matriculation, he worked at a wholesale store and later for a medical doctor to raise money to go to university. In January 1955, Modise went to the University of Fort Hare to study medicine.He joined the African National Congress (ANC) on the train while en route to Fort Hare. At Fort Hare, he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalised for six months. In the Eastern Cape while still a student, he became secretary of the ANC Youth League Fort Hare branch, and later secretary of the Student Representative Council. His condition forced him to switch from medicine to a BA degree, which he completed in 1959. While still at Fort Hare, Modise was also an executive member of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). In 1960, he was asked by NUSAS to attend a conference in Sweden. NUSAS arranged with the European student formations for a Swedish scholarship for Modise. At the university Modise attended, there were only 11 black students out of a total of 5 000. He started mobilising all university formations against the apartheid state. It started small in the university but grew nationally. Between 1960 and 1972, Modise’s political mobilisation extended to Finland, Denmark and Norway where he set up ANC networks. In 1975, he was redeployed to the United States to work in New York for Habitat, the United Nations (UN) Conference on Human Settlements. From 1976 to 1988, he worked for the UN, training exiled Namibians in political science, sociology and education, among other courses. Modise left the UN in 1988 to work for the ANC full-time. He was sent back to Sweden as chief representative of the ANC. In 1991,he was recalled from Sweden to head Matla Trust, established to prepare for the 1994 elections at the then Shell House ANC headquarters. In 1995, he was posted to Canada as high commissioner to keep the active support of the ANC alive. Modise was the Chief of State Protocol from 1999 to 2006. He is now retired from government. Source: The South African Presidency |
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Billy Nair South African Communist Party; African National Congress; South African Indian Congress Billy Nair was a South African politician, a member of the National Assembly of South Africa, an anti-apartheid activist and a political prisoner in Robben Island. In 1949, he became a member of the Indian Youth Congress and was elected as its secretary in 1950. He became a member of the executive of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in 1950. In 1953 Nair joined the secretly reconstituted South African Communist Party and was a leading member of South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) when it was formed in 1955 and served on its national executive committee. Nair was among the 150 activists arrested with Mandela on 5 December 1956 and charged with treason. The marathon Treason Trial of 1956–1961 followed. Two months into the trial, the initial indictment was dropped and he was acquitted of all charges.After the banning of ANC in 1960, Nair became a member of the underground organization Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Nair went underground for two months before being arrested and detained for 3 months. Between 1961 and 1963, he participated in the armed struggle as part of MK and was involved in the bombing of Indian Affairs Department. On 6 July 1963, Nair was arrested and charged with sabotage and attempting to overthrow the government by violent means and sentenced for 20 years in Robben Island. He was released on 27 February 1984 from prison. Thereafter he joined the United Democratic Front (UDF) office and participated in the anti-election campaign of 1984. He was again detained in August, just before the elections for the House of Delegates under section 29 of the internal Security Act. Upon his release Nair went into hiding. In 1990, after De Klerk lifted the State of Emergency in July, Nair was re-arrested along with 40 members of ANC accusing them as conspirators in Operation Vula to overthrow the government. After the unbanning of the ANC in February 1990, Nair served on the interim leadership committees of both the ANC and the South African Communist Party. He was elected to the ANC National Executive Committee in July 1991. In the first all-inclusive democratic South African elections in 1994, Nair was elected as a member of parliament for the ANC; he served two terms as an MP with distinction until 2004. Nair passed away on October 23, 2008. Source: Wikipedia |
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Caroline Hunter Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement Caroline Hunter graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans in 1968, and shortly thereafter was recruited as a research bench chemist by Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this capacity, she began her direct involvement with anti-apartheid activity purely by chance in October 1970, upon her discovery of her employer’s involvement in the apartheid system. She and a co-worker who would ultimately be her husband, Ken Williams, formed the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement in response. The PRWM issued three demands: that the company stop all sales to South Africa until the end of apartheid, that they publicly announce that their withdrawal from South Africa was because of the unjust system of apartheid, and that they donate all the profits they’d made in South Africa to the liberation movements. In 1971 Hunter, who testified before the United Nations and met with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, was fired because of her advocacy of a boycott of Polaroid products. As a result of the protests, a community group in Boston donated $10,000 it has received from Polaroid to South African liberation movements. Caroline Hunter continued to advocate for US disengagement with the apartheid regime. Ken Williams died in 1998; his name remains alive with the Ken Williams Memorial Scholarship Fund, of which Caroline is co-founder and secretary.Source: African Activist Archive |
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Cecelie Counts TransAfrica; Free South Africa Movement Cecilie Counts attended a predominately black high school in East Orange, New Jersey. In school they began demanding a Black Students Union and Black Awareness Week. She started to attend demonstrations around South Africa when she was in high school. After attending Stanford and Howard, she joined the Southern African News Collective, which evolved into the Southern African Support Project. She began graduate work at Harvard Law School in 1980, and while there began working at TransAfrica, where she began advocating and writing about US foreign policy issues in relation to Africa and the Caribbean. Counts was prominently involved in the Free South Africa Movement begun in 1984, helping to organize the pickets outside the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C., as well as coordinate legislative pressure in Congress. She served as Congressional Liaison for the NAACP from 1991 to 1996, and currently serves as Legislative Representative for the AFL CIO. |
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Charles Diggs U.S. Congressman (MI) Born in Detroit, Diggs attended the University of Michigan and Fisk University. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945. Elected to Congress for a first term beginning in 1955, Diggs came from a prominent Detroit African American family. His father had established a leading mortuary business and had been one of the black pioneers in state Democratic Party politics. When the younger Diggs came to Congress, he was one of only three African American members, and he was conscious of the obligation to stand up for black people everywhere, not just in Detroit.Diggs was significant not just for his individual commitment and contributions, but for illustrating the complex ways in which Africa solidarity moved into the mainstream as the anti-apartheid movement grew. He was among a much larger cohort of African American politicians and professionals who gained entry, if only marginal, into the corridors of Washington power in the wake of the 1960s civil rights movement. Charles Diggs passed away on August 24, 1998. Source: noeasyvictories.org |
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Cheryl Carolus Black Consciousness Movement; United Democratic Front; African National Congress Cheryl Carolus was born in Silvertown, on the Cape Flats, Cape Town. Carolus obtained a BA degree in Law and Education in 1979 and began her working life as a secondary school teacher. She took up the post of full-time Provincial Secretary of the UDF Western Cape in 1983, and became its National Coordinator in 1985.In May 1990, Carolus was elected to be part of the African National Congress' delegation which held talks with the apartheid government and in July 1991, she was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee. Having become the NEC Coordinator of ANC policy in 1992, she was elected Deputy Secretary General of the ANC in 1994 responsible for its repositioning at national, provincial and municipal levels following the country’s first democratic election process. In 1998, she became South Africa's High Commissioner in London. Between 2001 and 2004, she was the chief executive officer of SA Tourism (SATOUR). She was the Board Chairperson for South African National Parks (SANPARKS), in 2009 she assumed this position at South African Airways. She is also the executive chair of Peotona Holdings, an investment company that deals with business development. Cheryl Carolus’ career to date can be summed up as having championed South Africa’s transformation to democracy and her pursuit of equality at the highest levels focusing on race, gender and disability issues, sustainable job creation and the alleviation of poverty. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Law in 2004 by the University of Cape Town for her human rights’ work. |
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Chris Nteta Mass Divest; Polaroid Campaign Chris Nteta, professor and Methodist minister, left South Africa to attend Harvard Divinity School. A mutual friend, Danny Schechter, put Nteta in touch with Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams, who were beginning their work on forcing their employer, Polaroid, to disengage from South Africa, and Nteta proved instrumental in the Polaroid campaign. Along with Randall Robinson and Jim Winston, two Harvard Law students, Nteta was one of the key leaders of the Pan African Liberation Committee, the organization that, in 1971, started the campaign for Harvard to divest from South Africa. He served as Chair of Mass Divest in the early 1980s to promote the (ultimately successful) passage of the Massachusetts Divestment Bill authored by Massachusetts State Representative Mel King. Professor Nteta began teaching undergraduate courses on history and civil rights at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in 1982, and continued to write and advocate for social justice issues throughout his life. He died of heart failure in Tshwane, South Africa, at the age of 70.Source: UMass Boston |
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Christabel Gurney British Anti-Apartheid Movement Christabel Gurney began her activist work in the Youth CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), and became interested in anti-apartheid through interacting with the South African exile community in England. In 1969, the same year she participated in the protests against the Springbok rugby tour, she became the editor of Anti-Apartheid News, the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s official publication, a position she held until 1980. She also served on the AAM’s national and executive committees. Along with Ruth First and Jonathan Steel, Gurney co-authored the 1972 book The South African Connection, detailing Britain’s economic involvement with apartheid.She continues to be active as a member of ACTSA (Action for Southern Africa), the successor organization to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and has written numerous articles about the history of the international anti-apartheid struggle. |
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Conny Braam Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement Braam was one of the founders of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the Netherlands (Anti-Apartheids Beweging Nederland, or AABN) and served for many years as its chairperson. AABN became one of the most active of the international anti-apartheid movements, working on areas of the cultural boycott, the Shell campaign, providing funds and supplies to the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania, and many others. Conny was instrumental setting up events and organizations (like CASA – Culture in Another South Africa) where South African artists, poets, and musicians flew to Amsterdam to participate in cultural exchanges. In 1986 Conny was asked by Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC in exile, to participate with him and Mac Maharaj in the highly secret Operation Vula. She helped set up shelters in South Africa and the smuggling of documents. They also provided contacts in Europe, where ANC members were hiding. In 1990 she visited South Africa for the first time. Since the release of Nelson Mandela, she has written a number of fiction and non-fiction books about South Africa and other topics.Source: connybraam.nl | Wikipedia |
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“CRITICS' PICK! One of the most notable achievements (and there are many) of this massive, ENGROSSING, AND SURPRISINGLY EXCITING work about South African apartheid is that it reminds us how recently this violent, immoral, criminal regime was in power— and of how so many world governments turned a blind eye to its brutalities.”
– Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine
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Damu Smith Washington Office on Africa; Artists for a Free South Africa Damu Smith grew up in the tough Carr Square Village housing project of St. Louis and he idolized his father one of the city's few black firefighters. As a high school student, Smith attended a Jesuit-run, after-school program for “disadvantaged male youth”. As part of that program he went on a field trip to Cairo, Illinois, to attend Black Solidarity Day rallies where he listened to speeches by Amiri Baraka, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, Nina Simone and Jesse Jackson, and he toured black neighborhoods where white supremacists had sprayed houses with gunfire. Smith recalls, “Seeing those bullet holes…that changed my life.” As a freshman student at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and president of the Organization of Afro-American Students, Smith led a protest and takeover of the school’s administrative offices demanding a Black Studies program.Smith was one of the founders of the June 16th Coalition in Washington, DC, in response to the Soweto Uprisinging of 1976, and anti-apartheid became a primary focus of his activist work. He joined the staff of the Washington Office on Africa as Legislative Director in 1985, (becoming the Office’s Executive Director the following year), and along with Danny Glover, Alfre Woodard, and others, co-founded Artists for a Free South Africa. Outside of his anti-apartheid work, Smith worked to expose gun violence, police brutality and government injustice through his work with the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, the National Wilmington 10 Defense Committee, and the National Black Independent Political Party. He worked to effect peace and a freeze on nuclear weapons as Associate Director of the Washington Office of the American Friends Service Committee, and advocated for environmental justice as National Associate Director and national toxics campaigner for Greenpeace USA. In response to September 11, Smith founded and co-chaired Black Voices for Peace (BVFP). Damu Smith succumbed to cancer on May 5, 2006. Source: The Washington Post |
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Danisa Baloyi Coalition For A Free South Africa During the 1980's Dr. Baloyi was a student at Columbia University, and became involved in the divestment movement against South Africa. In 1985 a series of protests culminated in a student takeover of Hamilton Hall. Ultimately student pressure helped push Columbia University to divest it's holdings from companies doing business in South Africa. Columbia's movement was highly publicized and inspired other university and high school students, as well as celebrities, to join the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S.Later she was a college professor at various universities in the U.S. and also worked for the UN Development Fund for Women and the African-American Institute. Dr. Baloyi is a business development specialist and strategist. She was the first female chair of the Black Business Council and Baloyi chaired the National Skills Authority and SA Women's Investment Holdings. Other directorships include Denel, Absa, MGX, Fidentia the Don Group, AMB and Adcorp. |
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David De Beer KAIROS De Beer was born in South Africa and was educated at the University of Witwatersrand. His father was Dutch, which earned De Beer the right to hold two passports, Dutch and South African. He used his South African passport until he was put under house arrest, and in 1971 the Nambians asked him to leave South Africa to lobby on Nambia. He left South Africa on a Dutch passport and went to England and then the Netherlands. Through KAIROS, a Dutch church organization set up as an international solidarity group connected to Dr. Beyers Naudé’s South African Christian Institute, De Beer became involved in the helping the Dutch become more aware of the real situation for blacks in South Africa. He campaigned against Shell’s involvement in South Africa and promoted sports boycotts and oil embargos. He mainly worked in the field which involved traveling throughout the Netherlands speaking to local church groups. He has worked on various international issues since the dismantling of apartheid, including weapons disarmament in Cambodia, working with the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and as Director of the International Affairs nonprofit Saferworld. |
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David Haslam End Loans to South Africa; World Council of Churches Methodist minister Rev. David Haslam was inspired to tackle injustice in the world after attending a World Council of Churches conference in Sweden 1968 which included speakers such as American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin; he then attended the WCC’s Notting Hill Consultation in 1969, which generated the Programme to Combat Racism. During the 1970s and 1980s he served on the executive committee of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and was a founder of the End Loans To South Africa (ELTSA) campaign begun in 1974. As well as helping to found the Dalit Solidarity Network in the UK and the International Network based in Copenhagen, Rev. Haslam has written three books on the churches in Nicaragua, racial justice in the UK and caste discrimination in India.He worked for the British Council of Churches in community and race relations from 1987 to 1990 and helped set-up the Churches Commission for Racial Justice, in which he served from 1990 to 1998. Today, Rev. Haslam remains as committed as ever to the causes he believes in both internationally through his involvement with the campaign on caste discrimination against Dalits – the former ‘untouchables’ – in the countries of South Asia. He received an MBE from the Queen in June 2010. Source: Evesham Observer |
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David Kenvyn British Anti-Apartheid Movement David Kenvyn first encountered apartheid at around age 7 when he attended a sermon about South Africa by Father Trevor Huddleston, fresh from his tenure as parish priest in the township of Sophiatown. Huddleston’s appeal to boycott South Africa made a lasting impression on Kenvyn, and when he attended the London School of Economics to take a degree in Political History, he became active in Anti-Apartheid, beginning with the anti-Springbok rugby tour campaign in 1969. David Kenvyn went on to become the chairperson of the London AAM, and worked on the Barclays campaign, the Free Mandela campaign, and the Shell campaign. Kenvyn remained active in Southern African issues through continued work in ACTSA (Action for Southern Africa), the organization that succeeded the Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1995. |
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Dennis Brutus South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee Dennis Brutus was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) in 1924. His parents moved to Port Elizabeth, South Africa where he grew up. He graduated from the University of Fort Hare with distinction in English. His studies in law at the University of Witwatersrand were cut short by his imprisonment in 1960 for breaking the terms of his banning.Best known as founder of SANROC, with the ultimate purpose of persuading the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to withdraw recognition from the National Olympic Committee of South Africa, he became a familiar figure in the corridors of Olympic power. Although not an accomplished athlete in his own right, he was motivated by the unfairness of selections for athletic teams. SANROC's brilliantly conducted campaign persuaded individuals and international sports federations that to compete in South Africa, or even against South Africans, was to condone apartheid. Brutus was in prison when news of the country's suspension from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, for which he had campaigned, broke. Brutus was forbidden to teach, write and publish in South Africa. His first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. The book received the Mbari Poetry Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but Brutus turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity. He was the author of 14 books. In July 1991, he returned to South Africa after decades in exile in the UK and USA. He received numerous political and literary awards, and honorary doctorates from several American universities. In the United States he campaigned against the death penalty, and in 1997 was elected to the US committee of Amnesty International. Brutus died of prostate cancer on December 26, 2009. |
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Desmond Tutu South African Council of Churches Archbishop Desmond Tutu was born in Klerksdorp on 7 October 1931. As a youngster he attended mission schools in Klerksdorp. In 1954 Tutu completed a teaching diploma from the Pretoria Bantu Normal College and later a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Africa (UNISA). After three years in the teaching profession Tutu quit in protest against the deteriorating standard of Black education. This was due to the implementation of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which reduced Black education to second rate.He was ordained as a deacon in 1960, and became a priest in 1961. In 1962 he moved to London, where he completed his Honours and Masters degrees in the Arts in 1966. Tutu then returned to South Africa and taught at the Federal Theological Seminary at Alice in the Eastern Cape. The Federal Theological Seminary was taken over by the state and, with his strong critical views against the apartheid government, Tutu decided to leave his position. Between 1976 and 1978 Tutu was the Bishop of the Anglican Church in Lesotho and the Secretary-General of the South African Council of Churches. He was arrested by the South African government and at times his passport was confiscated, barring him from travelling overseas. On 16 October 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize award for his untiring effort in calling for the end to minority rule in South Africa, the unbanning of liberation organisations and the release of political prisoners. On 7 September 1986 Tutu was ordained as the Archbishop of Cape Town, thus becoming the first Black person to lead the Anglican Church of the Province of Southern Africa (1986-1996). In 1995 Tutu was appointed chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was put into place to deal with the atrocities of the past. He retired as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996 to devote all his time to the work of the TRC. A year later Tutu announced that he would undergo several months of treatment in the United States for prostate cancer, but continued to work with the commission. Tutu coined the phrase 'Rainbow Nation' and firmly believes in the possibility of interracial harmony in South Africa. On his 79th birthday, Tutu retired from public engagements to spend time with his family. Tutu passed away on the 26th of December 2021. Source: South Africa History Online |
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Diana Collins International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa She was born Diana Clavering Elliot at Stutton Hall, Suffolk, the home of her grandparents, on August 13, 1917. Her father was at that time serving with the Suffolk Regiment in France. Dame Diana Collins was the widow of Canon John Collins, the controversial Canon of St Paul's Cathedral with an international reputation for his leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the British campaign against apartheid in South Africa.Diana Collins was involved with the launch of the Defence and Aid Fund, which gave support to black South Africans who had fallen foul of their country's segregation laws; this later became an important weapon in the fight against apartheid. Diana Collins spoke on this subject at meetings all over Britain, and went incognito to South Africa when her husband was forbidden entry to the country. She also edited the Christian Action journal which at this time had a wide and influential readership. Following her husband's death in 1982, Diana Collins became a trustee of the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa until 1991, and remained on the Council of Christian Action. Diana Collins passed away on May 23, 2003. Source: The Telegraph |
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Donna Katzin Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility From 1986 until July of 1994 Katzin served as Director of South Africa and International Justice Programs for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). In that capacity she worked with religious bodies, institutional investors and community organizations to exert economic pressure to end apartheid and promote responsible reinvestment after apartheid. She was particularly active in campaigns against Citibank and Mobil Oil for their involvement in South Africa. Donna Katzin is the Founding Executive Director of Shared Interest, an organization that has worked together with South Africans to start new businesses, open new doors, and strengthen South Africa’s economy. Since 1994, Shared Interest has enabled low-income communities to receive bank loans.Source: African Activist Archive |
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Duma Ndlovu Journalist and playwright Duma Ndlovu is a poet, journalist, director, producer, and playwright. Born in Soweto, he attended the once prestigious Sekano Ntoane High School in Senaoane. After graduating, he began writing for the World Newspaper during the turbulent 1970s. In 1975 he founded the Medupe Writers Association, a national group that encouraged young black writers. He served as the organization’s president until October 1977, when the government banned the group and seventeen others that had been active in the Black Consciousness and anti-apartheid movements.Shortly afterwards, Duma left South Africa for the United States. After completing a Master’s degree at Hunter College in New York, he embarked on a career as a theatrical producer. Duma was responsible for the upsurge of interest in South African township theatre in the United States. In 1985, Duma founded the Woza Afrika Foundation, to raise money to support the arts in South Africa. Through the foundation he also produced theatre and music festivals that featured South African artists. During his last two years in the U.S., Duma taught African American literature and music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Duma returned to South Africa in 1992, where he founded Word Of Mouth Productions, to mount music, theatre, and television productions. In South Africa he wrote Bergville Stories (1994), which had successful runs in Durban at the Playhouse, the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and the Market Theatre. His other theatrical writing/directing credits include; BERGVILLE STORIES, THE GAME, THE RITUAL, THE JOURNEY and MEMEZA, based on the life of Brenda Fassie, which is still a work in progress. In everything he does he always acknowledges his father and Steven Bantu Biko as major influences in his life. Source: Muvhango | Book Rags |
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Dumisani Kumalo American Committee on Africa Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo was born in Kwambunda village on the banks of the Blood River in KwaZulu-Natal. For a decade beginning in 1967, Kumalo worked as a political reporter for the Golden City Post, the World newspapers, Drum, and the Johannesburg Sunday Times. He was a founder of the Union of Black Journalists, one of many organizations that grew out of the Black Consciousness Movement. In 1976 he was hired as the first African marketing executive officer at Total Oil Company, but he left that job in 1977 when he went into exile. From 1978 to 1980 Kumalo worked as an international education program coordinator at the Phelps Stokes Fund in New York.From there he moved to the American Committee on Africa and the Africa Fund. As projects director for the organizations, Dumisani Kumalo became the "man on the road" for divestment, an indispensable organizer in the campaign to divest funds from corporations and financial institutions in the United States that were involved in South Africa. He traveled from state to state, from college campus to campus, educating ordinary Americans about South Africa and showing them there was something important they could do to support the freedom struggle. Soon after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, Kumalo returned to South Africa for the first time in a decade and a half. He witnessed the historic elections in 1994 that brought the African National Congress (ANC) to power, and moved back to work for the government in 1997 as director of the United States desk at his country's Department of Foreign Affairs. Two years later he was appointed South African ambassador to the United Nations, the position he holds today. Source: noeasyvictories.org |
