Sunday Times E-Edition

LAST OF A CRUSADING QUARTET

Bob Hughes and his fellow activists Mike Terry, Ethel de Keyser and Trevor Huddleston were the leading lights of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, writes Chris Barron

Lord Bob Hughes, who has died at the age of 90, was chair of the British AntiApartheid Movement (AAM) for 20 years during which it played an indispensable role in turning world opinion against the apartheid government. As a Labour MP from 1970 to 1997 he used all his clout and down-to-earth powers of persuasion to lobby, bully and cajole relentlessly colleagues on both sides of the House of Commons to support the struggle for liberation in deed as well as word.

Hughes, his executive secretary Mike Terry, Terry’s predecessor Ethel de Keyser and the AAM president Archbishop Trevor Huddleston were a formidable combination who turned the movement from a small, fringe organisation into the most effective and influential anti-apartheid group in the world.

It brought the issue of apartheid to the fore in the UK at a time when there was little if any awareness, let alone understanding or concern, about it. It spearheaded the campaign for sanctions and the total isolation of SA, and made Nelson Mandela a global icon.

The leadership of the AAM all had strong South African and Southern African connections.

Huddleston’s searing indictment of the apartheid regime, Naught For Your Comfort, was based on his experiences as a parish priest in Sophiatown in the 1950s.

Terry, who died in 2008 at the age of 61, had his eyes opened to the inhumanity of racism while teaching at a mission school in what was then Southern Rhodesia, where a white truck driver who gave the young hitchhiker a lift screamed at him: “It’s bastards like you that will hand us over to the munts [a pejorative term for blacks].”

Born and educated in SA, De Keyser became executive secretary of the AAM in 1967 after she was detained and expelled from SA while attending the trial of her brother Jack, who was jailed for 12 years for his anti-apartheid work.

She was a formidable fundraiser and key organiser of the Stop the Seventy Tour campaign, which targeted a Springbok rugby tour of the UK and raised the profile of the hitherto almost invisible AAM, giving it a militant edge.

She left the AAM to become director of the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, but remained on the executive committee until 1986.

She was awarded an OBE for her services to human rights in 2001, and the same year was invited to Windsor Castle to dine with Queen Elizabeth when the then president, Thabo Mbeki, was on a state visit.

An impossible woman to say “no” to, De Keyser continued barking orders and “requests” even after being immobilised by a stroke a week before she died aged 77 in 2004. Her final instruction was to a colleague to meet Kader Asmal, a founder of the AAM who later held two cabinet posts, for lunch.

Hughes, who was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on January 3 1932, went with his parents to live in Benoni on the East Rand soon after World War 2. He completed his schooling there and did an engineering apprenticeship in Howick, near Pietermaritzburg, before returning to the UK in 1954, leaving his parents in SA.

Filled with a burning hatred for racism and colonialism, in 1956 he joined the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which had been founded in the UK two years earlier. It was renamed Liberation in 1970 with him as joint chair.

In 1960 he joined the AAM, which had been started the year before by South African exiles as The Boycott Movement. It became the AAM after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

For most of the ’60s and ’70s SA was pretty much a non-issue in British and world politics. It took years of slog to get it on the agenda of even the average Labour Party MP, let alone anyone else, Hughes remembered.

“There is a kind of mythology grown up that there were always millions of people in the world who were against apartheid. It isn’t true. If we had had as many members as people who claimed to have been members of the AAM, the South African government would have been brought down 20 years before.” It was only in the late ’70s and the ’80s that the AAM was able to bring thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands, onto the streets to demonstrate against apartheid and demand sanctions and the release of political prisoners.

For many years the AAM consisted of a small team “working their socks off”, as Hughes put it, often until 5am, in cramped rooms above a Spanish food importer in a district of central London known as Fitzrovia. They worked the phones, typed letters, set up networks of activists and organised poorly attended protests and demonstrations that received little media attention.

It was terribly dispiriting. In spite of its promises, expectations that the Labour Party would throw its weight behind the AAM when it came to power in 1974, and particularly its campaign for sanctions, came to very little.

Tensions between the AAM and the Labour government over the issue of sanctions continued through to 1979 when it lost power to Margaret Thatcher, who was at least open in her opposition to sanctions.

SA was an important customer for the UK. The policy of divesting and not buying South African goods was a hard one to sell, to the Left or the Right.

Even the Trotskyists didn’t want anything to do with it initially, arguing that change would only come with the growth of an industrial society. They believed investment was necessary to bring about change.

There were tensions with the unions. When Hughes got a motion through the Aberdeen town council in the ’60s blocking the purchase of South African goods, SA threatened to cancel a contract for six trawlers unless the motion was withdrawn. Local shipyard workers vowed to build the ships; when Hughes spoke to them they said they understood the politics but were not prepared to risk their livelihoods.

After he became an MP and tried to introduce a similar motion in parliament he went to a meeting of his engineering union at an aero-parts factory. The chair complained angrily about “some silly bugger in parliament trying to stop us selling aeroplane parts to SA”, then realised it was Hughes.

