Stuart Hall

I am very pleased to be here, because it is an extremely important project which is in prospect at this Symposium. There comes a moment when one has to take command of one's own history, before one forgets what it is - and somebody else tells you. This seems to be the moment as far as the Anti-Apartheid Movement is concerned. I have found the contributions this morning absolutely riveting.

I have no authority to speak to you on this subject. The truth is I was involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement from the very earliest days as a supporter. I spoke at meetings, I went to demonstrations; I had the frisson which I suppose many other people had this morning as I finally came through the doors. I know the length of the pavement outside.
I could walk it in my sleep and know where I should turn instead of going to church. I was a supporter but I was not involved organisationally. And therefore the kind of authority which others who have spoken to you today have been able to bring to this Symposium is not really my brief.

I have many personal memories of the Movement, and one or two which I will share with you now. I suppose I first became conscious of knowing something about Southern Africa from listening to some of the early Anti-Apartheid Movement meetings addressed by Trevor Huddleston and Michael Scott. I was trying to remember today when I first encountered Ethel de Keyser, but this is one of those mythic moments which it is impossible to recall. She is one of a select company of people to whom I have always found it impossible to say no. I remember especially trying to resist an invitation to speak at a Rhodesia demonstration, but she overcame all resistances. So I spoke, without any notes; towards the end of my speech I was uplifted by my own rhetoric and pointed towards Rhodesia House, whereupon the entire demonstration flooded towards it and there was a lot of broken glass. On Monday morning the Metropolitan police asked me whether I had notes of what I had said. 'I never have notes', I replied.

I remember being introduced by John Rex to Oliver Tambo, very shortly after his arrival in Britain, and I want to take this opportunity of paying the respect of a rank and file member of the AAM to Oliver's leadership and to the brilliant way in which he managed to combine inside and outside. You were always aware of how much thought he was giving to the movement of support outside, while knowing that he was in waiting, really, for the moment to go back and continue the struggle from within.

When I got married in 1964 my wife was a second year undergraduate at Sussex University and I am very proud to say that Thabo Mbeki was at our wedding party. Two of our lifelong friends were Harold and Anne-Marie Wolpe. I met Harold Wolpe very shortly after his sensational escape from prison and we used to talk long into the night about South African affairs, about the ANC, about the work which Harold was doing around education and so on, and very often, at about quarter to twelve, we would be aware that Joe Slovo had come into the house. He appeared and disappeared without anybody quite knowing how he had come. It was only some years afterwards that in replacing the telephone system the Wolpes discovered that their house was bugged from end to end. These are just some of the personal ways in which one was connected with what went on in that period.

What I have been asked to do is to try to make some kind of assessment of the influence of the Anti-Apartheid Movement on politics in Britain. What I want to focus on is the intangible relationship between a movement of this kind and the wider public, the non-organised, non-official public who were inevitably touched by it in some way. A movement of this kind obviously depends very closely on the people whom it recruits into its organisation, who become committed to it, who give it their life, their allegiance, their solidarity, their material support, their symbolic support and so on. These are people who become witnesses in their own lives to a struggle that is taking place elsewhere. But when they turn around and face that broad amorphous mass of 'the public' outside, how do they make an impact, how do they shift opinion? Opinion is a very intangible element. How is a shift of opinion brought about?

I wanted to call my talk 'Race-ing of Britain', a funny word, but what I mean by it is the becoming aware of the question of race and racialisation and of a racialised political regime by the British public. When I say 'becoming aware' this may surprise you, because you might ask how it was that Britain, a long-time imperial country, did not know about these things before. I came to this country very early in the 1950s; I was the advance party of the Afro-Caribbean alien wedge - the sharp end of Mrs Thatcher's alien wedge. And in the 1950s a very curious atmosphere prevailed. That is to say, this old country, which had been deeply meshed in imperial relations, had somehow just got accustomed to the fact that decolonisation was going to happen whether they liked it or not. And the principal response to that was to enter what one can only call the deep freeze of amnesia. It was as if they had nothing whatsoever to do with anything that had gone on before. They certainly looked at people like me as if they couldn't imagine why I had come or where I had come from, and they clearly wondered when I was going back. So as far as South Africa was concerned it was as though Britain had met South Africa at some point in the long distant past, had encountered it in passing, nodded as it passed and moved on. So why on earth should anything that was happening in South Africa be of internal interest to the British public? They couldn't conceive of racialised relations as an after-effect of that long complicit involvement which Britain had with Africa as a whole, and with Southern Africa in particular.

