Anti-Apartheid at the periphery: a case study of grassroots activism in Dundee, 1967-1990.

Abstract

The histories of the global anti-apartheid struggle, and particularly the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), have predominantly been examined through a transnational and national prism, creating an inaccurate impression of a highly centralized and homogeneous movement. We argue, however, that refining the analysis to focus on the local setting reveals a more complex and diverse movement, which has not been fully captured in the existing scholarship. Using Dundee as a case study, this article charts the emergence, character, and evolution of anti-apartheid sentiment and activity in this small, peripheral industrial Scottish city. By exploring student activities in the 1970s, the brief but influential presence of Southern African exiles in the city, the radical politics of Dundee AAM (DAAM), and the symbolic solidarity of civic actors, the article demonstrates where local AAM group autonomy and regionally specific conditions intersected to shape the distinct trajectory of anti-apartheid in Dundee. Within this local history, we uncover divergences with wider national trends, most notably DAAM's accommodation of the radical Revolutionary Communist Group, which complicates dominant narratives of entryism and tension between the far-left and the AAM. The Dundee example demonstrates that analysing anti-apartheid activities through a local lens establishes alternative readings of the multi-layered and divergent nature of British activism and of twentieth-century international solidarity movements more broadly.