Even when some unions began divesting their pension funds from SA there were no strikes, no refusing to work on South African contracts or to block ships setting sail with goods for SA.

Tensions eased somewhat when the AAM set up a trade union committee in which a key player was South African communist Fred Carneson, who’d arrived in England after being a political prisoner in SA for five years.

“The idea that there was a uniform belief from the beginning that the boycott of South African goods should become a campaign for disinvestment isn’t true,” said Hughes. “These were long drawn-out battles and very fierce arguments.”

Their drive to cultivate a mass base among politicians, students, unions and religious groups ran into trouble when different groups tried to push through resolutions for direct action in pursuit of their own agendas.

This threatened the AAM’s attempts to win over the average member of the public and almost destroyed it. The fight wasn’t about SA any more, it was an internal ideological battle between those who believed in Trotskyism and those who believed in communism.

The AAM’s priority was to generate maximum possible support for action against the South African government. This meant standing firm against dogmatism, which Hughes and Terry realised would tear the movement apart.

Although most members were historically supporters of the Labour Party, Hughes made it clear that ideology was irrelevant to the struggle against apartheid.

The movement didn’t care if support came from communists, Tories, liberals or Trotskyists as long as they didn’t bring their competing ideologies.

“We set out to engage the broadest possible political spectrum at a time when it was not

There is a kind of mythology grown up that there were always millions of people in the world who were against apartheid. It isn’t true

respectable to be interested in what was happening outside the UK.”

Until the late ’70s the prevailing view was that what happened 9,000km away had nothing to do with the average British member of the public.

Hughes and Terry realised that with the AAM pushed to the periphery of British politics, what it needed was a symbolic figure who would capture hearts and minds. Together with the ANC they decided that Mandela, largely unknown at the time, had to be that figure.

On Mandela’s 60th birthday, July 18 1978, a group of Labour MPs at the House of Commons cut a cake with 60 candles. It was the spark that made Mandela and the freedom struggle inseparable.

Tragically, it was too late for activist Solomon Mahlangu, who had been sentenced to death in March 1978.

A year-long campaign to get media coverage and persuade governments around the world as well as the Labour government at home to intervene, got little traction and Mahlangu was hanged in April 1979.

Days before the execution the AAM managed with the belated help of some Western governments to get a UN Security Council resolution calling on Pretoria not to execute him, but by then it was too late. While holding an all-night vigil outside SA House in Trafalgar Square, AAM activists heard he’d been executed in the early hours.

Many were alienated by the AAM’s open support for the ANC. It aroused the hostility of the Pan African Congress, which derided the movement as a “child of the ANC”.

Hughes denied it, saying the AAM had refused a request by the ANC to be dubbed the sole liberation movement in SA. Large sections of the public and media accused the movement of aiding and abetting what Thatcher described as a terrorist organisation.

But the strategy of personalising the anti-apartheid campaign around Mandela, the intense public awareness campaigns — which saved seven activists in SA from the gallows — and the actions of the South African government itself (“the best propagandist ally we had”, in Hughes’s words), began swelling the tide of public opinion against apartheid.

When rebellion swept through the townships in 1985 and Pretoria imposed a state of emergency, support for sanctions burgeoned. Where previously AAM marches had drawn hundreds of participants at most, now they began attracting 150,000 demonstrators and more.

Barclays Bank pulled out of SA when students throughout the UK, whose support the AAM had been cultivating for years, closed their accounts.

Between 1986 and 1988 at least 55 British companies sold off their subsidiaries in SA, and the number of British companies investing fell by 20%.

Hughes, an engaging, down-to-earth, undogmatic man who interacted well with people across the political spectrum, had good relations with Thatcher’s foreign minister, Lynda Chalker, and persuaded her to meet OR Tambo in 1986 in spite of the Tory government’s refusal to meet with ANC leaders unless they renounced violence.

Her meeting with Tambo was seen as a turning point in British government policy toward the ANC, and was a major success for the AAM.

But the real game-changer was the Free Nelson Mandela concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988 organised by the AAM to mark his 70th birthday, attended by 100,000 people and watched by a global audience of more than 600-million.

The next day Archbishop Desmond Tutu, introduced by Hughes, a close friend, addressed a gathering of more than 250,000 people in Hyde Park, London, calling on the South African government to release Mandela.

As a result of the AAM’s Free Mandela campaign its membership grew from 8,500 in 1986 to 19,410 in March 1989. Even Thatcher felt sufficiently pressured by the huge support for the campaign to assure Huddleston that “we raise his [Mandela’s] case regularly with the South African government”.

Hughes believed the Free Nelson Mandela concert and the refusal in 1985 of the then Chase Manhattan Bank to roll over its loans to SA, a step followed by other US banks, were the biggest nails in apartheid’s coffin.

But what really brought about the end of apartheid, he said, was not anti-apartheid movements in Britain or elsewhere.

“It was the South African people themselves. It was their resistance that eventually broke the system.”

Insight

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2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

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