That is the background of emotional and knowledge deficit within which the Movement began to work. I mean that literally; I mean that knowledge about South Africa, about those historical connections, about what was going on, about what it meant, what its implications were, was extremely limited in the popular imagination. It was largely unarticulated, usually incorrect and unmobilisable. You couldn't get it moving. So I think one has to see the development of the Anti-Apartheid Movement as bringing about a transformation of popular understanding, awareness and consciousness amongst people who had no long legacy of awareness on these issues. This, of course, is not to say that there had not been an important tradition in British political history, of the sort that Shula Marks was pointing to, of a long history of anti-slavery and abolitionist movements, all the way through Indian independence, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, etc. There was a very important minority tradition. And many of the things that the Anti-Apartheid Movement began to put into effect in terms of developing a programme grew out of the experiences when these issues were fought through, particularly in the inter-war years. This is certainly the case. But if you think about the large body of the population that had somehow to be mobilised, so that political pressure could then be brought to bear on the trade union movement, on the political parties, on the government, etc. there was a blank screen. There was only a dedicated small number of people.

In that respect - this is how I remember it and it may be inaccurate - Sharpeville was the beginning of that shift of awareness, an extremely rapid learning curve, when suddenly the question of the pass laws began to take people who had never had any understanding of what was going on in South Africa into the detail of how the regime was constructed around racialised exclusion. And it was met by what I can only describe as liberal shock horror. I was then editor of New Left Review and you would think that people around New Left Review ought to have known how to respond to Sharpeville. But I remember rattling around in the editorial board asking what on earth one could say to one's readers to try to make that connection, to make the spark flow across; wondering how to engender some kind of sympathetic understanding and identification which would make political mobilisation around the issue happen.

Many people have talked about some of the characteristics of the movement which then developed around anti-apartheid issues. I want to draw attention to some points which have not been mentioned so far. I agree very much that the Anti-Apartheid Movement was an independent popular movement which was always looking for the organisational break-back of popular politics, which had then, of course, to be sustained in discussions, at conferences, in memos, in representations to the United Nations and so on, a popular movement which was looking for a break in the politics of the early Cold War. The AAM insisted that it would talk to anybody who would talk to it about the issues. It was willing to talk to anybody and everybody. Now in this sense the AAM was one of the new social movements. It was one of the new social movements that developed in the 1950s and 1960s that cut across issues of clear class and party and organisational allegiance. That is not to say that it had no relationship to class issues, nor to say that it had no relationship with the political parties and their programmes. It is not to say that it did not, of necessity, have an organisational dimension. That was absolutely essential. The information disseminated, and the interest generated popularly, would be of no effect if
it had simply remained within a self-congratulatory movement which was happy to move like the army of the good from one demonstration to another. It had to be interested in the question of what effect it was going to have on the politics of Southern Africa, even from a distance. It had that concern, it was interested in that break-back. In that sense,
it is rather different from some of the other social movements which got lost in a kind of romanticism of participatory politics, and never asked themselves questions about who drafts the demands, who drafts the resolution, who do we know who will pass us the minutes. Other movements did not ask those institutional questions. But a movement which is capable of maintaining a popular impetus while mobilising its expert knowledge is a brilliant combination, and the AAM is one of the distinctive ones of that kind.

