In early 1968, shortly before the end of his tenure as Anglican Bishop of Masasi in southern Tanzania, the anti-apartheid activist and political missionary Trevor Huddleston described a scene he witnessed while in transit through the small airport at Nachingwea. Huddleston maintained that airports, already in 1968 an embodiment of global society, were often international only insofar as âpassengers of many nations pass through their lounges and their exit-rampsâ. The scene he described at Nachingwea, however, was in contrast an illustration of the ways in which one town in a young African state was enmeshed in a series of global connections:
In the twenty or so people standing around, there was a group of Russian geologists, some American mission-priests, a few Chinese technicians wearing Mao-Tse Tung badges, African soldiers, a Canadian army officer, a group of Asian business-men and some other British travellers as well as myself ⊠They are not just passengers moving through the country: for the most part they are part of the very fabric of the country at this time; each individual has some contribution to make, for good or ill, to its future. 1
During the 1950s, Huddleston had become one of the most prominent critics of apartheid, and a powerful advocate for a coordinated international campaign against the countryâs race policies. Having left South Africa in 1956, he had held the role of Bishop of Masasi in southern Tanzania since 1960, shifting focus from a staunch critic of white supremacy to a willing participant in a very different form of state-led development. 2 While accounts suggest that he found his Tanzanian experiences frustrating at times, he clearly embraced the principles of African socialism and self-reliance set out in Arusha Declaration, offering an apologia for single-party rule, which, he argued was ârooted in the idea of free discussion and the coming to a common mindâ. 3 But the primary motivation behind Huddlestonâs account was the ongoing dispute between Britain and Tanzania, centred on the latter stateâs opposition to the white settler regime in Rhodesia. The small group at Nachingwea airport thus appeared to represent a form of internationalism that was an answer to the seemingly intractable problem of global inequality, which could be solved only âby men and women, by nations and groups of nations learning to respect one another and to recognise that in our shrinking world there can be no room for rigid nationalismsâ. 4
Participatory development and international cooperation in Tanzania might appear an odd place to begin an exploration of human rights and humanitarianism in global anti-apartheid. But Huddlestonâs interventions lead us to core issues that have concerned recent accounts of the history of apartheid and anti-apartheid. To what extent was Huddleston describing a nascent form of âglobal civil society â as others have detected in the history of anti-apartheid itself? The cosmopolitan group, bound together by a role in the grand narrative of âdevelopmentâ, shared many features of the transnational anti-apartheid network, what HĂ„kan Thörn described as an âimagined community of solidarity activistsâ. 5 The missionary values inherent in Huddlestonâs efforts as both an anti-apartheid activist and Anglican minister (the two being, for him, indivisible of course) were integral to the definitions of solidarity that underpinned anti-apartheid activism. One way of defining this centres on the values of universal human community, shaped by acts of identification with the plights of others. 6 The global political space created by anti-apartheid therefore shared a number of features in common with the transnational networks that drove the utopian development efforts described by Huddleston in 1968.
As Saul Dubow has recently suggested, the task of reconciling global and local scales of action is key to understanding the relationships between apartheid, anti-apartheid and those who sought to oppose anti-apartheid. 7 To address this task, this chapter examines the ways in which anti-apartheid was envisioned as a global struggle by activists, either as a humanitarian response to a political and social crisis or as a particular form of human rights struggle. It argues that these ideasâand humanitarian conceptions in particularâprovided a framework that allowed activists to imagine themselves as part of a global movement, anchoring the contingent and diverse qualities of local movements to a concept of international solidarity. The chapter begins by exploring the ways in which anti-apartheid was conceptualised both consciously and unconsciously as a form of humanitarianism . Other notions of universal solidarity, including class consciousness, diasporic black identity and Third World solidarities, were all highly significant in the development of a global anti-apartheid movement identity, however, and humanitarianism provided a moral basis for anti-apartheid only in selective contexts at particular moments.
Where humanitarian motives underpinned anti-apartheid, they often presented apartheid as a form of humanitarian crisis. The emergence of organised anti-apartheid movements and coordinated sanctions campaigns in the early 1960s, for example, was, for some, a response to global crisis. The shooting of black protestors in Sharpeville in March 1960, images of which were circulated via global media networks within hours, could be incorporated into a narrative that juxtaposed events in South Africa with anti-colonial conflict in Algeria, and soon after, alongside burgeoning popular resistance to Portuguese colonialism. The arrival of the anti-apartheid âmomentâ signalled an internationalisation of the problem of white supremacy in the context of decolonisation; but it did so at a time when Cold War tensions and the increasingly obvious possibility of nuclear Armageddon. Two years after Sharpeville, more feverish accounts could conceive of a web that connected apartheid, global corporate interests and tensions around decolonisation in central Africa, warning of a genuine threat to world peace. 8
And yet, activistsâ sense of themselves as players in a larger struggle with world-historical significance was invariably defined in enclosed, self-referential terms. The petition which in 1963 launched the World Campaign for the Release of South African Political Prisoners (WCRSAPP) presented itself as the voice of âsupporters of the struggle against racial injusticeâ, a formulation which simultaneously aligned with the particular agendas of South African organisations and evoked a more general campaign for civil and human rights . 9 It might therefore be preferable to consider anti-apartheid, not as a continuity with colonial humanitarianism , but as a vehicle for activism centred on the concept of human rights. It is certainly true that anti-apartheid activists invoked the language of human rights from the early 1950s, with perhaps the most obvious early example of a deliberate efforts to connect opposition to apartheid with an international discourse of human rights coming in the 1958 Declaration of Conscience, a global petition coordinated by the American Committee on Africa to mark the tenth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . However, recent accounts have suggested that human rights as a transformative, utopian vision of transnational activism only emerged in the late 1970s. 10 Should anti-apartheid therefore be viewed as a human rights movement in an older sense of the term, in which rights are articulated, accounted for and enacted in the context of citizenship within an independent nation state? Was anti-apartheid, after all, simply a struggle for national rights?
In this context, the relationships between anti-apartheid and global institutions need to be brought into the foreground. The ways in which apartheid became a focus of discussions around human rights were not obscure or diffuse, but took place in specific spaces, in particular institutions inaugurated by the United Nations during the 1960s and 1970s. The attraction of this is that it seems to enable us to âlocate the places ⊠where âglobalization â is being painted overâ. 11 It also requires the careful historicisation of both human rights and anti-apartheid itself. Accounting for shifting definitions of anti-apartheid, which reflected the peculiar concerns of specific moments in time, is therefore critical to a global history of the movement.
But we should also not lose sight of the nature of anti-apartheid as a form of individual action, an opportunity to express and perform âthe politicalâ. Many of the activists who appear in this chapter, and throughout this volume, were primarily interested in what they would define as the real, material, impact of their work in solidarity with the âstruggleâ for liberation in southern Africa. Their interests lay in performing actions with tangible impact on political institutions, with the apartheid state as the ultimate target of their efforts. The significance of global anti-apartheid also lay in the movementâs ability to connect disparate people and prompt them to enact their rejection of apartheid through everyday decisions.
Anti-Apartheid as Humanitarian Intervention?
International anti-apartheid took root in a variety of social settings and institutions. Public debate around the issue of apartheid was stimulated by journalists, academics, trade union activists and politicians. But the efforts of particular individuals, working in specific geographical and institutional contexts, were of particular importance in the development of anti-apartheid. In Britain , the Observer newspaper took a close interest in ...