Student Protests and Lessons from the Anti-Apartheid Movement

In April 1994, apartheid in South Africa formally ended with the election of that country’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela. The triumph of this moment represented the culmination of nearly a half-century of struggle against racial oppression by South Africans and many across the world who organized in solidarity with them. As my research over the past ten years has demonstrated, the response to apartheid was an emotional phenomenon, mobilizing people the world over and from multiple social sectors—be it from labor, churches, NGOs, regular consumers, and, most relevantly for the purposes of this essay, students, faculty, and alumni on university and college campuses. 

In the mid 1980s, student-led anti-apartheid organizations proliferated at universities in the United States, Canada, and beyond. They adopted similar strategies, tactics, and language to achieve a common goal: to pressure their universities to divest shares in companies that did business in South Africa. 

Four decades later, in 2024, the debate about South African apartheid continues to hold relevance, as evidenced by contemporary campus protests as well as reactions to them. The student anti-apartheid protests of the 1970s and 1980s not only echo on university campuses today, but its successes have served as a blueprint for other activists in their own campaigns. From genocide in Darfur to fossil fuels to the war in Gaza, students have explicitly invoked the traditions, symbols, and lessons of the fight against South African apartheid. Consequently, it is worth revisiting the evolution of this movement on college campuses.

In June 1976, South African police opened fire on school children demonstrating at the Soweto township outside of Johannesburg. Students and Black workers responded by taking to the streets as a nationwide revolt swept the country. Over the next eighteen months, hundreds were detained and killed, including a leader of the South African Students’ Organisation, Steve Biko.

The Soweto uprising provoked international outrage, inspiring a wave of student activism on university campuses in Western countries. Student-led solidarity groups emerged, committed to removing any ties between their universities and white minority rule in southern Africa. If apartheid persisted, they reasoned, it was due to Western trade and investments in that system. By pressuring universities to divest their holdings in South Africa, they could cut off the funds that facilitated the oppression of nonwhite peoples.

Seemingly overnight, anti-apartheid groups appeared on university campuses across the US, Canada, and western Europe. In 1978, the Harvard-Radcliffe Southern Africa Solidarity Committee was formed, followed by chapters at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University. Similar organizations sprung up at Howard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, McGill, and elsewhere. 

Drawing inspiration and tactics from the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, teach-ins were held, designed to educate the university community about apartheid and to make the case for divestment. Student activists also organized rallies where South African opponents of the apartheid regime were invited to speak. These campaigns remained local, but student activists were made aware of developments on other campuses through media coverage, national student newsletters written and distributed by the American Committee on Africa, and the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, which brought student anti-apartheid leaders together in New York to testify about their respective campaigns.

Campus protests elicited a response from universities. Meetings were arranged with boards of trustees, and advisory committees were established to investigate the matter more fully. Even so, universities did not go as far as student anti-apartheid groups wanted. From an administration’s perspective, an acceptable compromise presented itself through corporate codes of conduct, which provided ethical guidelines for companies doing business in South Africa to follow. If a company refused to adhere to a code of conduct, universities promised that they would consider divestment. As students pointed out, these concessions amounted to partial rather than total withdrawal. Instead of adopting a general policy of disassociation, firms were treated on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, as Pretoria violently restored control over the country in the late 1970s, media attention shifted to other issues and, with it, campus protests against apartheid subsided.

Six years later, in the mid 1980s, South Africa again made international headlines following the outbreak of the township uprisings and Pretoria’s imposition of a partial state of emergency. Images of South African police brutalizing unarmed Black protestors filled news reports in real time, horrifying people in the Global North. Any pretense that the South African government was trying their best to reform in difficult circumstances vanished, and with it, an international consensus developed that apartheid needed to be dismantled. Student anti-apartheid groups resurfaced to pressure universities into severing ties with South Africa. Taking lessons from the successes and failures of the late 1970s, they surmised that nonviolent direct action provoked universities to react and make concessions. They also learned that building coalitions that brought together the widest number of groups gave them an authority that could not be easily dismissed by university administrations. These coalitions included, among others, groups committed to African liberation, women’s groups, anti-apartheid solidarity organizations, and trade unions. 

