At various points in its history, writes Roger Fieldhouse, the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) saw itself and was seen by others as a “moral crusade, a political pressure group and a `new' social movement” (464). The AAM emerged with the hardening of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and its mission ended with the emergence of a democratic South Africa in 1994. Anti-Apartheid is based on impressive research drawing on the AAM archives (now housed in the Bodleian/Rhodes House, Oxford), oral testimony from AAM activists, and African National Congress (ANC) archives. Fieldhouse was a committed AAM activist but strives to maintain critical objectivity in considering the contribution the AAM made to the ending of Apartheid. His detailed and comprehensive study considers the origins and antecedents of the movement, including the involvement of Christian Aid in South Africa from the late 1940s, relations with the ANC, the British government and labor movement, the United Nations, and the international Anti-Apartheid movement. The book concludes with an overview of the situation after Apartheid. It is, as the title flags, a study of a single issue campaigning pressure group whose consistent aims were to mobilize the British public; to compel a change in government policy; to raise awareness of the injustices of Apartheid, through education, propaganda, and information; and to support liberation movements.

As the first major study of the British AAM, this book has much to commend it. It leads us through the different stages of the movement, demonstrating how the organization's priorities shifted with the changing climate of oppression in South Africa and international developments. The early organization, growing out of the Boycott Committee founded in 1952, was shaped in the context of anticolonialism and links with anti-imperial British organizations such as the Movement for Colonial freedom. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, South Africa's exit from the Commonwealth, and the transformation of the ANC into an armed liberation movement with a leadership in exile was a seminal turning point. In the 1970s, the organization reorientated its brief to embrace the wider liberation struggles against the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia, South African oppression in South West Africa (Namibia), and the Portuguese colonial regimes.

So how successful was the AAM in achieving its aims? Numbers in the organization were never higher than 2,500 throughout most of the 1960s and remained so until the late 1980s when the township struggles and U.S.-negotiated peace settlements across Southern Africa made the region center stage. In 1989, membership reached a peak of 19,410, although this quickly began to ebb. Fieldhouse claims, however, that the AAM had much wider support than its membership would suggest. Public awareness was raised and support generated through the Anti-Apartheid News (founded in 1965), marches, festivals (the 1985 Festival for Freedom attracted up to 250,000), and the well-publicized Free Mandela Campaign. The AAM was proactive in encouraging consumer, academic, cultural, and sports boycotts against the South African regime. Yet the movement had little success in pressurizing the British government to extend economic sanctions and an arms embargo, was consistently short of funds and/or in debt, and lacked a base outside London. Supporters were largely middle-class, middle-aged, white liberals, and the organization became overcentralized with a tendency to “control freakery” (479). Relations with the ANC were ambivalent; the leadership welcomed AAM support but was privately critical at times. Equally, there was evidence of AAM resentment when the ANC assumed a dominant role (276). The AAM also had a complex and difficult relationship with the British Black community. Fieldhouse observes at the beginning of the book that the history of British imperialism in South Africa firmly placed the “racist history of South Africa” as “part of British History” (1). Yet the AAM was accused of ignoring racism in Britain.

Such criticisms highlight a key weakness of single issue campaigns—the failure to make linkages between inequalities and injustices that can only be effectively challenged by broader political movements. Fieldhouse provides a balanced analysis but, at times, needed to transcend the narrow perspective of the AAM. Additionally, the AAM needed to be contextualized within a longer history of British middle-class pressure group activity in defense of exploited colonial subjects beginning with the Anti-Slavery Movement. Such groups shared similarities in tactics, membership, and problematic relationships with more radical organizations. All employed middle-class networking, organizing, publicity skills, and influence in governmental circles to promote their cause of “conscience.” Specifically, the Friends of Africa and South African Joint Councils, formed in opposition to racial segregation in South Africa, were important pre–Second World War precedents to the AAM, with which they shared many similarities in terms of complex relations with the Left and the Africans whom they sought to help (Barbara Bush, Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919–1945 [London, Routledge, 1999]). A strong interconnection was liberal antipathy for communism. The AAM had “an almost pathological fear of the militancy and direct action advocated by the `far left'” and distanced itself from the British and South African Communist Parties in order not to deter its middle-class supporters (226). Ironically, the right of the British labor movement believed that the AAM was controlled by South African communist exiles, whereas the organization was wary of communist influence in the ANC, and the relationship between the ANC and AAM was threatened by the turn to armed liberation struggle. Connections between the Irish Republican Army and the ANC were viewed as particularly problematic.

Apartheid ended as a result of a combination of powerful forces, internal and external: the 1986 U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act that reduced imports from South Africa by 50 percent (70), the increasing economic weakness of the South African economy resulting from the costs of war with Angola and disinvestment, mounting international opinion against Apartheid, and the internal resistance of the Mass Democratic Movement and the township uprisings. As Apartheid began to fragment in the 1980s, the boycotts pioneered by the AAM began to break down. After 1990 and the release of Mandela, membership rapidly dropped off, and the AAM found itself increasingly without a role, although it was transformed into Action for South Africa (ACTSA) in 1994. The contribution of the AAM to ending Apartheid must be assessed in relation to these wider forces and the parallel activities of Anti-Apartheid movements in Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Holland, France, and Ireland. Yet, the ANC acknowledged the contribution of the AAM, and, given the historic links between Britain and South Africa, the history of the organization is worthy of record. Anti-Apartheid is thus a useful addition to an emergent literature on the international dimension to the struggle for liberation in Southern Africa.