Category: African National Congress
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South African progressives and the Suez Crisis of 1956
On 29 October, 1956, the Suez Crisis began with an Israeli attack upon Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, with the UK and France intervening the subsequent days to ‘protect’ the Suez Canal. Many historians have viewed these actions as the last major ‘roll of the dice’ for the British and French governments hoping to stem the decolonisation…
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London Recruits: Please help fund doco on ‘secret war against Apartheid’
This is an appeal to help raise money to fund the completion of this documentary on the British activists who travelled to South Africa in the late 1960s to undertake secret missions to help the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Here’s a message from the film makers: New documentary feature London…
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Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa in the Far Right Popular Imagination
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, it has emerged that the killer had been photographed in clothing bearing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. While a lot has been written on this in the last two days, I thought I would post this on how these regimes (and…
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The Last Stubborn Outpost of a Past Epoch: The British Communist Party and National Liberation in Zimbabwe, pt. 3
This is the third (and final) post in a series looking at how the Communist Party of Great Britain viewed and interacted with the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The other instalments can be found here and here. Throughout the 1970s, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was seen as a weak…
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South Africa and anti-Apartheid in British popular culture before Mandela (1976-1983)
This post is partly inspired by my work on The Young Ones and the cultural depictions of the history of Thatcherite Britain. In the first episode, ‘Demolition’, which aired in late 1982, Rick and Neil have an argument over whether the vegetables in the meal were from South Africa (there was an international campaign for a boycott…
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Communist Party of Cuba’s ‘Gramma’ on Nelson Mandela (1985)
There have been a few commentators, such as this, arguing that the role of Castro’s Cuba in the anti-Apartheid struggle had been overlooked in the memorialising after Nelson Mandela’s death last Friday. I had just received a box of the newspaper Gramma, the English language paper of the Communist Party of Cuba, from a retiring…
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