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This conclusion begins with a vignette of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. It then explores some aspects of the anti-apartheid movement that crested during the late 1980s, lingering on campaigns in Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States. The road between the postapartheid and postcolonial moments, however, was neither straight nor straightforward. The conclusion explicates some of the differences between the apartheid question in the 1980s and 1960s, and then reviews Gordian Knot’s central findings and restates its main arguments.

In chapter 5, the gradual stifling of Eoan’s opera productions in the 1970s is illustrated. After being moved out to Athlone on the Cape Flats, the group was effectively exiled from the central position it used to occupy with regard to cultural activities (such as opera and ballet) in the city of Cape Town. At the same time, the detrimental effects of their political compromise on the support they used to enjoy within the colored community took on serious proportions. The underlying theme of this chapter is the increasing isolation (artistic and otherwise) the group experienced and the ebbing away of willpower and creative energy resulting in the cessation of operatic activities.

This chapter explores the evangelical contribution to the debate over U.S. relations with the apartheid government of South Africa and the global anti-apartheid movement. It talks about some members of the Southern Baptist Convention that joined progressive religious groups in order to protest U.S. involvement with the regime. It also describes why many evangelicals urged the Reagan administration to refrain from imposing sanctions on South Africa or pursuing disinvestment strategies. The chapter analyzes the evangelical groups' claims that the policies would have dire effects on the fragile human rights situation in South Africa and expressed concern about the potential for a communist takeover. It discusses the evangelical antisanctions rhetoric that employed a paradoxical blend of human rights language, religious beliefs, and anticommunism.

Focusing on West’s meetings with South African activist leaders, this chapter explores the timing of truth-telling public intervention and intercultural and interreligious collaboration in order to build antiviolence solidarity. The South African context is introduced by highlighting connections between gender justice and antiracist organizing in their anti-apartheid struggle and their post-apartheid constitutional clauses on gender and sexual orientation equality. Discussions with Muslim and Christian leaders feature communal responses to sexual assault. In Pietermaritzburg, South African public discourse on racism, religion, and sexual assault such as Jacob Zuma’s trial for rape invite relevant comparisons to public debates about United States leaders such as Donald Trump. In Cape Town, discussions of South African Black and Coloured intracommunal racial politics and antiviolence collaboration instigate reflections on collaboration among U.S. activists of color.

This chapter focuses on the role that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has played in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa since the 1960s. The pivotal role of the CBC in passing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986 in particular places the discussion in this chapter into context. Previous studies tend to view the activism of the CBC on this issue as a function of its deep commitments to striking down the last vestiges of settler colonialism in Africa and to forging ties with the ancestral homeland. The chapter shows that affective ties to black South Africans living under apartheid were an important force motivating the CBC during its long campaign to pass a sanctions bill, and also that strategic calculations about what was expedient on the home front played an even larger role in pushing the CBC to initiate sanctions legislation.

Chapter 1 explores the role of ‘memory entrepreneurs’ in revising historical content. It asks, “If history is written by the victors, then who revises it?” I answer this question by identifying the key actors involved in positioning museums as sites of revision, paying attention to how their institutional locations and interests help explain the cultural politics of revision. I discuss revision in terms of historical content as a gateway to a deeper consideration of revision as a source of renewing social consensus and reshaping public (historical) space. This chapter links the cultural work of museums dedicated to preserving histories of violence to longstanding criticisms of mainstream history and museum culture. The chapter compares the development of a family of black history museums operating in opposition to whitewashing of US history to the overhaul of national museums after the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

In Chapter 2, I examine how violent histories are recounted through the lens of group identity formation in exhibitions. I discuss how relying on the conventions of collective storytelling—the rules and norms around both plot and structure—blunts the sharp edges of history. This chapter analyzes the visual and discursive turns used to construct a metanarrative of group identity forged through collective trauma. In South Africa, this collective experience is articulated as a national one, whereas in the United States interrogation of the society’s racist past is the purview of so-called ethnic or black museums.

Chapter 3 treats the museum not only as a site of memory, but also as a site of employment. It considers how the collective representations require management over time, focusing on some of the banal or profane dimensions of memory work: the budgets, the political wrangling, staff composition and training, and construction costs and woes. Museum curators and directors must contend with a cluster of political-economic and institutional factors that deeply determine their capacity to represent the past. I found that all the museums I studied faced related concerns about funding, attendance, membership development, and exhibition design.

Chapter 4 asks, “What can deviant forms of remembering tell us about the normative project of collective remembrance?” This chapter draws on newspaper articles, blogs, and interviews to explore the world of “memory deviants” who refuse to engage in ‘socially responsible” forms of remembering and the identity constructions implicit in them. This chapter investigates the limits of constructing a consensus-driven collective memory through the lens of dissenting voices, particularly those of the people meant to identify with revised collective narratives.

