Download Dr. Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans

Race for sanctions: African Americans against
apartheid, 1946-1994.
By
Francis Njubi Nesbitt. 2004.
(The book was published by the prestigious Blacks in the Diaspora Series
edited by Darlene Clark Hine,Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
This study traces the role of African American activists in the international
anti-apartheid movement from its inception in the late 1940s to the attainment of
majority rule in South Africa in the elections 1994. It begins with the forgotten
years of the movement between 1946 and 1955 when the Council on African
Affairs organized famine relief campaigns, legal defense funds, sit-ins and
demonstrations at South African embassies and petitioned the United Nations to
impose international sanctions. In 1946 CAA members Alphaeus Hunton and
Eslanda Robeson worked with India's representative Vijaya Pandit to block South
Africa's attempt to annex South West Africa and to impose sanctions on the
regime for discriminating against people of Indian descent. In addition to the rally,
the CAA also organized a picket at the South African embassy on November 21,
1946. To the surprise of South Africa, the Council's view prevailed and the UN
rejected South Africa's attempt to annex South West Africa.
While the efforts to pass sanctions against South Africa was vetoed by the
United States and the United Kingdom, the campaign to raise the world's
awareness of the plight of nonwhites in South Africa was a resounding success. It
set in motion the sanctions movement that would eventually succeed in isolating
South Africa and expelling it from the United Nations. As more African and Asian
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countries joined the United Nations in the 1950s and 1960s, the body moved
inexorably toward sanctions. These efforts paid off on 6 November 1962 when
member states voted in the General Assembly to sever diplomatic, transportation
and economic relations with South Africa. Although this resolution was nonbinding, it was a major victory for the external anti-apartheid movement. To be
effective, however, the movement needed the support of the Security Council
where the UK and the US continued to block mandatory sanctions.
The study examines the United States government's role in suppressing
radical anti-colonial organizations and financing the establishment of cold war
alternatives like the African American Institute and the American Society of
African Culture. These organizations were ostensibly created by African-American
liberals to establish ties between African nationalists and African-Americans but
were really designed to influence African students in the United States by steering
them away from "radicals" like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. These official
and unofficial interests in Africa's minerals and anti-communism also led to the
establishment of African studies as a legitimate field of study in the United States.
The early African studies programs were funded by the CIA and Pentagon, which
encouraged scholars to produce reports about the emergence of African
nationalism. The African studies programs established had a distinctive cold war
ideology and orientation. They were the academic arm of US imperialism in Africa.
They provided the data that were used to make decisions about the importance of
the Congo and South Africa to the United States. By the 1960s, these cold war
organs were discredited and their journals considered anti-black and
neocolonialist. Both AMSAC and ANLCA folded after revelations of CIA funding.
The AAI continued to exist as a predominately white organization. These new
tensions were demonstrated in the withdrawal of African Americans and Africans
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from the African Studies Association in 1969 because of differences over
involvement in political actions like the anti-apartheid movement and the lack of
representation of people of African descent in the board of directors. These black
scholars then formed the African Heritage Studies Association with a political
action committee that included many of the veteran anti-apartheid activists who
would work behind the scenes in the formation of TransAfrica and the Free South
Africa Movement. Among the members of this committee were Hershelle
Challanor, Willard Johnson and Ronald Walters who would all become members of
the board of TransAfrica and TransAfrica Forum in the 1980s. It is this group that
brought in Randall Robinson to lead TransAfrica after the organizing conference in
1976.
