The 1970s: The Anti-Apartheid Movement's Difficult Decade

The 1970s were a pivotal decade in the Southern African liberation struggle. In 1975 Mozambique and Angola won their independence front Portugal, transforming the Southern African region. In South Africa, after a period in the late 1960s when internal opposition seemed crushed, the Black Consciousness Movement and the growth of independent trade unions signalled the growth of a new resistance. At the same time, changing attitudes to race in a postcolonial world made apartheid more difficult to defend. Even international corporations, whose high rates of profit depended on the subsistence wages they paid their black employees, needed to find an acceptable rationale for continuing to invest in South Africa. These changes threw up new challenges for the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The establishment of Marxist governments in the former Portuguese colonies and the involvement of Cuba in Angola thrust Southern Africa into the frontline of the Cold War. It was unclear how the emergence of the new movements in South Africa would affect the course of the struggle and the role of the African National Congress (ANC). And the arguments for constructive engagement put forward by business interests ran counter to the AAM's advocacy of the total isolation of South Africa. These arguments gained currency in sections of the British trade union movement, the churches and other constituencies to which the AAM looked for support. This article examines how the AAM responded to these challenges and how it emerged to become a mass movement in the 1980s.