The second point has to do with the fact that AAM's activities were located in a wider political context. One has to ask what else was going on in the late '50s, what else was happening in the '60s and '70s and '80s that facilitated and supported a movement of this kind. And clearly the AAM was part of a wider focus. Those of us who used to go to meetings in Canon Collins' room wearing the hat of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament could hardly get out of the room in time for the Defence and Aid Fund to meet. It was the same table. Half the people stayed in the room, they were members of both Executives. It was a kind of moving scenario of mobilised armies, changing hats. This was how AAM became part of a wider kind of politics.

One has also to remember that the moment of AAM's foundation was the moment of large-scale Afro-Caribbean migration to Britain. I think there are interesting and sometimes perplexing questions to be asked, something which I hope researchers will try to look into, about the importance for the Anti-Apartheid Movement of there being an embodiment of the reminder of race in their presence, actually in front of them, as Britain saw the beginnings of a society which was both multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. Undoubtedly there was an awareness among the black populations of the South African issue. And yet there was, in some ways, an inexplicable distance between these two movements. People have referred to the fact that Ethel was one of the people who wanted to make a conjunction between these two movements, and that there were people from those communities who became active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement. We were aware all the time that there was a wider general reservoir of support amongst those populations than the Anti-Apartheid Movement was able to encapsulate. This may not have been a problem of the Movement itself; it may have had something to do with the attitudes of those populations towards involvement in mainstream political organisations of any kind. Somehow there was a dislocation between where their sentiments were and where they were prepared to become organisationally committed. They were not yet organisationally committed to things which had an established basis within the United Kingdom. Anyhow there were clearly two contiguous and related, but not unified, discourses about racism in the world going on at the same time, related but slightly passing one another. I leave that just as a side thought.

What interests me is the organisational question which the Anti-Apartheid Movement set itself from the very beginning, which was how to connect with ordinary, relatively unpolitical people. How do you politicise unpolitical people? 'Unpolitical' is not a swear word; I do not mean that everyone must be political up to their gills. (Or at least I know that they are not going to be!) A large number of people have other things to do. How
do you plug your issue into their lives? That is why the range of activities which the Movement sustained over a period of time was important. Perfectly ordinary folk, with a variety of other commitments, felt that there was something that they could do; that unimportant as they were, they had a role in sustaining a struggle, the centre of which was somewhere else, that they had a pivotal role in keeping it going. This was one of the AAM's most important achievements and it was a very delicate political job. It is hard to pin down exactly how it was done.

We need a very critical assessment of which of those many initiatives helped achieve that, and just remember the range of things which were done. Practically anything - it could be a run, a concert, a mobilisation, a boycott, a vigil, a march - could be hitched to the anti-apartheid theme if you knew how to do it. That was where the imagination in the Movement came in, how to make the hitch. It was a brilliant stroke to discover that the heart of the British way of life lay in sport. This is one of those shafts of light. You look at the British population and you think 'How can I touch them, especially their masculine souls?' and you think 'It's on the cricket pitch, it's on the rugby field'. If you can only get it in there they would think it really mattered. And so from the Springbok rugby tour and the digging up of pitches, and the struggle around the Olympic Games, the politicisation of sport began; I am happy to say it has never gone away. This was represented in the press as a kind of pollution, as if sport was a kind of pure domain, which could proceed utterly devoid of any relationship to where the people came from, what the teams looked like, who couldn't play and so on, as if you could detach sport from everything else. One of the great contributions of the Anti-Apartheid Movement to the politicisation of sport was that it found a way of bringing home to people who thought sport was time out from real life, that real life was in the centre of time out.