On April 4, 1985, declared National Divestment Protest Day, rallies were held at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Amherst, Stanford, and elsewhere. Columbia was at the center of campus anti-apartheid activity, and students blockaded Hamilton Hall for over a week, receiving public endorsements from political figures including US presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the mayor of Washington, DC, Marion Barry. Student activists also engaged in other initiatives, such as fasts, renaming Hamilton Hall “Mandela Hall,” and constructing “shantytowns” as a visual representation of the oppression of Black South Africans. Columbia’s activities inspired others as dozens of student groups in the United States and Canada likewise blockaded university buildings, erected shantytowns, and rechristened university buildings and spaces after leading opponents of apartheid.

Student activists worked to shame their universities into cutting ties with corporations doing business with the apartheid regime. (Notable corporate targets included Polaroid Corporation, IBM, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Ford Motor, and Eastman Kodak, to name a few.) A common discursive tactic drew attention to the gap between the university’s professed values as an institution of higher learning and its investments in South Africa. A promise to divest was therefore framed as support for the anti-apartheid movement and, by extension, racial equality, while a refusal to do so was tantamount to racism. To be sure, some student activists acknowledged that divestment might not end apartheid, while others favored less confrontational approaches, such as educational initiatives, revealing the existence of ideological and strategic tensions that mirrored the broader anti-apartheid movement. Still, for the majority of student activists, it was imperative that their institution disassociate from the apartheid regime as any contact sullied its reputation. In so doing, it would not only restore its honor but build pressure on other institutions to follow suit.

The university response to student anti-apartheid activism in the mid 1980s was decidedly mixed. At Columbia, City University of New York, Hampshire College, and the University of California, to name a few, billions of dollars were withdrawn from corporations doing business in South Africa. And yet, while some university administrations agreed to public fora to debate their investment policies, or other actions, in most cases they would only partially divest their holdings. Hundreds of students were arrested for acts of civil disobedience and encampments were dismantled, be it from the police or reactionary groups. And yet, these actions tended to galvanize students, faculty, and alumni, who redoubled their demands for full divestment.

With the situation in South Africa continuing to deteriorate, the US government faced intensifying grassroots and international pressure to act. In October 1986, Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, overriding President Ronald Reagan’s veto to impose trade sanctions on South Africa. 

Similar measures were adopted in the Commonwealth, the European Community, Japan, and the Nordic countries. As divestment and sanctions legislation succeeded at the federal, state, and city levels, and with many colleges agreeing to selectively withdraw from South Africa, student anti-apartheid activism diminished into the late 1980s and early 1990s. The end of apartheid was not a certainty at this stage—it continued for nearly another decade—but, for many students, their fight against racial oppression in South Africa had concluded.

Into the twenty-first century, student campus activists have modeled themselves after the South African student anti-apartheid movement. Of course, 2024 is not 1984. International norms, dynamics, and priorities are different today than they were four decades ago. And yet, one cannot help but be struck by how contemporary campus protests have borrowed the tactics, language, and symbols from anti-apartheid activism. Likewise, the debates surrounding divestment and the appropriateness of student activism are remarkably similar to the mid 1980s. As the adage goes, “history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

What lessons can we take away from student anti-apartheid activism? First, while it is true that divestment did not end apartheid—and certainly not overnight—this does not mean that it was meaningless. Student-led anti-apartheid campaigns reflected and contributed to a growing global consensus that apartheid needed to be dismantled. Their public education initiatives also made the university community and the broader public more informed, shaping their attitudes and responses to social and political issues decades later.

Second, students exploited the university’s need to maintain its reputation to shame them into reconsidering their relationship with firms doing business in South Africa. As one university capitulated, so the theory went, it would cascade, leading others to follow suit. 

Third, while the student anti-apartheid movement’s greatest asset in achieving its objectives was media attention, this was a double-edged sword. Finding ways to sustain and expand campaigns as media coverage shifted to other issues remained one of the enduring obstacles of student anti-apartheid activism. Ultimately, while most student anti-apartheid movements did not achieve their goal of full university divestment, they could claim notable successes—and their actions have continued to resonate decades later. 

Contributor Bio

Daniel Manulak is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. From 2022-2024 he was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His book manuscript, under contract with an academic press, is an international history of Canada and South African apartheid. His recent publications on the anti-apartheid movement have been published in the Globe and Mail and Diplomatic History.