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Eddie Funde African National Congress Eddie Funde is a qualified Electrical Engineer, with a Master of Sciences degree from the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in St. Petersburg. He joined the African National Congress underground in South Africa after its banning in the early sixties and was forced into exile in 1965. Thereafter he served in various capacities of the ANC for more than twenty years including International Head of the ANC Youth Section in Zambia (1978 -1983), Chief Representative in Australasia and the Pacific (1983 – 1991) and Administrator and Researcher of the Civil Service Unit (1992 – 1994).After democracy in South Africa in 1994, he served in various public and private agencies in an executive and non- executive capacity, including setting up and directing a number of private companies including the Independent Development Trust (IDT), which is the largest public entity for development implementation and policy, with special emphasis on rural development. He was also the chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation from 2004 to 2007 when he withdrew his nomination for second term after his term was up. |
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Elias “Roller” Masinga Soweto Student Representative Council; African National Congress Not a person to abscond from liberation duty, Masinga responded by rising to the daunting challenges that faced South Africa in the 1970s and beyond. He became an active member and leader of the youth and student movements, contributing to the emergence of the SA Student Movement, the Soweto Student Representative Council, the National Youth Organisation and the Congress of South African Students, among others.He was one of the forerunners who were instrumental in swelling the ranks of the ANC on the eve of the Soweto student uprising against racial education.He helped raise the awareness of many about conditions in the country and helped direct them to forge links with the liberation organisations that were active outside the borders of South Africa. In exile Roller grew in stature, mentoring many of our current cadre of government leaders. He did all of these in his unassuming and humble manner. In his gallant fight against the system of racial and national oppression, as well as economic exploitation of our people, he paid a painful price. On numerous occasions he was arrested and tried or incarcerated without trial. His life was always in danger. In the ranks of the ANC he was one of those who raised difficult matters for discussion and action. This cost him dearly. Roller nevertheless shunned fighting for positions and privileges, despite his ability and qualifications. He continued to work with everybody and was reachable by those who sought his counsel. Source: Independent Online |
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Enuga (ES) Reddy United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid ES Reddy came to the United States from India in 1946 and started working for the United Nations Secretariat in 1949, serving there for 35 years. From 1963 to 1984 he was the U.N. official in charge of action against apartheid, first as principal secretary of the Special Committee Against Apartheid and then as director of the Centre against Apartheid. Reddy was probably the most consistent and influential of the U.N. officials working behind the scenes, ensuring that the United Nations not only represented governments but also helped build bridges between liberation movements and their supporters in the United States and other countries.Source: noeasyvictories.org |
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Ethel de Keyser British Anti-Apartheid Movement Born and educated in South Africa, the daughter of a garment factory owner, Ethel De Keyser came to Britain after school to continue her studies in English literature and theatre. When she learned of the detention of her older brother, Jack Tarshish, following the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960, and the subsequent state of emergency, she returned home, where she was drawn into the anti-apartheid struggle and participated in the underground activities of the African National Congress (ANC), including helping activists to flee the country.Ethel de Keyser was one of a remarkable group of Jewish South African women who committed themselves totally to the African liberation struggle. At a critical time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her campaigning talents ensured that the issue of apartheid and racism in southern Africa were put on the political agenda in Britain. Initially, she served as a volunteer for the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), while working for the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1967, she became the movement's executive secretary, its senior fulltime official, based at the small AAM offices in Charlotte Street, central London. In Britain, while many paid lip service to their opposition to apartheid, few were prepared to act. Ethel brought to the AAM her total dedication, her boundless energy and, above all, her indomitable spirit. She had an open and non-sectarian approach, which sometimes caused misunderstandings with others in the AAM and ANC. Ethel passed away on July 16, 2004. Source: The Guardian |
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Fons Geerlings Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement Fons Geerlings first went to Africa when he was a student in 1968 and 1969, where he met representatives from SWAPO and the ANC. When he came back to Amsterdam, he became actively involved in the Angola Committee. At University his professor invited a conservative, pro-apartheid South African to speak and Geerlings and his peers protested the lecture, demanding that the man must speak outside of University premises. This was one of his first protests against apartheid. As a member of the AABN (Anti-Apartheids Beweging Nederland, the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement), he worked on campaigns surrounding the cultural boycott, the Anne Frank House exhibition, and corporate disengagement. He worked for 25 years in the apartheid struggle and for international solidarity. |
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Frene Ginwala African National Congress Frene Noshir Ginwala is a retired South African politician and a member of the African National Congress. She was the Speaker of the House in the South African parliament when the first democratic government with Nelson Mandela as president came in to power in 1994.After leaving South Africa in 1960 as a student to help arrange the escape of the late ANC President Oliver Tambo, she completed her studies at the universities of London and Oxford before returning to Africa to become managing editor of Tanzania's principal English-language newspaper. Upon her return from exile to South Africa in 1991, Ms. Ginwala formed the task force to establish the ANC Women's League in South Africa. She also helped to set up the Women's National Coalition, which was made up of organisations from across the political spectrum with the aim of drawing up the charter on women and was elected its national convener. In 1994, elected the Speaker of the National Assembly. In this capacity, she has been instrumental in bringing about the many changes in the parliament. Before and during her exile, Ms. Ginwala worked in Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and the United Kingdom as an ANC official, a journalist, and a broadcaster. Ginwala passed away on 12 January 2023, at the age of 90. |
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Gary Foley Aboriginal Gumbainggir activist Gary Foley became involved in the black power movement in Redfern, a suburb of Sydney, in 1967, agitating against Australia's racist laws and for Aboriginal land rights. He participated in the 1971 protests against the Springbok rugby tour of Australia, most famously by wearing a Springbok rugby jersey (given to him by former Wallaby Jim Boyce) in a demonstration outside the team's hotel. In 1972, Foley co-founded the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra, in an effort to raise awareness of Aboriginal issues; the Aboriginal Embassy persists to this day. He also helped form the Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern, and the Aboriginal Medical Service in Melbourne and Sydney. In 1981, he travelled to New Zealand to participate in the anti-Springbok campaign, and was one of the protesters who burst through the fence and onto the field at the Hamilton game, which ended in the game being cancelled.He continued to use sport as a galvanizing tool for Aboriginal issues by protesting against the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982, and organized Aboriginal protests against the Australian Bicentenary in 1988. He served as a consultant to the Royal Commission in to Black Deaths in Custody and on the executive of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations. Foley received a Bachelor of Arts from Melbourne University in 2000, and completed a First Class Honours Degree in 2002. From 2005 to 2008 he was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and is currently completing his PhD in History there. Foley designed and maintains the Kooriweb site on Aboriginal history. Source: kooriweb.org |
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Gay McDougall Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Gay McDougall grew up in the segregated South, in Atlanta, Georgia. When she finished high school, she was chosen to be the first black student to integrate into Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. After graduating from Yale Law School, she joined the New York City corporate law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton, Lyons & Gates. She was director of the Southern African Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law from 1980 until early 1994 and gave direct assistance to the defense of thousands of political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia by financing the defense and collaborating with attorneys. In 1998, she was elected to serve as an independent expert on the United Nations treaty body that oversees the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). She was the first American to be elected to the body of 18 international experts who oversee compliance by governments worldwide with the obligations established under the treaty. At its 1996 session, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights elected her to serve a four year term as a member (alternate) of the U.N. Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities of the Human Rights commission. She also served as Special Rapporteur on the issue of systematic rape, sexual slavery, and slavery-like practices in armed conflict, in which capacity she presented a study to the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights that called for international legal standards for prosecuting acts of systematic rape and sexual slavery committed during armed conflict. Gay McDougall served as one of five international members of South Africa's 16-member Independent Electoral Commission which successfully organized and administered that country's first non-racial elections. McDougall was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999 for her "innovative and highly effective" work on behalf of international human rights.Source: Wikipedia |
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George Houser American Committee on Africa George Houser was born in 1916 as the son of missionaries, spending portions of his early life in the Far East. During his long life, Houser has been at the forefront of the civil-rights movement and of the Solidarity Movement in the United States of America (USA) for the liberation of African people, especially in southern Africa.Houser started his journey as a young peace activist in the 1930s and then spent the rest of his life as a peaceful warrior for human rights and the liberation of people oppressed by colonialism, racism and apartheid. In the case of South and southern Africa, Houser devoted nearly 50 years to being the executive director and board member of the American Committee on Africa. When others in the USA were either uninformed or silent about colonial, racist and apartheid injustices in southern Africa, Houser and his colleagues raised their voices to awaken and foster solidarity with the oppressed people of the continent. He was part of the anti-apartheid movement in the USA and supported the efforts of the African National Congress in that country long before the US Government saw fit to permit entry to the country by our greatest advocates abroad such as Oliver Tambo, Johnny Makhathini and others. Houser died on August 19, 2015, at the age of 99 in California. Source: The South African Presidency |
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Govan Mbeki African National Congress Govan Archibald Mvuyelwa Mbeki was a South African politician, and father of the former South African president Thabo Mbeki and Moeletsi Mbeki.He was named in honour of Edward Govan, a Scottish missionary who founded Lovedale College, the school that he attended in the Eastern Cape.He attended Fort Hare University, completing in 1936 a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics and psychology and a teaching diploma, and met other African struggle leaders there. In 1954, he joined the editorial board of New Age, which was to be the only South African newspaper serving the liberation movement for the eight following years. Mbeki played an immensely important role in ensuring that the pages and columns reflected the conditions of the black peoples, their demands and aspirations. In November 1962, the then Minister of Justice, John Vorster, banned New Age. When the editorial board came out with its successor, Vorster went one step further by banning not the newspaper but its editors and writers. He was a leader of the African National Congress (ANC) and of the South African Communist Party. After the Rivonia Trial, he was imprisoned for terrorism and treason (1964–1987) with Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and other ANC leaders. On June 26, 1980 the Secretary General of the African National Congress, Alfred Nzo, announced the conferring of the Isitwalandwe Medal, the ANC's highest honour, on Govan Mbeki. Mbeki was not present to receive the award, because he was serving a life imprisonment sentence on Robben Island. Govan Mbeki was released from custody after serving 24 years in the Robben Island prison on November 5, 1987. He served in South Africa's post-apartheid Senate from 1994 to 1997 as Deputy President of the Senate, and its successor, the National Council of Provinces from 1997 to 1999. Mbeki received international recognition for his political achievements including the renaming of the recently opened Health building at Glasgow Caledonian University. The Govan Mbeki Health Building was inaugurated in 2001 at a ceremony featuring his son Thabo. Govan Mbeki passed away on 30 August 2001. Source: Wikipedia |
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Gunnar Helander International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa Reverend Gunnar Helendar was a volunteer missionary placed at a missionary station outside Pietermaritzburg, Natal in 1938. Helendar felt that the ANC was not a political party but rather a movement with one single goal, namely to eliminate racism. He respected the fact that the ANC would incorporate anybody into the struggle against the government, even Communists who were considered an enemy by the West. Helendar often refuted the ill feelings by the West about Communists and noted that in South African they were not violent.His positions included the Founder of the Swedish Fund for the Victims of Racial Oppression in South Africa, Chairman of the Swedish South Africa Committee, Member of the Consultative Committee on Humanitarian Assistance, and Vice Chairman of the International Defence and Aid Fund. Source: liberationafrica.se |
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“Mandatory viewing! Epic! Exhilarating! More compelling and instructive than any fictionalized movies on the subject. Charged by the impassioned, clear-eyed approach of its producer/director Connie Field and energized by a cast of characters… The figure who stands out as the blood, guts, and mind of the movement… is Oliver Tambo. Shown in rare interview footage, he emerges as a dynamic leader of impressive intellect and courage. (The film) demonstrates Field's talent for weaving an extraordinarily complex tapestry of historical events and international personages into a dramatic structure, complete with climax and catharsis. The number of impressive individuals that Field has assembled to flesh out this story is astounding. There is not a dull or inarticulate figure among these talking heads.”