Finally, in the conclusion, I revisit the puzzle of collective memory and the politics of representation or the “museumification of memory.” This chapter argues that memory and identity become artifacts in the interest of reconstituting the collective in the aftermath of prolonged and intense conflict. It also questions the motivations for and implications of the construction and production of consensus-driven narratives as the basis of collective memory. Ultimately, this chapter considers the extent to which museum practices can transcend the familiar visual and discursive language of racial and national identities that is itself rooted in histories of oppression and exclusion.

This chapter covers the activities of three youth-based activist movements: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), and the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM). It examines their experiment with creative organizing strategies in three parts. The first part focuses on the SNCC's organizing efforts after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its efforts to implement new strategies aimed at helping the organization adjust to a different political context in the second half of the 1960s. The second part turns to the SOBU who used framing and appropriation to marry African American students to black working-class politics and Pan-African movements. The last part deals with the FSAM and how the anti-apartheid campaign heightened the political consciousness of the youth about racial justice and transnational politics.

Communists and members of the New Left were involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement [AAM] from its origins in the Boycott Committee in the late 1950s. In its early days, the AAM welcomed support from individual communists, but was reluctant to be seen to be too close to the Communist Party. Nevertheless, members of the Communist Party of Great Britain [CPGB] played a significant role at all levels of the movement throughout its history. Fundamental to this was the relationship between the CPGB and the South African Communist Party [SACP] whose cadre played a central role in the exiled structures of the African National Congress [ANC]. In contrast to the CPGB, other left tendencies had more complicated relationships with the AAM’s leadership. This chapter examines the relationship of different far Left tendencies to the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1970s and 1980s.

This chapter, along with chapters six and seven, explores the emergence and consolidation of co-ordinated international opposition to apartheid and minority rule in southern Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. It begins by describing an important shift in Irish rhetoric: from the anti-British, pro-Boer nationalism of the early twentieth century to the anti-colonial, pro-African discourse employed at the UN and beyond. In diplomatic terms that approach was an obvious extension of ‘fire brigade’ support for decolonisation. Yet the emergence of a strong anti-apartheid movement across northern Europe and North America in the 1960s changed the playing field completely. The second half of this chapter paints an image of that emerging coalition, viewing the creation of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1964 as part of an international campaign to match local reaction with transnational action.

This chapter tackles two of the themes that are at the heart of this book. First, it argues that the radicalisation of Afro-Asian demands at the UN – most visibly in the response to minority rule in Rhodesia, Portuguese Africa, South Africa, and South West Africa – not only distanced the ‘fire brigade’ states further from the anti-colonial cause, it forced them to seek out new policy avenues, and new ways of expressing their identities in a changing international system. Second, this chapter shows how the growing strength of the international anti-apartheid movement, combined with the rise of the counter-culture and the tensions that spread throughout Europe and North America in the late 1960s, drew individuals, politicians, and local pressure groups into global conversations and measures for a global reaction. The result, described here in the response to the 1970 South African rugby tour of Britain and Ireland, was a further shift in the location of political and popular action.

This chapter extends the key themes of chapter six – the ‘fire brigade’ response to Afro-Asian radicalism, and the growing influence of the international anti-apartheid movement – into a new decade. It shows that the principles that allowed the ‘fire brigade’ to gain prominence in earlier years were re-shaped to fit a changing international context in the 1970s. In the Irish and Danish cases that meant using their progressive approach on issues such as apartheid and minority rule to shape new identities for themselves as members of the European Community (EC) from 1973. While those core values were being re-articulated and re-defined at official level, anti-apartheid movements in Europe and North America continued to be a thorn in the side of the South African, Rhodesian and Portuguese regimes. This chapter describes the 1970s as a time of ever-increasing integration and inter-dependence in the campaign against minority rule, and asks, what impact did that have on Irish politics and society?

This chapter reviews the major Africa campaigns in Britain: the campaign to abolish slavery, It analyses each campaign as part of a campaign tradition. It does this by connecting the campaign’s efforts to represent Africa through frame analysis. More specifically, the chapter focuses on three forms of framing: diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing. The chapter highlights certain core practices of representation: the boycott, petitions, and the use of propaganda.

This chapter argues that Africa campaigning has played a key role in the construction of British national identity. This is evident in the self-conscious way that individual African campaigns tend to refer back to other campaigns in order to claim to be part of a national tradition. The chapter goes on to discern the ways in which Christian and liberal moralities have been both at the heart of Britishness and also common within representations of Africa. The chapter details how these connections are established through the representation of Africa as in need of salvation. Additionally, the chapter notes that representations of Africa and Africans are generally extremely simplistic and oriented around the theme of poverty. As such, the representation of Africa is substantially ‘introverted’, that is, focussed on British peoples perceptions of their own nationality.