This panel examines efforts to build global solidarity to end apartheid, colonialism and counterinsurgency in southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970s, contravening the overwhelming trend in Africa toward decolonization, apartheid in South Africa was thriving. And deeply disturbing to many, it was enabled and subsidized by the United States and the United Kingdom, among other nations. Moreover, in violation of United Nations mandates, South Africa illegally occupied neighboring Namibia. Rhodesia was another settler-colonial society in southern Africa forcibly maintaining white rule and Black subjugation. And shoring up this extraordinary landscape of injustice, was Portugal’s insistence on its right to rule over the peoples of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Portugal was the last remaining European colonial power in Africa. The United States justified its diplomatic, economic, and military support for the apartheid and colonial regimes by claiming that they acted as bulwarks against the potential spread of Soviet communism. But anticolonial leaders fought relentlessly to sideline the Cold War narrative in favor of recognizing the legitimate claims for self-determination of still-colonized peoples.
This panel examines efforts by Southern African liberation leaders and their international allies to put pressure on the US, Britain and other nations to sever ties with South Africa and Portugal and to respect the right to national sovereignty as frontline states Angola and Mozambique gained independence. How did they amplify their stories of apartheid and colonial injustice and build support? Who did they appeal to and what narratives did they mobilize? International solidarity movements are inevitably heterogeneous and risk contradiction and loss of control over their own narratives as local activists prioritize their own sense of what tactics will work in their particular contexts. On the other hand, international allies faced the challenge of balancing their fidelity to the priorities of southern African freedom fighters with the political realities of their organizing contexts. International solidarity was a theater comprised of many stages, frequent improvisation, but ultimately acts and actions intended to be faithful to the ordinary people fighting for peace and justice in southern Africa.
Please submit abstracts to Martha Biondi (m-biondi@northwestern.edu) and Elizabeth Schmidt (eschmidt@loyola.edu) by September 6.
