Above photo: An anti-Apartheid rally in New York City featuring Desmond Tutu on June 14, 1986. Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress.
The South African anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. made its most significant gains during Ronald Reagan’s second term in office.
There are lessons for the Palestine movement as Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The Biden administration’s insistence to continue arming Israel despite it carrying out what a growing consensus of scholars and human rights organizations are calling a genocide in Gaza has been one of the greatest moral failures in modern American history. While the Biden administration’s approach to the situation has been disastrous, there are legitimate fears that Donald Trump’s second term in office may prove even worse for Palestinian survival, much less liberation.
In the wake of these traumatizing times, it is worth looking back at the South African anti-apartheid movement during a similar moment in American history for some hope and guidance.
Ronald Reagan was elected to a second presidential term in 1984 by a landslide. With a platform focused on economic austerity, hawkish cold war politics, and repressive domestic policies important to the religious right, Reagan won every state but Minnesota and nearly 60% of the popular vote. Reagan’s position on South African apartheid was steeped in racism and an approach called “constructive engagement,” by which the American government worked with instead of against the apartheid regime to slowly reform its policies. As the president’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs throughout his two terms in office, Chester Crocker, put it, “all Reagan knows about Southern Africa is that he is on the side of the whites.” Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, who more often focused on the positive qualities of even his bitterest enemies, was blunter: “[Ronald Reagan] is a racist, pure and simple.”
And yet it was during Reagan’s second term in office that the anti-apartheid movement in America made its most significant gains. For more than three decades, a loose, multi-racial coalition of faith-based, labor, student, and peace organizations worked in solidarity with their South African brethren to try to help end the country’s legally sanctioned system of white supremacy. After the African National Congress in 1958 called upon the world to put economic pressure on the apartheid regime, many in this American coalition used boycotts, shareholder resolutions, direct action, divestment, and advocacy for sanctions to force US corporations to leave South Africa. By the early 1980s, the movement had successfully pushed a few religious institutions, labor unions, universities, and local and state governments to divest from some companies operating in South Africa. Kodak stopped doing business with the South African government after a years-long boycott campaign. And the United Nations had issued an arms embargo. But the United States was finding all sorts of ways around the arms embargo, and most major institutions in America were still thoroughly invested in banks and other companies that were directly or indirectly supporting the apartheid regime.
Despite Reagan’s renewed presidency, the anti-apartheid movement set its eyes during his second term on more divestment and the biggest prize of all: U.S. sanctions on South Africa. Congress passed a sanctions bill in 1985, but Reagan vetoed it. Feeling the pressure from the movement and from many in the Democratic-controlled Congress to do something, Reagan responded by issuing a set of limited sanctions by executive order. But as Tutu described them, they were “not even a flea bite” on the monstrous apartheid regime. The anti-apartheid movement pressed on, as clergy, labor leaders, students, and other activists engaged with each member of Congress, urging them to pass a more comprehensive sanctions bill. Meanwhile, thanks to equally dogged campaigns, many of the biggest institutional investors were beginning to divest. The Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Harvard University, Columbia University, TIAA-CREF, and the New York City Pension fund, among other institutions, all divested, in 1985, from at least some companies involved in South Africa. Responding to the threat of divestment, fifty multinational corporations ended their business activity in South Africa that year, including PepsiCo, General Electric, American Express, Motorola, and Boeing. When Chase Manhattan Bank, long a target of the anti-apartheid campaign, suddenly froze the apartheid regime’s line of credit and demanded it repay its outstanding loans, the South African economy began to collapse.
By September 1985, the South African government announced that it was freezing its repayment of foreign debt until the following year as a means of slowing down foreign withdrawal from the country.
Momentum was building in 1986, ahead of midterm Congressional elections, for a more comprehensive sanctions bill. Congress, again, passed sweeping sanctions against South Africa, and Reagan, again, vetoed the bill. But this time, with deeper relationships between activists and Congresspeople, and elections looming in a matter of weeks, a bipartisan Senate and House garnered the necessary supermajority to override the president’s veto. The sanctions bill, while still a compromised version of what many opponents of apartheid were calling for, significantly curtailed US trade with South Africa. Other industrialized nations had their own sanctions in place. Beset by this foreign economic pressure and increasing agitation from Black South African freedom fighters within and just outside its borders, the apartheid government could see the writing on the wall.
A little over a year after Reagan left office, amidst the one and only term of his former vice president, George H.W. Bush, South African President F.W. de Klerk announced that all political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, would be released, anti-apartheid political parties would be unbanned, and free democratic elections would soon take place.
Somehow, an international coalition of activists, working in solidarity with the African National Congress, managed to help end apartheid, despite the best efforts of one of its most powerful foreign enablers to stop them.
For those of us engaged in solidarity with Palestinian struggles for liberation and return, or in any movement for peace and justice, we should take note that an all-powerful conservative president is not all that powerful after all. We must press on, waging struggles with the power that we have, as workers, consumers, members of institutions with sizable investments, and as voting citizens, who can remove a person from office as quickly as we can put them in if they do not earn our votes.
Indeed, drawing explicitly upon the South African example, Palestinian civil society is still calling upon us to use this power to employ boycotts, divestment, and sanctions until Palestinians have a full slate of human rights. In the shadow of tens of thousands of dead Palestinians and millions struggling to live on, the urgency to force the American and Israeli governments, and the businesses that support them, to end this bloodshed couldn’t be greater. And while the context is different, and the struggle may be more difficult, one of the lessons that the South African anti-apartheid movement gives us is that we can do this, regardless of who might be in the White House.