– Tony Pipolo, Artforum
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Howard Wolpe U.S. Congressman (MI) Howard Wolpe is a former U.S. Congressional Representative from the state of Michigan. He was elected as a Democrat to the Ninety-sixth and to the six succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1979–January 3, 1993). A specialist in African politics for ten of his fourteen years in the Congress, Wolpe chaired the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. As Africa Subcommittee Chair, Wolpe authored and managed legislation imposing sanctions against South Africa, and over-riding President Ronald Reagan's veto of the sanctions legislation (the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986). He also authored and managed the passage of the African Famine Recovery and Development Act - a comprehensive rewrite in the 1980's of America's approach to development assistance in Africa, that included the creation of the African Development Fund. After his term in Congress Wolpe served as Presidential Special Envoy to Africa's Great Lakes Region in the Clinton Administration, where he led the United States delegation to the Arusha and Lusaka peace talks, which aimed to end civil wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More recently he returned to the State Department as Special Advisor to the Secretary for Africa's Great Lakes Region. Previously, he served as Director of the Africa Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and of the Center's Project on Leadership and Building State Capacity. While at the Center, Wolpe directed post-conflict leadership training programs in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia. He died on October 25, 2011 at his home in Michigan.Source: Wikipedia | congress.gov |
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Irene Gale Campaign Against Racial Exploitation Irene Gale, having grown up in Australia, moved to New Zealand where she married New Zealander, Jim Gale, and was there introduced to the South African issue via the "No Maoris No Tour" campaign against the New Zealand All Blacks touring South Africa under the edict from the apartheid regime that no Maoris should be allowed on the team. She became involved with the New Zealand CARE (Citizens Association for Racial Equality). The family moved back to Australia in early 1971, and the Gales became very involved with the protests around the Springbok rugby tour of Australia in the [Southern] winter of that year. When the Australian CARE (Campaign Against Racial Exploitation) was established in 1974, the Gales became among the primary organizers for the organization.In 1977, the Gales took a trip to Chicago, arriving the very day South African Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko died. Together with Dennis Brutus, who was a professor of Literature and African Studies at Northwestern at the time, they set up the Steve Biko Memorial Committee, and during their six month stay they stopped the sale of South African Krugerrands in Chicago in all but one tiny coin shop. Since working on anti-apartheid, she has contributed her efforts to a wide variety of peace campaigns, most notably as a member of the Australian Peace Committee, and in 1988 was awarded the Order of Australia. Jim Gale died in 1985; Irene continued her work with her new partner Ron Gray from 1986 until his death in 2004. Politics remains the primary focus of her life. Irene finally visited South Africa for the first time in 2009. |
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Jacqueline Derens Recontre National Contre L’Apartheid Derens became active in anti-apartheid in 1975. She used the trade unions as a way of reaching the larger corporations in order to stop them trading with South Africa. Her main focus was to have a campaign for political prisoners and to impose an embargo on South Africa. Along with Macel Tigon and others, Derens founded the Rencontre Nationale Contre L’Apartheid (National Gathering Against Apartheid) to provide support for Dulcie September, the ANC’s Chief Representative in France. |
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Jennifer Davis American Committee on Africa; The Africa Fund Jennifer Davis was born in Johannesburg in 1933. She obtained a BA degree in 1954 from the University of the Witwatersrand and was subsequently employed as secretary to the Industrial Council for the Military Industry, a lecturer to external students of the London School of Economics in South Africa, high school teacher and graduate assistant at Wits from 1955 to 1966. Davis was a committed anti-apartheid student activist at university, which earned her the status of persona non-grata in the 1960s. She was continually pestered by the security forces and later threatened with house arrest. The subsequent concerted pressure forced her into exile in New York. In 1967, Davis joined the staff of the American Committee on Africa / The Africa Fund, the oldest US anti-apartheid and pro-African democracy organization. As research director and executive director from 1981 to 2000, Davis spearheaded sustained efforts to establish programs, which eventually succeeded in persuading the USA to impose economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Davis served as an election observer in Empangeni, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1994 and to be invited as a special guest of President Nelson Mandela to the presidential inauguration the same year. Since leaving the American Committee on Africa and the Africa Fund in 2000, Davis has worked as a consultant on US-Africa policy, and serves on the boards of several US organizations working to advance economic and political justice for Africa. |
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Jim Boyce Campaign Against Racism In Sport Jim Boyce played wing for the Australian Wallabies from 1962 to 1965, and toured South Africa with them in 1963, playing four test matches against the Springboks. On that tour, he came face-to-face with apartheid in action, which changed his perceptions on whether sporting links with a country like apartheid South Africa were acceptable. After leaving the Wallabies team in 1965 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States, Boyce returned to Australia in 1969, just as the Anti-Apartheid Movement was gearing up to protest the 1971 Springbok Rugby tour. Just prior to going on the 1963 tour, Boyce had met John Brink, an exiled South African living in Australia; he now became treasurer for Brink's Australian branch of the Defence and Aid Fund, SADAF, and worked with John Myrtle, Anthony Abrams, and others in CARIS, the Campaign Against Racism In Sport, which engaged in a leafleting and educational campaign. |
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John Halfpenny Communist Party of Australia; Amalgamated Metalworkers' Union John Halfpenny was a long-time member of the Communist Party of Australia and active trade unionist. His Communist involvement led him to get involved in a range of international issues, including apartheid in South Africa. He became the secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) in 1970, and helped organize the union boycotts of the Springboks rugby team during their 1971 tour of Australia. The following year he was elected Victorian state secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Workers' Union, a post he held for 16 years. He later became state representative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council from 1987 to 1995, leading one of the biggest protest marches in the state's history in November 1992 against the government's industrial relations laws. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1998. He died in 2003 after a long struggle with heart disease and diabetes. |
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John Minto Halt All Racist Tours In September 1979, HART (Halt All Racist Tours) held its Stop the '81 Tour planning conference. Eighty people attended, many of them veterans of previous campaigns. Two could remember opposition to the 1928 rugby tour of South Africa. There was also a group of younger activists, including John Minto, who had become involved in HART in the mid 1970s.From 1979 until the closing of the movement in 1992, Minto was to hold many senior positions. He was actively involved in the campaigns to end New Zealand economic ties with South Africa, but it is the campaign against the 1981 Springboks rugby tour with which his name is most indelibly linked. Minto was the face of radical protest. The long batons used by riot police during the tour were nicknamed 'Minto bars.' In 1981, as HART's national organiser, he attracted special attention from pro-tour supporters. In Hamilton, he was one of those who invaded field and forced the abandonment of the game. The violence meted out by tour supporters to some of those who had stopped the game was gratuitous and savage. Minto was one of the main targets. John Minto believes that the greatest impact that the 1981 Springboks tour had on New Zealand society was to stimulate debate about racism and the place of Maori in New Zealand. A 2005 documentary on New Zealand's top 100 history makers listed him as number 89. Today he works for the Unite Union - a trade union for low-paid workers in New Zealand. He is spokesperson for Global Peace and Justice Auckland and chairperson of the Quality Public Education Coalition. Before his years of political activism, he was a secondary school science teacher. |
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Karel Roskam Comité Zuid-Afrika Karel Roskam traveled to South Africa as a student in the late 1950s,during the course of which he attended the infamous Treason Trial, meeting many members of the ANC. Upon returning to the Netherlands, he wrote his thesis for the University of Amsterdam in 1960 on racial relations in South Africa, and the international community. In the fall of 1959, he revived the Comité Zuid-Afrika (CZA), a support committee that had previously only done one fundraising event in late 1957. Karel Roskam was a radio journalist with the progressive broadcaster VARA, and interviewed many activists and South African exiles both on radio and on television during the period 1961-1992. Roskam died at the age of 78.Source: nelsonmandela.org | archive.niza.nl |
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Kenneth Kaunda President of Zambia Born at Lubwa Mission in the northern province of the Republic of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda became President of the Republic of Zambia in October 1964. Kaunda started playing a continental role in 1963 when he became President of the Pan-African Freedom movement for East, Central and Southern Africa. He extended his influence to the global level after Zambia’s independence, serving as chairperson of the Organisation of African Unity from 1970 to 1971 and from 1987 to 1988.A great friend of the South African liberation struggle, he was close to veterans of the liberation movement such as Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Chris Hani and others. He maintained his support for the liberation movements despite Pretoria’s policy aimed at destabilisation of governments in the region. During his early presidency he was an outspoken supporter of the anti-apartheid movement and opposed Ian Smith's white minority rule in Rhodesia. Kaunda allowed several African liberation fronts such as ZAPU and ZANU of Rhodesia and African National Congress to set headquarters in Zambia. Former ANC president Oliver Tambo spent a significant proportion of his 30 year exile living and working in Zambia. In 1991, he founded the Kenneth Kaunda Peace Foundation dedicated to the establishment of peace and conflict resolution on the continent. KK, as he is fondly known, devoted his remaining life to fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa. He died on 17 June 2021 at the age of 97. Source: The South African Presidency |
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Knut Vollebaek Norwegian Foreign Ministry Knut Vollebaek studied at the Norwegian School For Economics and Business Administration and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined the Norwegian Foreign Service in 1973, where his assignments included India, Spain, Zimbabwe, and the United Nations. From 1988-1989 he served as UN Rapporteur to the Anti-Apartheid Committee of the ILO. He was Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE in 1999. He was also Norwegian ambassador to Costa Rica in 1991-1993, and special envoy for development issues from 1994 until he became Foreign Minister in 1997. He served as a peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia from 1993-1995. From 2001-2007 he was the Norwegian Ambassador to the United States of America.Source: Wikipedia |
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Leon Sullivan General Motors; anti-apartheid activist Reverend Sullivan was a Baptist minister, a civil rights leader and social activist focusing on the creation of job training opportunities for African-Americans, a longtime General Motors Board Member, and an anti-apartheid activist.In 1971, Sullivan joined the General Motors Board of Directors and became the first African-American on the board of a major corporation. He went on to serve on General Motors' board for over 20 years. In 1977, Sullivan developed a code of conduct for companies operating in South Africa called the Sullivan Principles, as an alternative to complete disinvestment. As part of the Board of Directors at General Motors, Sullivan lobbied GM and other large corporations to voluntarily withdrawal from doing business in South Africa while the system of apartheid was still in effect. Sullivan was determined to provide a model of self-help and empowerment to the people of Africa. He began using his talent for bringing world leaders together to find solutions to international issues through the establishment of the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH) in order to establish and maintain programs and activities in the areas of agriculture, business and economic development, democracy and governance, education and health. These programs would in turn help governments in sub-Saharan Africa reduce poverty and unemployment and build civil societies. Leon Sullivan passed away on April 24, 2001. Source: Wikipedia |
