The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid

As Nelson Mandela approaches his 95th year, eyes turn expectantly to Johannesburg, any thought of the loss of his unrivalled global presence unsettling for those on all continents. His ageing calls forth the legendary history of the anti-apartheid struggle anew, even as archival openings and unuttered testimonies await their historians. Rob Skinner's study of some of the transnational dimensions of this movement in its formation, that ends two years after Mandela's imprisonment, is a timely and erudite contribution to a burgeoning historiography. The book is especially useful for modern British historians, adding to contributions from those of Paul Rich to Stuart Hall, on the political and organizational lives of British-based left liberals, socialists, and fellow travellers—religious and secular activists alike—who took up the South African question, in many cases long before the promulgation of the apartheid system by the National Party in 1948. First and foremost, the book serves as a scholarly lexicon of persons, causes, and associations that came to constitute the vital external support system for opposition to apartheid in the English-speaking West. Skinner also importantly pursues the British interface with the US movement that grew to occupy a most critical role in the final stages of the regime's demise in the late 1980s and early 1990s, under acute economic and political pressure and assisted immeasurably by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Skinner's treatment of the communist presence in South Africa and abroad remains his weakest suit, but he brings much else to the reader that is vital, by concentrating as his title avers, on the liberal humanitarian bulge in the Anglo-American movement abroad, before 1965

Communism · Demise · Economic history · Elite · Historiography · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · South African History and Culture · History · Law