Struggles on the Page: British Antiapartheid and Radical Scholarship

This article combines an overview of the historiography of antiapartheid movements with a case study of radical scholarship on South Africa in the 1960s. It highlights the ways that antiapartheid activism effectively framed public understanding of the idea of apartheid and its application in South Africa. Using the British African solidarity movement as an example, it addresses the mutually constitutive relationship between the antiapartheid movement and radical analyses of South African politics and society. From the emergence of international responses to apartheid that began in the 1950s, activist research was at the leading edge of organized opposition to South African government policies and a transnational influence on radical politics in Britain.