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Mac Maharaj South African Communist Party; African National Congress Maharaj was a political activist and member of the South African Communist Party, who worked closely on anti-apartheid activities with Nelson Mandela, with whom he was incarcerated on Robben Island following the Little Rivonia Trial. In prison he secretly transcribed Mandela's memoir Long Walk to Freedom and smuggled it out of the prison in 1976.From 1988 to 1990 he commanded Operation Vula, an underground program of armed resistance. In this high profile and controversial trial, his fellow accused were Pravin Gordhan, Billy Nair, Siphiwe Nyanda, Dipak Teps Patel, Dipuo Mvelase and three others. He was democratic South Africa's first Minister of Transport, a post he took on 11 May 1994 and kept until 1999. In 2005 he joined the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont, USA and in July 2011, he was appointed as Jacob Zuma’s presidential Spokesman. Source: Wikipedia |
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Majakathata Mokoena South African Students Association A student leader during the uprisings of June 1976, Majakathata Mokoena has since worked as an international entrepreneur - a consultant in the computing, telecommunications and financial industries. He has also been a prolific writer on the subject of individual rights and market economies. Majakathata Mokoena was in the Democratic Alliance for a year and left to co-found his Economic Freedom Movement which was deregistered in 2009. He is also a founding member of the June 16 1976 Foundation.Source: International Society for Individual Liberty |
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Margaret Brink Black Sash; International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa Margaret Brink was born in Pretoria and studied political science at the then whites-only Natal University. She taught at an expensive boys' school in Johannesburg, but soon gravitated to teaching at night schools for blacks (including at Father Trevor Huddleston’s Sophiatown school), which were made illegal under the Bantu Education Act of 1953.In 1955, Brink and her twin sister Elizabeth were among the founders of the Black Sash group, a non-violent white women’s resistance organization. As the apartheid system began to reach into every aspect of South African life, Black Sash members demonstrated against the Pass Laws, the 90-day Detention law, the explicitly racist constitution, and other legalized injustices. Margaret and her husband John were good friends with ANC President Chief Albert Lutuli, and John Brink was arrested with Lutuli after he burned his pass following Sharpeville. The Brinks fled South Africa to Australia in 1961 after John was released from 93 days in prison. In 1962, the Brinks, supported by the writers Patrick White and Judith Wright, helped to establish an Australian branch of the South Africa Defence and Aid Fund, which raised money to support political prisoners and their families in South Africa, and spent many years exposing apartheid to the Australia public. John Brink would serve as mentor and inspiration to a number of young Australian activists (including Peter McGregor), and Margaret would continue to wear a black sash at protests, including the anti-Springbok rugby tour campaign in 1971. Her autobiography, Nkosi Sikekel’ iAfrika – Memories of Apartheid was published in 2006, all the proceeds from its sale going to help HIV orphans in South Africa. She died in 2008. |
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Marilyn Waring Member of Parliament (NZ); anti-apartheid activist No one more clearly reflects the political diversity of the New Zealand anti-apartheid movement than Marilyn Waring. Waring is a New Zealand feminist, a politician, an activist for women's rights and environmental issues, an author and an academic, known for her contributions to feminist economics. From 2005 - 2009 she was a board member of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. In 2007, along with Ken Loach and Susan George, she was one of 16 prominent individuals invited to contribute to a French publication on global human rights.But in 1981, at the time of the Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand, Waring was a Member of Parliament (MP) for the conservative National Party. She was an MP from 1975 - 1984, representing a North Island rural electorate. In 1975, aged 23, she was the youngest member of the Parliament. She was also the only Member of Parliament to join demonstrations against the 1981 Springboks tour. Most notably, she was part of the protests in Hamilton which lead to the cancellation of the Springbok's game against the Waikato provincial side. Following the cancellation of this game, a senior male political adversary phoned her with the message 'You've got more balls than me'. Since 2006, Marilyn Waring has been a Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT University in Auckland. She has held Fellowships at Harvard and Rutgers Universities. In recent years she has worked as a consultant for various organisations, including FAO, UNIFEM and the Ford Foundation. |
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Martin Fishgold Labor Committee Against Apartheid Martin Fishgold was editor of “The Unionist”, newspaper for the SSEU Local 371 Trade Union in New York City. In that capacity, Fishgold was approached by Peter Freemam in June 1983 with a story about a homeless shelter worker’s complaint about having to serve imported South Africian pineapples to Park Avenue shelter clients. Fishgold began covering the piece with a story called “Fruits of Racism”, and along with union vice-president, Ira Williams, took it to the labor committee. The continued publicity of the issue led to a bill being introduced into the city council by Council President Carol Bellamy, which banned New York City from doing business with banks and companies that were doing business with the South African government. In 1985 the bill, which had become known as “the Pineapple Bill”, passed.Martin was a part of the Labor Committee Against Apartheid and regularly covered the demonstrations and sit-ins, which frequently took place outside the South African consulate in New York. Martin Fishgold remained the longtime editor of The Unionist. He died on August 12 2010 at the age of 70. |
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Mary Benson Africa Bureau; Treason Trial Defence Fund Mary Benson was born in Pretoria where she received her early education. In 1941 she joined the South African Women’s Army and served in Cairo, Algiers, Italy, Greece and Vienna until 1945. On her return to South Africa, her attitude started shifting from that of traditional prejudice. In 1951 she worked as secretary to Tshekedi Khama, who was at the time campaigning to have his banishment revoked. In 1952 Benson went on to help establish the Africa Bureau in London and subsequently acted as secretary for the body.In 1957, she was secretary of the fund set up to raise funds for the defence in the Treason Trial. From this time on, Benson wrote extensively on the leaders and the followers of the liberation struggle in South Africa. She has published the biographies of Tshekedi Khama and Chief Albert Luthuli. She has also contributed to the publication edited by Marion Friedman, I Will Still Be Moved. She passed away on June 19, 2000. |
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Meredith Burgmann Australian Anti-Apartheid Movement Meredith Burgmann received a BA in English and Government from Sydney University in 1969, obtained a Masters Degree in 1973, and ultimately a PhD from Macquarie University. During her undergraduate years, she became involved in anti-Vietnam protests and subsequently in Anti-Apartheid in 1971 around Australia's sporting ties with South Africa, and was frequently arrested for her direct-action tactics.Having joined the Australian Labor Party in 1971, she was elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1991, and served as chair on the Parliamentary Priveleges and Ethis Committee. She served as President of the Legislative Council from 1999 to 2007. She is currently the President of the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID), supporting a network of NGOs focusing on international aid and development. Source: Australian Council for International Development |
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Mike Terry British Anti-Apartheid Movement He studied nuclear physics at Birmingham University, where he was president of the Student Union in 1969 – the year of the anti-apartheid demonstrations at Twickenham against the Springboks rugby tour. He went on to become secretary of the National Union of Students, and then worked for two years for the International Defence and Aid Fund. In 1975 Terry joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement as Executive Secretary. The organisation had been formed in London in 1959, as a "boycott committee" to draw attention to the evils of apartheid. Terry was the secretary of Freedom Productions, the company set up by AAM to organise the two Wembley Stadium concerts in support of Nelson Mandela. The first, in 1988, pressed for Mandela's release from prison and was timed to mark his 70th birthday. The second, in April 1990, was attended by Mandela himself, two months after he had walked free after 27 years in jail. Terry returned to the relative obscurity of science teaching in a London school - the career he had hoped to follow. In 2001 he was awarded the OBE for his work. He was instrumental in establishing the Oliver Tambo Science Student of the Year Award, as well as the partnership between Alexandra Park School and Ephes MamkeliSecondary School in Wattville, the East Rand township where Oliver Tambo is buried. Terry died on December 2, 2008.Sources: The Guardian | Independent |
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Mildred Lesiea African National Congress; United Democratic Front Mildred Ramakaba-Lesiea was born in 1933 in Langa, Cape Town. After leaving school due to financial constraints, she worked as a domestic worker in Sea Point. Lesiea joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1954 during the introduction of racist and retrogressive Bantu education and was an activist in community affairs for many years. In 1956, Lesiea was involved in the door-to-door campaign for the signing of petitions in the township against pass laws for women. She also served on a committee that promoted the We Stand by Our Leaders Campaign during the Treason Trial. In 1957, she was involved in the campaign against forced removals in the Western Cape.In 1958, she served on the regional committee of the ANC in the Western Cape and joined the South African Communist Party. After her release from detention in 1960, Lesiea became involved in the support and motivation of families of political detainees. In 1961, she was instrumental in organising the Federation of South African Women Conference held in Port Elizabeth. She was later detained again and banned for five years. Between 1972 and 1976, she was involved in the revival of women’s structures and also played a pivotal role in motivation and family counselling during the youth uprisings. As an active member of the United Democratic Front, she worked closely with the leadership of the Western Cape Civic Organisation. Lesiea contributed to the formation of the South African Youth Congress and mobilised youths, women’s structures and other organisations in the fight against apartheid. After serving five months in detention during the State of Emergency, she did underground work for the ANC, which included mobilising communities to support the Black Xmas Campaign. After 1994, Lesiea served in the national steering committee of the ANC Women's League and was elected as a ward councillor from 1995 to 1998. She is currently a Member of Parliament. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa |
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Murphy Morobe South African Student's Movement; United Democratic Front Morobe started school in Ermelo, completed Primary School in Soweto and then went to Orlando North Secondary School and Isaacson High School. While he was in high school he became interested in politics and history. In 1972 Morobe became part of the South African Student’s Movement (SASM). Many members of the SASM were detained in 1973 and it became quite weak. In 1974 Morobe helped with the re-building of SASM, and then was made treasurer by them.Later he was one of the student leaders of the Soweto Uprising in June, 1976. Due to his alleged role in the uprising, he spent three years in prison on Robben Island. He served his time alongside other student leaders. He also was in the company of South African political prisoner and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela. He was released in May 1982. After being released from prison, he returned to politics, involving himself with several groups, including: Congress of South African Students (COSAS), General and Allied Worker’s Union and he helped to form the United Democratic Front (South Africa) (UDF) in 1983. In 1994 Morobe had become the Chairperson and CEO of the Financial and Fiscal Commission in South Africa. Morobe was on the Council on Higher Education (CHE). He also is the Chairman of the South African National Parks Board (SANP), and is a part of the International Fundraising Consortium, an organisation that provides money grants to the non-governmental sectors of South Africa. Morobe has also been appointed to the position of Director on the board of the Old Mutual South Africa. He is currently the spokesman for former South African President Thabo Mbeki. Source: Wikipedia |
“Connie Field has produced a STAGGERING, PANORAMIC FILM-HISTORY of the forces that ultimately toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa.”
