Laurie Flynn

Until recently some British people were getting brown envelopes from Harrods. If you could do a few favours from your position in Parliament you got cash inside. Just recently some brown envelopes have been finding their way to my house in North London.They fill me with great excitement every time they come because they are full of something much more interesting than money. They are full of information.

They come from a remarkable woman who was the secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the early 1960s called Dorothy Robinson. She sent me an envelope with
a picture in it of the police attacking people at Cato Manor in 1959, an event that was
a precursor of the Sharpeville tragedy. It's a powerful and shocking picture and AAM wanted to use it widely to show people what was going on in South Africa. As interesting as the picture itself was the correspondence enclosed with it. This clearly showed that Argus Press in South Africa and their agents in Britain, the Associated Press, went to considerable lengths to keep it from public view.

Besides looking for still photographs, it was also my job in preparation for this Symposium to see what library film we could find relating to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. It was interesting to see how little there was and to speculate why coverage of such an influential social movement was so sparse in Britain.

We found some fascinating material of course, not least the interviews with Albert Lutuli, Tennyson Makiwane and others in an early Panorama programme. In this too there was a truly remarkable shot of the Treason Trialists assembled in a car park which I had never seen before.

There was also some splendid film from Granada and from Central TV who put together a particularly interesting programme called The British Desk. This focussed on BOSS's spying activities in Britain and their agents' work to undermine AAM.

With just a few days research and working with what library film we could get in a hurry from the BBC and ITN we put together a 75-minute assembly on the history of the AAM. And in the wake of the Symposium it is our intention to do a much more exhaustive search for film and video relating to the struggle against apartheid waged by the AAM.

If you know of any important leads, particularly concerning the early days of, say, 1959-1975 please contact me on 0171 713 4495 or fax 0171 713 4475 or e mail laurie.flynn@guardian.co.uk

And if you would like a copy of the video (for private viewing only) we can let you have it at cost price of £5 plus postage.

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