Draft conference presentation
African Liberation and Progressive Internationalism in American Life: An Untold History
William Minter
( Editor, AfricaFocus Bulletin, Washington, DC , E-mail: )
Panel Presentation for the conference on the Role of the International Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa's Freedom Struggle, University of KwaZulu-Natal, October 10-13, 2004
In May 1990, when Ebony magazine asked Nelson Mandela about how the struggle of American Blacks had influenced the South African struggle, Mandela replied, "You are correct, there are many similarities between us. We have learned a great deal from each other" (cited in Nixon 1994, 189). While the reporters' question implied one-way influence, Mandela's tactful correction stressed that the learning process was reciprocal.
There is only fragmentary evidence on how the Defiance Campaign in 1952-53 may have influenced U.S. civil rights leaders, including the young Martin Luther King, Jr. And few are aware of how the conclusion of King's famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington ("Free at Last, Free at Last") echoed Kwame Nkrumah's words at the independence of Ghana in 1957, to which King was invited at the suggestion of African-American activist Bill Sutherland (Sutherland and Meyer 2000, 34). The common story-line does not feature African influence on Americans, just as it puts aside King's opposition to the Vietnam war and his broader internationalist perspective. More generally, the strands of American internationalism that have identified not with American preeminence but with global resistance are simply left out of the conventional vision of history. In this context, even in focusing on the "international anti-apartheid movement," the tendency is to ask only about what the international movement may have contributed to South Africa, rather than to explore a more complex pattern of interaction of progressive forces.
In my view, it is impossible to understand what the international anti-apartheid movement may have contributed without also asking how struggles for African freedom have both stimulated the solidarity that was evoked and themselves influenced progressive currents in other countries. This is particularly apparent in the case of the United States. In the 1950s the independence of Ghana had a profound, albeit hard to isolate, effect on the U.S. civil rights movement. This period is beginning to be explored by scholars such as Plummer (1996), Von Eschen (1997), Borstelmann (2001), and Meriwether (2002). But the impact on movements in the U.S. of Tanzania and the liberation struggles against Portuguese colonialism in the late 1960s and 1970s, and of the South African struggle in the 1960s and 1970s as well as at its high point of visibility in the 1980s, are topics that have hardly been touched on by researchers, much less explored in depth.
From the 1980s through the current period, as right-wing forces have consolidated hegemony over the national agenda, victories for progressive forces in the U.S., such as winning sanctions against apartheid in the mid-1980s, have been few. This has reinforced the tendency to forget or oversimplify the earlier history. This should not be allowed to happen. At present, however, the historical record is slipping further away as activists die or forget the details of campaigns. Most records of smaller organizations and individual activists, if they are preserved at all, are consigned to moldy basements rather than to archives where they can later be found by scholars.
Since so high a portion of solidarity with African liberation in the United States was dispersed in local and often short-lived organizations or in ad-hoc networks, rather than in centralized groups, even the first steps of preserving or recovering the history are significantly more difficult than in most other Western countries.
With a group of colleagues, I am currently engaged in a research project with the working title "No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000. " We are ourselves activists (as well as writers and researchers) who have been participants in various aspects of this history over several decades. We began working on this project in 2003, motivated in large part by our discontent with the fact that so far accounts of the period we knew - beginning in the 1960s - have relied largely on the images portrayed by media accounts. Entire chunks of history that we knew to be important, and particularly those behind-the-scene activists and local organizations that never gained media prominence, seemed to be entirely invisible even to the few scholars who have begun to chronicle the history.
To cite only one glaring example, both the 896-page Loosing the Bonds (Massie 1997) and the recent Race to Sanctions (Nesbitt, 2004) spend a few pages on the year-long demonstrations at the South African embassy in 1984-1985, noting the media impact of the events and the prominent figures arrested there. But neither study even mentions the local activists of the Southern Africa Support Project (SASP), the core of the organizing work for the daily demonstrations, who had been working for years to educate the local community in Washington, DC about apartheid. It is not that the public picture, as presented in the New York Times and reflected in books such as these, is not real. But it is distorted by the absence of the far larger number of gaps.
Even the term "anti-apartheid" itself significantly truncates movement history for many of us who have been involved in solidarity with African liberation struggles over decades. Granted, it was in part the uniquely extreme racism of the apartheid state that made possible such a broad public coalition to oppose it. But the term also reinforces the tendency to minimize or even to ignore entirely the fact that the "anti-apartheid" struggle was part of a wider history of African liberation and worldwide anti-colonial resistance. For those of us whose involvement began with the struggles against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, or for those who focused on solidarity with Zimbabwe or Namibia, to trace the history of the U.S. "anti-apartheid" movement alone separates it from the integral connections it had with wider Pan African and global movements, as well as with struggles within the United States.