– Anderson Tepper, Vanity Fair
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Øystein Gudim Norwegian Council for South African Affairs Øystein Gudim holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oslo with a major in political science, history and sociology. In the years 1988 - 1992 he worked first in Tanzania for the United Nations and later for the United Nations Section of Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was very active in the Norwegian Council for Southern Africa from 1975 - 1994, including a period as Chairperson (1992 - 1993), and worked closely on campaigning for the cessation of Norwegian oil shipping deliveries to South Africa. He had several positions at the international department of the Norwegian People’s Aid (1994 - 2001) He continues to work on Southern Africa.Source: Wikipedia |
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Pallo Jordan African National Congress Zweledinga Pallo Jordan was born in Kroonstad in the Orange Free State.Both his parents were activists and when he enrolled at UCT, he was similarly inclined. By 1960 he joined the ANC and began serious Marxist studies. His father obtained a Carnegie fellowship after major promotion at Fort Hare University and was refused a passport but the family left South Africa for the USA in 1962. In the USA, whilst completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin and later his post graduate at the London School of Economics, Jordan continued with his Marxist associations, but amongst its academic “non-communist” followers. By 1975, he was working full-time for the ANC in its London-based information wing, moving to Luanda, Angola, in 1977 to head Radio Freedom and in 1980 to Lusaka, Zambia, to head the ANC Research Unit of the Department of Information and Publicity. He rose in the ranks of the ANC and returned to South Africa after its unbanning in 1990.Pallo Jordan was sworn in as a member of Parliament and minister for posts, telecommunications and broadcasting after the April 1994 elections. In 1996 he was appointed as minister of environmental affairs and tourism after a cabinet reshuffle, a position he held until 1999. He served as chairperson of the foreign affairs portfolio committee from 2002 to 2004, when he became minister of arts and culture, a position he held until 2009. |
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Per Wästberg International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa Per Wästberg was born on 20 November 1933 in Stockholm, Sweden. Wästberg campaigned extensively for human rights. He was chairperson of the International PEN from 1979 to 1986 and founder of the Swedish section of Amnesty International (1963).Fired up with the passion to see all humanity free from the bondage of colonialism, he was involved in the anti-colonial movement. He was especially active in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Wästberg become a travel writer and in addition the most important introducer of African literature to Sweden. The following two books from 1960 are important period documents: Förbjudet Område (Forbidden Area) from Rhodesia and På Svarta Listan (On the Black List) from South Africa mix genres such as diaries, portraits and political analyses to illustrate the shock when a neutral Swede meets everyday life under apartheid. The books reached far outside the Nordic countries and gained great importance for Swedish commitment to southern Africa. Through his writing and his active involvement in the struggles of ”third world” people, as well as his undying love for humanity, Per Wästberg subjected the brutalities of apartheid to the glare of the international arena. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa | Svenskaak Ademien |
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Peter McGregor Australian Anti-Apartheid Movement Peter McGregor was based in Sydney, attending the University of Sydney, earning degrees both there and the University of New South Wales. Upon meeting South African exiles in Australia (notably John and Margaret Brink, both of whom had set up the South African Defence and Aid Fund in Australia) he got introduced to Anti-Apartheid politics, in addition to his growing involvement with the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War, and aboriginal rights movements. He took on a full-time organizing position for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and campaigned vigorously against the Springbok Tour in Australia in 1971. Subsequent to the Australian Tour, McGregor travelled to New Zealand in 1973 at the behest of HART (Halt All Racist Tours) and CARE (Citizens Association for Racial Equality), and toured that country with HART's Trevor Richards, giving educational and strategy talks in anticipation of the proposed 1973 Springbok tour of New Zealand.By the mid-70's, McGregor's political philosophy had become stoutly anarchistic, and in following decades committed himself to working on various causes ranging from freedom for East Timor to collective bargaining rights to aboriginal rights to squatter's rights. In 1998, he published Cultural Battles: The Meaning of the Vietnam-USA War, and he was a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and the University of Western Sydney from 1987 to 2004. McGregor died in 2008. Source: The Sydney Morning Herald |
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Peter Molotsi Pan Africanist Congress; African National Congress Peter Hlaole Molotsi was born in Steinsrust, a municipal location, in the district of Kroonstad, (then Orange Free State). His father was a primary school teacher and his mother a housewife. He worked as a journalist on Bantu World, later retitled simply The World, after leaving school. He became an office-bearer in the African National Congress Youth League, participated in the Defiance Campaign, and served a spell in jail after being convicted under anti-communist legislation.He was, until his death, one of only two surviving members of the national executive committee set up when the party was founded. Under Robert Sobukwe, he occupied the post of secretary for pan African affairs. In 1960 he was one of a trio of PAC leaders who left South Africa after the party was banned. They organised the PAC in exile with headquarters in Dar es Salaam. Later he became its representative in the United States and at the United Nations. He undertook these activities while completing a doctorate and lecturing at various universities in the US. Peter Molotsi returned to South Africa in 1990 following the unbanning of political organisations, and taught for several years at the Mohadi College of Education in Kroonstad before retiring in 2000. He passed away in 2010. Source: South African History Online |
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Pierre Schori Swedish government Pierre Schori was international secretary in the Swedish Social Democratic Party and a close assistant to the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. He assisted Palme in the Socialist International Movement and took part in the struggle against the fascist rule in Greece, Portugal and Spain.Schori’s first contact with Southern Africa was in 1965, when he started to work at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party in Stockholm. At that time, the party had relations with SWANU of South West Africa, today Namibia. There were a number of SWANU students in Sweden and you could say that they opened the eyes of both the party and of the public opinion to the situation in that part of the world. Schori knew that Oliver Tambo and the other ANC leaders were truly democratic and that they had a vision of the future South African society as a mixed, pluralist and tolerant society. Since March 2007 Schori has been General Director of FRIDE, a think-tank based in Madrid. Source: Wikipedia |
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John Minto Halt All Racist Tours In September 1979, HART (Halt All Racist Tours) held its Stop the '81 Tour planning conference. Eighty people attended, many of them veterans of previous campaigns. Two could remember opposition to the 1928 rugby tour of South Africa. There was also a group of younger activists, including John Minto, who had become involved in HART in the mid 1970s.From 1979 until the closing of the movement in 1992, Minto was to hold many senior positions. He was actively involved in the campaigns to end New Zealand economic ties with South Africa, but it is the campaign against the 1981 Springboks rugby tour with which his name is most indelibly linked. Minto was the face of radical protest. The long batons used by riot police during the tour were nicknamed 'Minto bars.' In 1981, as HART's national organiser, he attracted special attention from pro-tour supporters. In Hamilton, he was one of those who invaded field and forced the abandonment of the game. The violence meted out by tour supporters to some of those who had stopped the game was gratuitous and savage. Minto was one of the main targets. John Minto believes that the greatest impact that the 1981 Springboks tour had on New Zealand society was to stimulate debate about racism and the place of Maori in New Zealand. A 2005 documentary on New Zealand's top 100 history makers listed him as number 89. Today he works for the Unite Union - a trade union for low-paid workers in New Zealand. He is spokesperson for Global Peace and Justice Auckland and chairperson of the Quality Public Education Coalition. Before his years of political activism, he was a secondary school science teacher. |
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Rica Hodgson International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa; Congress of Democrats Rica Hodgson devoted her life to the struggle for democracy from the early 1940s, until her retirement in 1996 as secretary to the late Walter Sisulu. In 1943, she became a fund-raiser for the Springbok Legion – an organisation comprising ex-servicemen that mobilised against the rising threat of fascism in South Africa. She joined the Communist Party in 1946 and in 1953 she was a founding member of the Congress of Democrats (COD) that organised white progressives into the mainstream Congress Alliance led by the African National Congress (ANC). She travelled around the country with other alliance members building a network of support and became the national secretary of the COD until August 1954, when she was served with banning orders.In 1954 Hodgson served on the National Action Council of the historic 1955 Congress of the People. In 1957, following the arrest of 156 leaders of the struggle, she became fund-raiser and secretary of the Treason Trial Defence Fund and later, in 1961, for the Johannesburg branch of the Defence and Aid Fund, South Africa. In 1959, she was secretary for the musical production King Kong that sought to promote black jazz musicians and non-racial performances. She was detained in 1960 during the state of emergency and in 1962 was placed under house arrest with her husband Jack Hodgson whom she has met in 1945. They left the country illegally in mid-1963 to set up a transit centre outside Lobatsi in the then Bechuanaland (Botswana), for MK cadres en-route to training abroad. The couple were declared prohibited immigrants by the British Government and were deported to London in September 1963. From 1964 to 1981, Hodgson worked full-time for the British Defence and Aid Fund and headed the Welfare Section of the International Defence and Aid Fund, covertly channelling funds for the defence of apartheid prisoners and the support of their families. During this time, she also volunteered her services to the development and administration work at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College, which was established by the ANC in Tanzania after the Soweto Uprising. Hodgson returned to South Africa in 1991 after the unbanning of the ANC. Her autobiography, Foot Soldier for Freedom: A Life in South Africa’s Liberation Movement was published in 2010. |
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Richard Hengeveld Shipping Research Bureau Richard Hengeveld studied economics in Amsterdam. As director of the Shipping Research Bureau, he monitored the movements of the world’s oil tanker fleets to see which ships were breaking the oil embargo on South Africa. Together with Jaap Rodeburg, he wrote the book Embargo: Apartheid’s Oil Secrets Revealed, published by the Shipping Research Bureau, and the SRB would prove a tremendous resource to the international anti-apartheid groups on up to the United Nations in making South Africa’s oil supply extremely costly for the apartheid regime. |
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Ripeka Evans anti-apartheid and Maori activist Up until the late 1960s, New Zealanders of European descent prided themselves on having the 'finest race relations in the world'. Ripeka Evans was a Maori activist, who, along with Syd Jackson and others, found this offensive. An activist for Maori women's rights, she saw the issue of apartheid in South Africa as a way of focussing on issues affecting Maori in New Zealand. In 1981 New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon Muldoon issued a Security Intelligence Service list of 15 alleged 'extremists, exploiting the protest movement for their own radical ends'. Evans was one of the fifteen. She was said to have attended 'training camps' in Cuba. Asked about this years later, she reflected that the closest that she had got to training 'was listening to Fidel Castro giving a speech for about two-and-a-half hours.'Evans spread glass on the Gisborne rugby field before the start of the first game of the 1981 Springboks tour of New Zealand. At the second game of the tour, which was cancelled following an invasion of the playing field by anti-apartheid activists, Evans, along with a couple of hundred protesters was filmed pushing down and walking over a fence at the rugby grounds. She regards her various criminal convictions during 1981 as "badges of courage". In the 1970s and 80s, Evans was a household name. She was one of the leaders of her generation. For the past 25 years, she has worked as a strategic leadership, communications and management consultant. This has included roles in Television New Zealand, the Department of Maori Affairs, Industry New Zealand, for tribal trust boards and for Maori and community health and research and economic development organisations. Today, Evans holds a senior position in Manatu Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. |
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Robert Hughes British Anti-Apartheid Movement Lord Robert Hughes was born in Pittenweem, County Fife in Scotland in 1932. He was educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, and after he emigrated with his family to South Africa in 1947, at Benoni High School in the Transvaal and at the Pietermaritzburg Technical College, Natal.Hughes' experience in South Africa imbued him with a life-long revulsion to racism, discrimination and injustice. He was soon drawn into politics and elected to the position of Chairperson of the Aberdeen City Labour Party. He was a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational Trust for South Africa, Chairperson of the Southern Africa Committee of the Movement for Colonial Freedom and Chair of the AAM from 1976 until its dissolution in 1995. The AAM played a major role in influencing international fora such as the United Nations (UN), the Organisation of African Unity, the Commonwealth and the Non Aligned Movement. The AAM, together with the UN Special Committee on Apartheid and anti-Apartheid movements in other countries, became the core of the solidarity movement which played an important role in isolating the South African regime, challenging its legitimacy and securing worldwide support for the liberation movement. After the first democratic elections, Hughes who became the first Chairperson of Action for South Africa, set up to support development in South Africa. His valuable and consistent leadership in the cause of African liberation helped build the AAM into an organisation that came to be regarded as the conscience of the British people. He is currently the Chair of the AAM Archives Committee. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa | South African History Online |
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Ron Dellums U.S. Congressman (CA) Ron Dellums served in the United States Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956 after he was denied the college scholarship he had sought. After service in the Marines, Dellums, with the help of the G.I Bill and an outside job, attended San Francisco State College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960. This was followed by an M.A. in Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962.Dellums quickly emerged as one of the most radical and outspoken Congressmen in Washington. Within weeks of his election, Dellums called for Congressional investigations into alleged war crimes in Vietnam and co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus. In 1972, Dellums began his campaign to end the apartheid policies of South Africa. Fourteen years later, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Dellums' anti-apartheid legislation, calling for a trade restriction against South Africa and immediate divestment by American corporations. The bill, the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, had broad bipartisan support. It called for sanctions against South Africa and stated preconditions for lifting the sanctions, including the release of all political prisoners. Ronald Reagan called for a policy of "constructive engagement" and vetoed the bill; however, his veto was overridden. It was the first override in the 20th century of a presidential foreign policy veto. Dellums recently served as the Mayor of Oakland, California, USA. He died on July 30, 2018. Source: Wikipedia | blackpast.org |