The study argues that radicals played an important role in pushing the
movement to support the national liberation struggles in southern Africa. In the
1970s, radical groups espousing ideologies ranging from Black Nationalism to
Maoism to Marxist Leninism played an important role in pushing the movement to
support armed struggle. This was demonstrated in the 30,000-strong crowd that
attended the Africa Liberation Day march in Washington D.C. in 1972 and the
large crowds that returned for ALD activities throughout the 1970s. These groups
reflected a revival of pan-Africanist sentiment that created the conditions for the
emergence of an anti-apartheid culture in the United States. Like the civil rights
movement of the 1960s, the anti-apartheid movement introduced a new language
and culture with its own language, values and heroes to the United States. A
specific discourse on sanctions, divestment, divestiture, disinvestment and
krugerrands was clearly associated with the movement. Images of Nelson
Mandela, Robben Island, Soweto and Sharpeville became tools for galvanizing
outrage against the racist regime. SNCC and the Black Panthers evolved into anti-
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imperialist and Third Worldist organizations. SNCC formed an international affairs
desk under James Forman in 1966 and organized sit-ins at the South African
Embassy in Washington D.C. Forman attended the International Conference on
Apartheid, Racial Discrimination and Colonialism in Southern Africa in 1967 where
he presented SNCC's position paper on apartheid. By its demise in 1970, SNCC
had taken on a strong Pan Africanist orientation although it was split between the
"back to Africa" emigrationists and those who saw their future in the United
States. This latter group became very important in moving the anti-apartheid
movement from a pacifist orientation to unequivocal support for the armed
struggle.
It was also this upsurge in popular anti-apartheid sentiment in the African
American community that led the CBC to take up the issue of apartheid. Ron
Dellums drafted the first sanctions bill introduced in the US Congress in response
to a petition from the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Union. It is this bill that
becomes the basis for US sanctions against South Africa thirteen years later when
Congress passes the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over President Reagan's
veto. The PRWM's access to Congress demonstrates how the black freedom
movement in the United States created the conditions for the success of the antiapartheid movement. It is the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the
election of African American legislators that led to a key turning point in the U.S.
anti-apartheid movement. Before the election of African Americans to Congress,
anti-apartheid activists were outsiders with no access to the decision-making
process. It is the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969 that
made the institution of a black lobby (TransAfrica) possible in 1977. The CBC
included South Africa in its legislative agenda from the outset. The Black Caucus
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was also the source of the Comprehensive Antiapartheid Act of 1986 that
transformed U.S. policy toward South Africa.
This collaboration between congressional leaders and human rights
activists was reflected in the Free South Africa Movement, which organized the
arrests of thousands of demonstrators outside the South African Embassy in
Washington D.C. in the early 1980s. During the demonstrations numerous African
American Congressmen were arrested along with ordinary citizens and celebrities
in the sit-ins outside the South African Embassy. The study examines the complex
process through which this loose coalition of politicians, activists, scholars,
students, ministers and journalists was established to implement on of the most
remarkable examples of grass-roots human rights groups influencing the foreign
policy of a major superpower. The movement forced the pro-apartheid Reagan
administration to change its foreign policy and debunked the myth that foreign
policy is the preserve of national elites.
Prior to the emergence of the CBC, anti-apartheid organizations were
limited to disseminating information to the media and the public without having
any impact on the Congress where decisions were being made. With the election
of African-American legislators following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however,
the anti-apartheid movement acquired important allies in Congress and moved to
a different level. The CBC itself also recognized the need for a partnership
between black legislators and activists in the effort to change domestic and
foreign policies. This need stemmed from the fact that CBC initiatives like
sanctions against South Africa were not likely to be sponsored by corporations or
the traditional lobby groups that control interest group politics in Washington.
Thus the CBC was involved in the formation of advocacy organizations like
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TransAfrica and the Free South Africa Movement as an alternative source of
influence and power. This collaboration between legislators and activists was the
key to the transformation of U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa. This
partnership also points to the weaknesses of the "interest group politics" theories
of the political scientists that fail to account for the role of racism in U.S. foreign
policy. Classical political science theories consider foreign policy the preserve of a
small elite usually working in close contact with Congress and the president. The
focus is usually on the influence of "interest groups" formed by corporations and
other powerful elites who have investments abroad and, therefore, a stake in U.S.
policies. There is no place for Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics or communitybased organizations in this theory as they have no investments abroad and do not
finance elections. As we have seen, most studies of the anti-apartheid movement
fail to deal with the issue of racism in U.S. policies and the impact of black
organizations in the antiapartheid movement. The role of the CBC, TransAfrica
and FSAM in the transformation of U.S. policies toward South Africa, however, can
only be understood through an examination of the links between racism and U.S.
foreign policy and the roots of the anti-apartheid movement in the black freedom
movement of the 1940s.
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