Researching and writing such a broader history is not a project for an individual or for a small group. There are far too many pieces missing. But such a broader perspective, with awareness of the many gaps, is indispensable if historians and activists are not to reinforce the silences of the conventional wisdom. In the U.S., as elsewhere, to understand the "anti-apartheid" movement it is essential to put it within the framework of progressive struggles for liberation on all fronts, in particular struggles against racism and colonialism.
In fact, there is a rich history intermingling currents of cultural and political resistance across the Atlantic, that dates back over centuries to the earliest years of the slave trade. The last half of the twentieth century, however, stands out as a distinct period. It is marked both by the uneven march of African states to majority rule and by the incomplete legal and political victories of the civil rights movement in the U.S. Over five decades, victories were most often tied to a rising sense of common struggle, while defeats in turn paralleled a retreat into isolation and fragmentation.
Our approach has been to begin this process with interviews with activists representing a variety of currents of solidarity, with the eventual goal of a short book with essays covering each of the five decades of the second half of the twentieth century. Writing the fuller history that needs to be written requires resources not available to us; in any case it would be premature. What we hope to do, starting with the initial on-line publication of selected interviews and essays in 2005, is to call attention to the gaps. We hope to convince other researchers to search beyond the sources most easily available, that is, those found in media accounts and the archives of the most prominent organizations and individuals. In short, we hope to provide "teasers" to convince a new generation of researchers that the work done to date has barely scratched the surface.
While this presentation is not a report of finished research, let me give a few examples to illustrate the questions we are trying to open up. We are now working on a first set of interviews, completing and checking transcripts, and writing short introductions and endnotes to provide necessary historical context. The first eight include Bill Sutherland and E. S. Reddy, representing the generation whose involvement with these issues preceded the 1960s; Ben Magubane, Mary Jane Patterson, Bob Van Lierop, and Prexy Nesbitt, whose major involvements begin in the 1960s; and Sylvia Hill and Frank Beeman, for whom significant involvement with African liberation dates to the early 1970s.
Though far from comprehensive, this set of eight individuals already brings in a wide range of the networks and currents involved in U.S. activists' connections with African liberation, with pointers towards archives, where available, and indications of historical currents that remain to be explored. Five are African-American, one South African, one Indian, and one white American; six men, two women. None appear prominently in published accounts of "anti-apartheid" activity in the United States, but all played significant roles over multiple decades in making links between African liberation and diverse constituencies in the United States.
It is not the goal of our project to substitute these names - or a larger list of interviewees that are projected or at earlier stages of processing - for other names that are currently more prominent in conventional accounts. It is rather to suggest that the fragmented and complex history reaches out far beyond a small set of "national" organizations, whatever their perceived racial or ideological complexions, to local and international networks, for which divisions into black/white or radical/liberal dichotomies are even less credible representations of the historical record. The successive stages of African liberation, from the first wave of independence in the 1950s and early 1960s through the armed struggles against Portuguese colonialism to the victory against apartheid in the 1990s, have each reverberated through multiple links across the Atlantic.
Take just one set of threads, traced back from the Free South Africa Movement demonstrations at the South African embassy in 1984-85. The local SASP group, Sylvia Hill recalls, was a direct outgrowth of their involvement in the Sixth Pan African Congress (SixPAC) in Dar es Salaam in 1974, for which she organized the logistics of participants from the United States. And that involvement in turn can be traced to the collaboration of the Tanzanian Embassy in Washington with the Drum and Spear Bookstore and the Center for Black Education, founded by veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1968.
The organizational outcomes of the Sixth Pan-African Congress were not readily visible. Many participants dismissed it as a failure. Similarly, the wider currents of identification with Africa that grew among African-American activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s broke apart on the shoals of internal division and government repression in less than a decade. The African Liberation Support Committees, which brought out tens of thousands to demonstrations on African Liberation Day in 1972, had largely disappeared by the upsurge of student anti-apartheid activity after the 1976 Soweto uprising. By the time of the Free South Africa Movement in the mid-1980s, few other than direct participants remembered the events and organizations of a decade before. The rise and fall of the ALSC, in part related to divisions over revelation of the alliance of Jonas Savimbi's UNITA with South Africa and the CIA in the 1975-76 war in Angola, but also touching on almost all the dysfunctions of the U.S. left, is one of the complex stories that has not yet found a historian.