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Ron Segal anti-apartheid activist; editor of Africa South Ron Segal was educated at Cape Town University, majoring in English and Latin, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1956, in Cape Town, he launched Africa South, a magazine critical of the policies of the Nationalist government. He became a marked man, not helped by a speaking tour of US campuses, where he argued with passion for an economic boycott. As a result, Segal’s passport was withdrawn, and was banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. After the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, Segal smuggled Oliver Tambo into exile across the border into Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and they both eventually arrived in England.Segal continued publishing abroad, changing the magazine’s title to Africa South In Exile, and edited a collection of essays on economic sanctions emerging from the 1963 United Nations Sanctions Conference in London. When finally unbanned by the South African government in 1992, Segal returned to visit his homeland, where he shared the stage with Mandela, Tambo, Joe Slovo and others, in order to deliver a speech at the inaugural presentation of the Ruth First Memorial Prize for journalism on behalf of the trust which he had been instrumental in setting up after First’s death by parcel bomb in 1982. Although he returned to South Africa several times, he continued to live in England. Ron Segal died on 23 February 2008 Source: The Guardian |
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Rona Bailey New Zealand Communist Party; anti-apartheid activist Labeled 'the High Priestess of New Zealand Communism' by former Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, Rona Bailey bestrode left-wing politics, dance and the theatre in New Zealand for more than 60 years. In the late 1930s, she studied dance with the legendary Martha Graham at Columbia University in New York. Back in New Zealand, she joined the New Zealand Communist Party in 1943, and pioneered the teaching of modern dance. In 1947, in Yugoslavia, she joined a work gang to help rebuild a railway, and interviewed the country's leader, Josip Tito.Bailey was always fiercely loyal to workers' causes. After recovering from tuberculosis in the early 1950s, she became active in various organisations, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, from 1959, the “No Maoris: No Tour” movement, formed to protest against the 1960 whites-only New Zealand rugby tour of South Africa. It was in the United States immediately before WWII that she had gained her first insight in the politics of race. Here she saw hooded night riders round a burning cross in Virginia. In Panama, she heard a concert by black American bass Paul Robeson. For all of the 1970s and early 1980s, she was a committed, anti-apartheid activist. In 1974, with Trevor Richards, she met with Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, the first African Head of State to visit New Zealand. In 1981, she was batoned and left bloodied in the “Battle of Molesworth Street” during protests against the Springbok rugby tour. She was one of those named by Prime Minister Muldoon in his infamous list of ‘extremists’ whom the SIS alleged were exploiting opposition to the tour for their own ends. In Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism, Trevor Richards has written of Bailey that 'her support, excitement and devotion to “the struggle” were inspirational.' |
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Salim Salim Organisation of African Unity; Tanzanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Salim Ahmed Salim was born in 1942 on the island of Zanzibar, now part of the United Republic of Tanzania. As a young student, Salim was active in politics and founded the All-Zanzibar Student Union in 1960 of which he became the first Vice-President.Salim started his diplomatic career as Ambassador of Zanzibar to Egypt at the age of 22, making him the youngest African ambassador at the time. Later, he served as Tanzanian Ambassador to India, China, Korea, Cuba and the United Nations (UN) in New York. At the UN, Salim served in various capacities including President of the UN Security Council and President of the 34th Session of the General Assembly. He took a special interest in the victims of colonialism and Apartheid. Salim also served as President of the International Conference on Sanctions against Apartheid (1981) and as President of the Paris International Conference Against Apartheid (1984). He returned to Tanzania to take up a major role in domestic politics, holding several senior ministerial positions as well as that of Prime Minister. He then resumed his international work, serving as Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity from 1989 to 2001, overseeing its transformation into the African Union. Salim continues to serve his country and continent as President of the Julius K. Nyerere Foundation, as member of the National Executive Committee of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi and as member of the Board of the South Centre based in Geneva. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa | moibrahimfoundation.org |
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Sam Ramsamy South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee Sam Ramsamy grew up in a highly politicised environment with his father being a trade unionist. He and his four siblings attended Depot Road Primary School and matriculated at Sastri College, the first high school for Indians. From an early age, Ramsamy learnt the importance of equality and non-racialism. It is a value that has spurred him on to fight for equality in sport. From a very tender age, he had been interested in sport, beginning his career as an educator and an avid sportsman.He was the founder member of the South African Council on Sport, established in 1973. In 1976, he became chairperson of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) and shortly after joined the organisation. By 1978, Ramsamy had become the executive chairperson of SANROC. The two sports organisations were united in their purpose of pursuing an international sports ban on South Africa’s athletes and by so doing, fostered greater global support for the resistance against apartheid. Following the Soweto uprisings in 1976, Ramsamy petitioned countries to formalise a boycott of South African sports, which culminated in the Gleneagles Agreement of 1977. Ramsamy, who up to this point was still employed as a teacher at a school in London, left his employment in 1978 and became a consultant to the United Nations (UN). His core responsibility at the UN was to ensure the drafting of an international convention against apartheid sport that would make for punitive measures to be placed against those countries who continued to engage South Africa in sporting activities. The convention was finally drawn up and signed by various countries in 1985. He took over running, managing and providing impetus to the sports boycott from the late 1970s onward. The sports boycott was important in spreading awareness of the evils of apartheid to the rest of the world. Ramsamy’s contribution to sport did not end with apartheid. During the transition to democracy, he encouraged international support for the black sports body, the National Olympic Committee of South Africa, and became its head in 1991. He led the first non-racial South African team to the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. He is also a member of the International Olympic Committee. He has spent most of his adult life fighting for the eradication of the colour bar in sport and towards creating unity in the sporting arena where selection for teams is based on merit and where athletes of all races are given an equal chance to participate. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa |
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Shridath 'Sonny' Ramphal Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath "Sonny" Surendranath Ramphal was born on 3 October 1928 in New Amsterdam, British Guiana. Ramphal attended a private school founded by his father in the capital city, Georgetown. He was also educated at the Modern Educational Institute. He completed his secondary education at Queen’s College, a government school in Georgetown. In 1947, Ramphal began his legal training at King’s College, London.At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1975, Ramphal was unanimously appointed the Commonwealth’s second secretary general, the first from the Developing World. Articulate, dynamic and self-confident, he was a strong advocate of the interests of the Developing World, the need for a new international economic order and the need to end apartheid in South Africa. Soon after his appointment, he challenged a statement by Henry Kissinger that the international economic system had worked well and argued that the developing countries had not been well served by it. He stressed the importance of increased North-South co-operation, and he played an important role as a member of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, the Brandt Commission. He had a deep commitment to human rights and served as a member of the International Commission of Jurists from 1970. After the end of his term as secretary general of the Commonwealth in 1989, he served as head of the World Conservation Union and played an important role in the Earth Summit in 1992. He was made an Honorary Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in May 2006. He is a Vice-President of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Source: ramphalcentre.org | The Presidency, Republic of South Africa |
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Sipho Makana African National Congress Born in Fort Beaufort in the Eastern Cape, he later went to Fort Hare where he became a staunch member of the ANC Youth League. He was expelled in 1959 because of his political activities. He continued his studies at the University of Natal where he was elected to the executive of the African Students Association (ASA). In 1962 Thabo Mbeki, a fellow executive member, invited him to join a group of student activists who were going into exile. After being imprisoned in Southern Rhodesia he eventually made it to Dar es Salaam to work for the ANC in exile.Makana served as Ambassador to Botswana and passed away in 2004. |
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Steve Phillips Stanford Out Of South Africa Steve grew up in Ohio, where his mother was a public school teacher and his father was a physician. He attended Stanford University, where he was active in the student government, the Black Student Union, and the South African divestment movement. Steve helped build a coalition of students, faculty and staff (Stanford Out Of South Africa) that pushed Stanford to make a partial divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. Steve continued his public service after graduating from college, devoting his early professional and political life to the issue of education. For four years he worked as the coordinator of an education reform project that linked low-performing schools with business and local community groups. In 1992, at the age of 28, Steve successfully ran for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Education, and he became the youngest elected official in the history of San Francisco, and went on to serve as President of the Board. Steve's work with non-profit organizations includes founding Justice Matters, an education reform and leadership development organization, and serving on the Board of Directors of Progressive Majority, the Democracy Alliance, and the American Conservatory Theater.Source: Huffington Post |
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Syd Jackson Halt All Racist Tours; Maori activist Protest against sporting contacts with South Africa goes back a long way in New Zealand. In 1928 and 1949, it was Maori who initiated the protests against New Zealand rugby tours to South Africa. The same was true for the 1970 tour. During Easter 1968, the Federation of Maori Students met in Auckland. Syd Jackson, son of 1937 All Black Everard Jackson, proposed that the 1970 rugby tour of South Africa be opposed, irrespective of whether or not Maori rugby players were allowed into South Africa as part of the team. The resolution was reported widely overseas. Dennis Brutus learned of it in Tehran, where he was participating in a United Nations human rights conference.Jackson had a particularly personal reason for taking a stand against apartheid. His father, Everard Jackson was a Maori who because of his race was denied a place in the trials to select the (later aborted) 1940 All Black tour of South Africa. When HART was formed in 1969, Jackson was elected Vice Chairman. For the next two decades, he was an active campaigner against New Zealand's sporting contacts with South Africa. Trevor Richards remembers sharing a platform with him in Rotorua in 1975. The meeting had scarcely got underway when the police came in and cleared the Hall. A bomb threat had been received. Jackson was also the leader of Nga Tamatoa, a Maori activist organisation which challenged New Zealand attitudes to race. Jackson's nephew, former MP and broadcaster Willie Jackson, said of his Uncle 'For many of us he was a mentor, a leader and an absolute role model. He was absolutely fixed on getting equity for Maori and that's the way he lived his life.' When he wasn't involved in Maori and anti-racist issues, he was an active trade unionist. For seventeen years he was a field officer, and then head, of the Clerical Workers Union in Auckland. |
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Sylvia Hill TransAfrica; Free South Africa Movement Sylvia Hill received her doctorate in education from the University of Oregon in 1971 after having majored in psychology at Howard University. Dr. Hill wanted to establish direct connections between African liberation movements and African-Americans and with a small group of fellow activists - almost all women – she founded a small group called the Southern Africa News Collective, which grew into the Southern Africa Support Project (SASP) in 1978. Sylvia and her fellow activists in SASP were at the heart of the Free South Africa Movement that brought demonstrators to be arrested at the South African embassy. Hill was also one of the key organizers for the Sixth Pan- African Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1974, and for Nelson Mandela's tour of the United States following his release from prison in 1990. Today Sylvia is professor of criminal justice at the University of the District of Columbia and she continues her involvement with Africa through her membership of the board of TransAfrica Forum.Source: noeasyvictories.org |
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Tim Smith Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility Tim Smith attended the University of Toronto and Union Theological Seminary in the 1960s, and began to do field work with a group called the University Christian Movement in Southern Africa Committee. While at UTS, Smith participated in a series of demonstrations in front of bank branches in New York City.In 1968 he traveled to South Africa as part of a delegation from the US to attend a meeting of the University Christian Movement, where he met Black Consciousness founder Steve Biko. When he returned to the States Smith sent Biko a number of books on the US Black Power Movement. Smith was one of the first employees of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), founded in 1973, and served as director from 1976 to 2000, with the aim coordinate the interfaith effort by helping religious denominations mobilize efforts against business interests in South Africa. He currently serves as Director of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance Issues) Shareowners Engagement at Walden Asset Management, and is on the Board of Donna Katzin’s Shared Interest. Source: African Activist Archive |
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Tom Newnham Citizens' Association for Racial Equality Tom Newnham was one of the founding fathers of anti-apartheid activism in New Zealand. It could be argued that he was the founding father. But for Tom, just as important as the anti-apartheid campaign was the campaign against racism inside New Zealand. His involvement with race issues began in the late 1950s, when he joined the campaign to stop the New Zealand rugby team going to South Africa without Maori players. In 1964, he was one of a handful of people who formed CARE (Citizens' Association for Racial Equality). For seven years he served as its secretary.His battles with populist Prime Minister Robert Muldoon kept journalists busy for a decade. Accused by Muldoon in 1976 of 'acts bordering on treason', Newnham took a libel suit against the Prime Minister, and lost on a technicality. For more than a quarter of a century of anti-apartheid activism, he was always enthusiastic, forever optimistic. He had patience and good humour in abundance. Perhaps, most importantly, he was always there, and not just for the big protests. At one protest outside a local Squash Club in the early 1970s, a fellow anti-apartheid activist turned up to find Tom, the sole protestor, holding a placard denouncing apartheid sport and weathering a stream of abuse from passers-by. Tom's response was always polite: 'Thank you sir for your opinion' and 'No thanks Madam, I don't think the placard will fit'. Ripeka Evans has described Newnham as 'a pakeha who gained huge respect among Maori for the quiet but strongly assertive way he focused people's attention not only on racism in South Africa, but within New Zealand.' Newnham was also a committed supporter of a nuclear free New Zealand. He spoke Cantonese and Mandarin after living in China and was heavily involved in helping Chinese immigrants in his later years. |
