Local AA groups

The summer/autumn edition of Hackney AA Group’s newsletter, Nelson’s Column, reported on the twinning of the London Borough of Hackney with Alexandra township in South Africa and interviewed Alexandra Civic Organisation Secretary Mary Ntingele. It launched an appeal for local contributions to the ANC's election fund for the April 1994 election. The election fund raised £1,000,000, much of it from the trade union movement.

Exeter AA Group held a vigil in the main shopping centre on 20 March 1993 to ask the British government to help end the violence in South Africa. It said Britain should support the sending of international peace monitors. It forwarded 500 letters to Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd from local people urging him to take action

The period leading up to the 1994 South African election was difficult for the AAM; this is reflected in Merton AA Group’s December 1992 newsletter. It warned that many political prisoners had still not been released and asked supporters to write to the British Prime Minister urging him to demand that the South African Government restrain its security forces. The newsletter also highlighted the ongoing civil war in Angola.

In September 1992, in the aftermath of the massacre at Boipatong, the AAM organised a month of events calling for international support for negotiations for peace and democracy in South Africa. It argued that the consumer boycott must continue until the apartheid government agreed to a democratic constitution. This leaflet advertised a picket of the head office of Sainsbury’s supermarket chain.

This edition of Hackney AA Group’s newsletter, Nelson’s Column, warned of civil war in South Africa after the Boipatong massacre. It contrasted the ANC’s aim of a united democratic South Africa with the de Klerk government’s attempts to entrench white privilege in a new constitution. It reported that Hackney AA Group had joined the local Anti-Racist Alliance.

Sheffield AA Group published this newsletter publicising its collecton of funds for victims of violence in Natal in 1992. Yorkshire and Humberside was paired with Natal in the AAM’s twining programme.

Birmingham AA Group collected signatures to a petition asking the British government to back an international commission on the Boipatong massacre in the summer of 1992. Its newsletter also publicised local action in support of the general strike called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Flyer for a day school examining the links between British pit closures and South African coal imports, organised by Durham AA Group and the north-east area of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1992. The day school looked at the role of international capital in the coal mining industry and at future strategies for the industry in Britain and South Africa. Speakers included representatives of the British and South African mineworkers unions.