Another brilliant shaft of a similar kind in the constitution of popular politics was the combination of sanctions and boycott. Sanctions are something which governments and institutions get together; boycotts are something done by ordinary people. But they connect - they are the same kind of idea. A campaign for sanctions is a movement which is trying to move somebody else; it is very important political work, but it does not stir the heart. But the fact that you could construct a political conversation with the green-grocer was one of the most pertinent objects of political discourse throughout this whole period. Have you ever tried to construct a political conversation with most greengrocers? It's a very difficult task. But you could say 'Are those Outspan oranges?' and stand back and watch the politics develop. 'What's wrong with the oranges?' 'I can tell you what's wrong with the oranges. Do you really want to know? I don't buy them.' These staged every day encounters, this political talk enters every day life, enters ordinary consumption and especially enters the family, what the family eats, what the family buys, and therefore especially involved women. This pervasiveness of a political issue in everyday life is one of the most enormous transformations which took place in terms of political consciousness.

I think another element that brought the issue home was the activities around Rhodesia. There was always the notion that Britain did not have direct responsibility for South Africa. The Labour Party said that it did not think that what was going on was right, but it had better positions out of power than in power, so another important political activity - almost the entire political activity in my life in the late 1960s and 1970s - was trying to hold the Labour Party in office to what it said when it was out of office. But the fact that the British government was responsible for Rhodesia was important. The Rhodesian crisis represented an attempt to generalise the apartheid crisis throughout Southern Africa. It was a bold attempt to snatch apartheid and expand it throughout the rest of Southern Africa. It was possible, therefore, to say that our government must have something to say about this issue, that it must be accountable on this issue.

The next aspect which I want say a word about occurred at a slightly later date; it is the question of armed struggle. The liberal shock horror around Sharpeville was nothing as to the liberal shock horror around the notion of an armed struggle. The language of terrorism and terrorist, of violence, was used as an abstracted principle. One could say 'Is it going to be violent, in which case we don't want anything to do with it'. Violence used in this simple reductive way was one of the ways in which what had been constructed as a very broad and consensual popular movement suddenly looked as if it was going to be divided between a much smaller group that was willing to take the next difficult step of supporting armed struggle and those who were not. The actual detail of how the problem was managed, so that the Anti-Apartheid Movement did not break apart over this issue, but managed to hold together and move itself through that argument is an extremely important strategic question. It is important to track the ways in which that was actually accomplished.

We come to my dear and close friend Mrs Thatcher. Popular politics were her forte and now we are talking about the 1980s, the time when the struggle in South Africa was sharpening, the drawing of those events to a head, at the very moment when political consciousness in Britain was swinging, or being reconstructed, to the right. It was, in my opinion, from the British point of view the most dangerous political moment, because it was the moment when Britain had a choice - of whether it held back from supporting the anti-apartheid struggle and emphasised the Buthelezi alternative or whether it stayed on board; the impact which this could have had on a wider constituency was huge. It could easily have produced in the 1980s a popular consciousness which rejected the violence of the townships - but this did not happen. One of the few areas in which a Thatcherite consensus did not displace an earlier popular politics was around the question of apartheid. That too is the achievement of a popular movement which kept its strategic and tactical sense about it. I remember the demonstration and the moment when Mrs Thatcher wanted to meet Prime Minister Botha, one of the few massive popular demonstrations of its kind. By then some of us thought we would never see another popular demonstration of any kind. But anti-apartheid had sunk itself into the liberal consciousness of the population as a whole so deeply that it could withstand the tide of Thatcherite withdrawal from political involvement on the right side.

By the end of the 1980s many of us who had been - I was going to say in politics - but I have never been in politics, I can't stand it, it's just that can't let it alone - those of us who had been jaundiced in politics up to that moment really thought we would never see Mandela again. We thought it would never happen. Politics by then had become a kind of cynical manipulation, a kind of strategic career game, played by the big players for tangible gains, compromising the souls of political figures. And the appearance of Mandela, and with him the politics of hope, is an absolutely critical moment in British politics. It could not go on for ever, but it is a kind of beacon in the rather drab days of the late 1980s and early '90s.

I want to say something very personal in closing. This is the unique history of an international solidarity movement whose uniqueness depends in part, in my view, on the fact that it was not driven by self interest. It was not a movement in which people were involved because there was an immediate pay back to them. It may have been the last moment of political altruism, but it was also one of the few successful political struggles I have ever participated in.

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