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Tony Glover Coalition for a Free South Africa Tony Glover grew up in a welfare household in a poor district of the Bronx. He became involved in the Coalition For a Free South Africa while he was studying at Columbia University, which aimed at educating students about the situation in South Africa. After a debate in the university senate it was decided that Columbia should divest its holdings in South Africa, which at the time was about $39 million. However, Columbia refused to follow through on this vote and ignored it. In response the student body arranged a blockade administration building, Hamilton Hall, on 4 April 1985. Glover was among 7 students who decided to take the protest further, and 8 days prior to the blockade had began a hunger strike in an attempt to impact the trustees. The whole protest lasted 21 days and turned out to be one of the longest continuous civil disobedience protests in the history of the US, with a telegram of support from Bishop Desmond Tutu and both Reverend Jesse Jackson and Oliver Tambo coming to speak on the campus. The work of the Coalition for a Free South Africa is cited by many as the catalyst for campus protests around the issue of apartheid that exploded in the United States during the 80s. |
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Trevor Richards Halt All Racist Tours Trevor Richards was born in 1946 in New Zealand. As a young student leader at Auckland University, Richards was deeply disturbed by the oppression and exploitation of black people in South Africa and joined the ranks of the anti-apartheid movement. Incensed by the apartheid regime's use of sporting exchanges and international sport to attempt to give what was in reality a tyrannical society a veneer of normality, Richards, together with Tom Newnham, John Minto, David Nickham and others formed the organization called Halt All Racist Tours (HART) in 1969, initially to co-ordinate opposition to the 1970 All Black tour to South Africa.Over the next twenty years, HART - of which Richards was national chairperson for ten years - actively contributed to the international campaigns to stop all sports tours to and from South Africa, establishing close working relationships with the South African Non-racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity and the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa. In 1973, when the New Zealand Government insisted that South Africa compete in the Softball World Championships in New Zealand despite HART's campaign, it caused world outrage. HART's campaign to prevent the New Zealand rugby tour to South Africa resulted in 17 African countries and Guyana and Iraq withdrawing from the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal in protest against the New Zealand Government's intransigence. In 1981 HART organized country-wide protests against the South African rugby tour to New Zealand, resulting in a national outcry when demonstrations of thousands of New Zealand marchers were met with a violent response from the police, leaving hundreds of protestors injured. Eventually the moral strength of the argument of the small lobby group of anti-apartheid campaigners developed into an unstoppable worldwide movement to ban apartheid sport. In 1977 the United Nations Declaration against Apartheid in Sport - which Richards helped to draft - was endorsed by the majority of member countries. In 1988 Richards became the first Africa Programme manager for New Zealand's Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA). In 1992 he finally visited South Africa for the first time and the following year he established the VSA programme in South Africa in which New Zealand volunteers assisted in voter education to prepare for South Africa's first democratic elections. Trevor Richards was one of the early campaigners against apartheid in New Zealand. His unflinching resolve and indefatigable efforts to undermine the abhorrent apartheid system by campaigning relentlessly for a sports boycott, has made him an icon of the anti-apartheid campaign in New Zealand and South Africa, and a world symbol of selflessness in defence of equality, justice and the inalienable rights of all humanity. South Africans stand in awe of this man who fought so gallantly on behalf of a people so far away. The role that Trevor Richards played in the anti-apartheid movement has earned him wide acclaim and many awards, both in New Zealand and internationally. He served as the Chair of the Africa Centre (1996 - 2003) and currently serves as a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Trust. From 1988 to 1990 he served as a member of the New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs' Advisory Committee on South Africa and in 2002 he was appointed to the New Zealand Government's Pacific Development and Conservation Trust. In 2004 The Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Gold was awarded to Trevor Richards for his exceptional contribution to the struggle for the attainment of a non-racial, free and democratic South Africa through consistent advocacy of non-racial sport and the boycott of apartheid sport. His account of the history of New Zealand's contribution to the fight against apartheid was published as Dancing on our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism, in 1999. Source: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa |
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Trond Bakkevig World Council of Churches Dr. Bakkevig graduated in theology at the Faculty of Theology in Oslo in 1974, and ten years later he became a doctor of theology at the University of Oslo. He was Secretary General of the Church of Norway’s Council for almost nine years beginning in 1978, and played an active role among churches internationally in coordinating worldwide public condemnation of apartheid. Bakkevig worked closely with the Norwegian government in funneling money into South Africa (sometimes personally flying the money into the country himself), and participated vocally in the public debate about sanctioning South Africa. Bakkevig served as chairman for the Institute for Human Rights at the University of Oslo, and was a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches from 1997 to 2006. The King appointed Bakkevig the commander of the St. Olav in May 2011.Source: Wikipedia |
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Vella Pillay British Anti-Apartheid Movement; SA Indian Congress; SA Communist Party Vella Pillay was born in Johannesburg, and went as a part-time student to the University of the Witwatersrand, gaining a bachelor of commerce degree in 1948. Becoming politically aware at university, he joined the Federation of Progressive Students and was active in the Transvaal Indian Congress. Pillay also joined the South African Communist party (SACP) as a student, and associated himself with the recently radicalized leadership of the South African Indian Congress. The following January, he moved to London with his family (his marriage to a white woman being untenable in South Africa), where Pillay had been accepted by the London School of Economics for an honours degree in international economics. Pillay was increasingly involved in various subversive undertakings. He managed the funds of the SACP. An organizer of the campaign to boycott South African goods in 1959, Pillay went on to be a founding member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1960, where he served on the organization's executive throughout its existence until 1994. He also arranged for South African revolutionaries to receive military training in the Soviet Union and China. Pillay was invited to return home in 1992-93 to coordinate the work of numerous distinguished economists in the Macroeconomic Research Group (Merg). Pillay received an honorary doctorate from the University of Natal (Durban-Westville) for his work on Merg. Vella Pillay died on 29 July, 2004.Source: The Guardian |
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Vesla Vetlesen Norwegian Union leader Vesla Vetlesen’s childhood was marked by the Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II. For a period, her family's home at Storhaug was the location for production of the illegal newspapers Stritt folk and Frihet. Her father was later imprisoned and sent to a concentration camp. She was a communist during her early life, chairing the regional chapter of the Young Communist League of Norway in Rogaland from 1948 to 1949. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary she renounced Communism and joined the Norwegian Labour Party. She left Norway to teach weaving in Uganda in 1968, where her husband worked for the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation. After some years in Uganda, they returned to Norway. She then worked as a secretary for humanitarian organizations; Save the Children from 1973 to 1975 and Norwegian People’s Aid from 1975 to 1980, before working in the Norwegian Confederation for Trade Unions from 1980 to 1986 and 1988 to 1994. Her experiences under Nazi occupation directly fed her activity in combating apartheid: she was active in consumers boycotts of South African goods, fundraising and educational campaigns, the anti-Shell campaign, and pressuring the Norwegian government on its sanctions policy.Source: Wikipedia |
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Vladimir Shemiatenkov Soviet Communist Party International Department Vladimir Shemyatenkov dealt with South African affairs from 1960 until 1965. Upon Oliver Tambo’s arrival in the Moscow in 1963, Shemiatenkov was assigned to accompany the exiled ANC leader on a Soviet-sponsored rest stay in a sanatorium in the Crimea, where he and Tambo became close friends, frequently hosting Tambo in his home on subsequent visits to the USSR.Shemiatenkov, a doctor of economics, attended the 1964 United Nations Sanctions Conference in London as a member of the Soviet delegation. Shemiatenkov served as Representative of the USSR to the European Community until 1991. He has written many articles and given papers on economic ties between Russia and the European Union, recently under the auspices of the Institute of Europe, Moscow. |
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Vladimir Shubin Operation Solidarity Movement, Soviet Communist Party Vladimir Shubin served as Secretary of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee and Head of the Africa Section of the CPSU International Department, and was the Soviet representative to the first African National Congress (ANC) National Conference after its unbanning. From the 1960s he had extensive contact with the leaders of African liberation movements, supporting them in an official capacity on behalf of the Soviet Union. He is now a Principal Research Fellow of the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of African History and Politics at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He is author of ANC: A View from Moscow (Mayibuye Books, 1999) and numerous books and articles on Southern African issues. He received the silver Grand Companion of OR Tambo in 2006, for his “Excellent contribution to the struggle against Apartheid and Colonialism in Southern Africa.”Source: African Activist Archive |
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Walter Fauntroy U.S. Congressman (D.C.) Throughout his career, Walter E. Fauntroy has linked his Christian values with nonviolent civil disobedience to bring about social change and justice. His work in the Civil Rights Movement and in the U.S. Congress helped end racial discrimination and poverty in America and eliminate human rights abuses across the African diaspora.From 1971 to 1990 he was D.C.’s representative in Congress. During his tenure, he was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as the committee’s chairman from 1981 to 1983. In 1984, he was arrested after conducting a sit-in at the South African embassy in protest of the U.S. policy against apartheid. In 1990, after a failed bid for mayor of Washington, D.C., Fauntroy returned to preaching at New Bethel. Source: stanford.edu |
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Walter Sisulu African National Congress Walter Ulyate Max Sisulu was born in the village of Qutubeni in the Engcobo district of the Transkei on 18 May 1912. He attended an Anglican missionary institute, but left in Standard 4 (Grade 6) at the age of 15 after his uncle died. To help support his family he was forced to seek work in Johannesburg where he found employment in a dairy. In 1940 at 28 years old, Sisulu joined the African National Congress (ANC).Walter Sisulu, along with Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Ashley Mda, was elected to the executive committee of the newly established ANC Youth League in 1944. While the Youth League in its early stages, it was heavily influenced by Anton Lembede’s militant African nationalism. Sisulu rose very rapidly in the ranks of the ANC and became a member of the Transvaal executive in addition to being secretary of the Youth League. At the ANC national conference in December 1949, Sisulu was instrumental in the ANC’s adoption of the Youth League's militant Program of Action. During the 1960 state of emergency following the Sharpville massacre, Sisulu and many of his co-defendants in the Treason Trial were detained for several months. Following the banning of the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), Sisulu was arrested. He was released on bail pending an appeal and placed under 24-hour house arrest. On 20 April 1963 he skipped his bail conditions and went underground at the SACP’s secret headquarters at Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia. On 11 July 1963 Sisulu was amongst those arrested at Lilieslief Farm, the secret headquarters of the ANC, and placed in solitary confinement for 88 days. A lengthy trial, which started in October 1963 lead to a sentence of life imprisonment (for planning acts of sabotage), handed down on 12 June 1964. Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, and four others were sent to Robben Island. In 1982 Sisulu was transferred Pollsmoor Prison, Cape Town, after a medical examination at Groote Schuur Hospital. In October 1989 he was finally released – after serving 25 years. Sisulu subsequently met with the external wing of the ANC in Lusaka and was asked to lead the ANC inside South Africa. This involved re-establishing ANC structures within the country and preparing for a national conference to be held inside South Africa on 16 December 1990. When the ANC was un-banned on 2 Feb 1990 Sisulu took a prominent role. He was elected deputy president in 1991 and given the task of re-structuring the ANC in South Africa. Walter Sisulu was deputy president of the ANC until ill health forced him to retire from active politics in 1994. He continued to be passionately committed to the wellbeing of his community, especially children and young people and he and Albertina devoted much of their time to the Albertina Sisulu Foundation which built a multi-purpose community centre in Orlando West, Soweto. Walter Sisulu passed away on 5 May 2003. Source: South African History Online |
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Wilfred Wood World Council of Churches Born in Barbados in 1936, Bishop Wilfred Wood came to London in 1962 and served as a curate, then honorary curate, of St. Thomas with St. Stephen, Shepherd's Bush, until 1974. Being struck by the harsh conditions that black immigrants had to undergo and by the problems of the inner city, Wood maintained an active interest in race relations and social justice in London. He was a founder member of the Paddington Churches Housing Association, and was appointed the Bishop of London's race relations officer in 1966, and was Bishop of Croydon from 1985 to 2003. He was the first black bishop in the Church of England. Wood was also a moderator of the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, known for its work on South African apartheid, acknowledging the importance of the work of commission as they supported the liberation movements against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.On 30 November 2000 - Barbados Independence Day - Queen Elizabeth II appointed Wood a Knight of St Andrew "for his contribution to race relations in the United Kingdom and general contribution to the welfare of Barbadians living here". Wood retired as Bishop of Croydon on September 30, 2002. In 2004, Wood was voted by the public as second on a list of the "100 Great Black Britons." Source: Wikipedia | 100greatblackbritons.com |