Nevertheless, as illustrated by SASP, such connections - personal even when there was no organizational continuity - were in the background as the South African struggle gained greater visibility. The precise links remain to be traced, and undoubtedly differ from place to place. Local efforts were never consolidated in one or even a small number of central organizations. Thus no one can yet show how the upsurges of student protests in the late 1970s and then of state and local divestment campaigns in the 1980s built on such prior links. But almost everyone who was involved can testify that it was such interlocking networks that made the movement pervasive once the images of South African struggle finally reached critical mass on the TV screens.
The Tanzanian connection also branches into a Mozambican connection. At SixPAC, coming after the coup in Portugal but before the agreement on Mozambican independence, the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) made a significant impression on the American delegation. Bob Van Lierop's film A Luta Continua, based on his trip to the liberated areas in Mozambique in 1971, had been distributed widely by liberation support networks in the U.S., including not only the African Liberation Support Committees and their affiliates, but also interracial groups such as the Southern Africa Committee in New York, the Liberation Support Movement on the west coast, the Chicago Committee for the Liberation of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau in Chicago, and the Madison Area Committee on Africa in Madison, Wisconsin, to name only a few. The film, Bob recalls, was also smuggled into Portugal and into South Africa as well, one of the avenues by which the Portuguese-language slogan became common currency beyond Mozambique's borders.
Samora Machel had not yet visited the United States, as had Amilcar Cabral, his colleague in struggle against Portuguese colonialism on the other side of the continent. But FRELIMO representative in New York Shafrudin Khan was among the earliest and most energetic of liberation movement spokespeople who mobilized support regardless of the ideological and racial divisions among those willing to support African liberation. In the U.S., as in South Africa, the victory over Portuguese colonialism in 1974-75 was seen as a sign of wider hope among a wide spectrum of those who identified with Africa..
Even in the 1960s, it is important to stress, there was a strong consensus among activists on the twin themes of direct support for liberation movements and targeting U.S. companies for their support of apartheid. The American Committee on Africa, formed in 1953, had fully endorsed African demands for a boycott against South Africa, and pioneered in exposing U.S. corporate ties. Moreover, despite the pacifist roots of some of the ACOA leaders, the ACOA consistently supported the African liberation movements as they turned from non-violent protest to armed struggle in the 1960s. Even in the 1950s, it had established close ties with the FLN in Algeria.
This consensus, common ground from Black and white activists within the churches to groups associated with the old and new left or different variants of Pan Africanism, even extended into the U.S. Congress, where the movement's most consistent ally, Representative Charles Diggs of Detroit, took over in 1969 as chair of the House Africa Affairs Subcommittee. Building such a consensus, it is clear from our experience and our interviews, depended on a host of personal connections that reached out into different sectors of American life.
One much underestimated influence is of informal as well as formal representatives of African liberation. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria before the 1950s, to Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique in the 1950s and early 1960s, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela of South Africa in the 1960s, were only a few of those whose personal impact established the credibility of the African liberation cause. The first anti-apartheid demonstrations in Los Angeles, Ben Magubane notes, were initiated by a group he and fellow South African Martin Legassick set up. And a January 1969 gathering in Raleigh, North Carolina - the Kennedy-King Memorial Forum of the Chief Albert Luthuli Memorial Fund - was organized by ANC supporter Rev. Gladstone Ntlabati, then working out of Atlanta, and included, among others on the program, Magubane's UCLA colleagues Martin Legassick and Anthony Ngubo, Rev. Chris Nteta and Rev. Ken Carstens from Boston, two South Africans who were stalwarts of the anti-apartheid cause in New England over the years, as well as musician Jonas Gwangwa and Pan Africanist Congress supporter Peter Molotsi (see program for the event in Southern Africa, December, 1968).
This listing of names from Africa in the "American" movement is hardly a beginning - I have not even mentioned Dennis Brutus, whose tireless activism extended far beyond his initial concentration on the sports boycott, or Wandile Kuse and Dan and Selina Kunene, who were key figures in the Madison Area Committee on Southern Africa. In the 1980s, the "American" Committee on Africa was headed by South African exile Jennifer Davis, and the key organizer for its state and local divestment campaign was Dumisani Kumalo, now the South African ambassador to the United Nations.