ON BUILDING A SOCIAL MOVEMENT: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited, by John S. Saul
On Building a Social Movement focuses, as its sub-title suggests, on the North American campaign for southern African liberation. It does so by first evoking both the region-wide battle for liberation from racial oppression that emerged in southern Africa between 1960 and 1994 and the world-wide mobilization of support for that regional struggle which emerged alongside it. It then examines in some detail the building of movements in both Canada and the United States designed to contribute to this notable global effort. These movements sought to publicize the positive goals and concrete undertakings of the liberation struggles on the ground in southern Africa while also focusing public attention on the policies of the governments and the corporations in North America that pulled the two countries focused on in this book to the wrong – the racist and exploitative – side of this African contestation.
“Solidarity is the soul of the workers’ movement. This is a book about one of history’s greatest international solidarity movements: the anti-apartheid movement and that in support of the southern African liberation struggles more generally. It provides an inspiring and incisive account that raises sharply the question of what could have been had our revolution not lost its way by succumbing to neo-liberalism’s false hopes and dead-end solutions.”
–Trevor Ngwane, veteran South African activist and writer
“John Saul offers far more than a comprehensive analysis of the historical development of Southern African solidarity movements in North America. He issues a call for an emancipatory politics and practice that locates battles for liberation in a larger context and in relationship to each other. He also challenges us to demystify the national liberation movements many of us worshiped in order to see not only their strengths and weaknesses, but in order to understand the forces that have ground many of them to a halt. What an outstanding piece of writing!”
–Bill Fletcher, Jr., former President of TransAfrica Forum; host of The Global African on Telesur-English
“In his characteristically engaging conversational style, combining intimate first-hand knowledge and lightly-worn scholarship with strong opinions, John Saul takes the reader vividly into the heart of the Canadian and American movements that supported the anti-apartheid and liberation struggles in southern Africa.”
–Colin Leys, co-editor, The Socialist Register
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN S. SAUL, a liberation support/anti-apartheid/anti-imperialist activist both in Canada and in southern Africa since the 1960s, has taught at York University in Canada and at the Universities of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, of Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique and of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Saul is the author and editor of over 20 books and dozens of articles, reports and papers on Africa over the years. He continues to speak and publish widely on the on-going struggle for meaningful democratic practice and genuinely transformative liberation in southern Africa and in Canada.
CATEGORY
Sociology, Social Movements, Politics/AFRICA
Full blurbs (inside cover):
– “John Saul offers far more than a comprehensive analysis of the historical development of Southern African solidarity movements in North America. He issues a call for an emancipatory politics and practice that locates battles for liberation in a larger context and in relationship to each other. He also challenges us to demystify the national liberation movements many of us worshiped in order to see not only their strengths and weaknesses, but in order to understand the forces that have ground many of them to a halt. What an outstanding piece of writing!”
Bill Fletcher, Jr., a former President of TransAfrica Forum, is host of The Global African on Telesur-English.
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– “Solidarity is the soul of the workers’ movement. This is a book about one of history’s greatest international solidarity movements: the anti-apartheid movement (and, indeed, the movement in support of the southern African liberation struggles more generally). It provides an inspiring and incisive account that raises sharply the question of what could have been had our revolution not lost its way by succumbing to neo-liberalism’s false hopes and dead-end solutions. We in southern Africa owe John Saul a double debt: for his work with many others in organizing support for our struggle during the dark days, and for his telling the story in this illuminating and timely book from which everyone everywhere can benefit. Only struggle will liberate humanity from the shackles and crises of the capitalist system. The generosity, compassion and vision that underpins solidarity makes it all worth our while. It is also a condition for victory.”
Trevor Ngwane, veteran South African community activist and writer
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– “A multi-faceted and critical reflection of a significant experience in the building of ‘a movement of movements,’ one dramatic instance of shared solidarity across continents in the 20th century. For Saul historicizes the campaign for liberation in Southern Africa in the broader context and interplay of international and local social forces. Drawing on Fanon and Cabral to help explain both the successes and the setbacks experienced, he revives our collective memory and conveys the hope and commitment of a generation of activists (including himself) that is also indispensable for a new generation confronting neoliberal capitalism worldwide. This is an important book for the praxis of social justice!”
Maria van Driel and Oupa Lehulere, teachers, writers and organizers, Khanya College, Johannesburg
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– “Who better than scholar-activist John Saul to take us on a critical guided tour of the twists and turns, the paths to left and right, the moments of transformation and betrayal of the national liberation movements of southern Africa and their external supporters. These struggles against colonialism and white minority rule in southern Africa spawned a global social movement of solidarity from the 1960s to the 1990s. Activists in this movement were attracted by both the promise of socialism and the abhorrence of institutionalized racism. Saul focusses particularly on Canada and the US and the diversity of solidarity and anti-apartheid expressions in each country engaging with the bobbing and weaving of their official government and corporate actors over four decades. Saul takes us from the ferment of 1960s Dar es Salaam with debates about the perils of neo-colonialism looking north and decisions to launch armed struggles looking south. He captures the growing strength of the internal social actors fighting to end apartheid in South Africa, the final bastion of white minority rule, in the 1980s and 1990s, and the adroitness of capital in co-opting the process – internally and externally – when it threatened to bring about a more radical transformation. A must read for anyone seeking to understand struggles for national liberation, past and present, and the challenges of solidarity politics.”
Judith Marshall, scholar-activist and labour educator, worked for many years in Mozambique and in the liberation support movement in Canada
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– “In his characteristically engaging conversational style, combining intimate first-hand knowledge and lightly-worn scholarship with strong opinions, John Saul takes the reader vividly into the heart of the Canadian and American movements that supported the anti-apartheid and liberation struggles in southern Africa. He argues that in spite of the commitment and creativity of hundreds of activists these movements were ultimately slow to spot, and then powerless to check, the Canadian and US governments’ backing of the ANC ‘s post-apartheid embrace of global capital, which foreclosed the egalitarian hopes of the struggle. He concludes that progressive social movements need to develop a new kind of democratic “movement-of-movements” organisational model if they are to be capable of countering global capital’s entrenched social, economic and political power.”
Colin Leys, a long-time writer and activist on a wide range of African issues and in defense of the British public health system, is also former editor of the Socialist Register
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– “John Saul has been one of the most indefatigable intellectual voices in solidarity with the oppressed and progressive forces in Southern Africa. This book, part activist memoir and part detailed and provocative analysis, ends an important silence in the literature on anti-colonial and anti-apartheid resistance. The role of solidarity centered in the global north played a crucial role in building one of the most formidable transnational movements in the 20th century that contributed to the end of colonial and racist rule in Southern Africa. This was a forerunner to the current cycle of anti-capitalist resistance. On Building a Social Movement offers valuable lessons for contemporary struggles and efforts to renew global solidarity to meet the challenges of a crisis ridden capitalist world.”
Drs. Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar are activists and teachers based at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and co-editors of the recent book Marxisms in the 21st Century
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– “Despite John Saul’s remarkably prolific output in recent years, this new book may, at least for those of us outside Southern Africa, be seen as the most important. His now deservedly famous and trenchant analysis of how today’s informal empire of global capital has incorporated even this key region only recently fully liberated from colonialism and apartheid is turned here to highlight not only the important contributions, but also the limitations and contradictions, of the anti-apartheid and other movements that supported those directly engaged in the liberation struggles in Southern Africa. The key strategic question posed is not simply whether the dissolution of those support movements by the 1990s was premature but whether they were ever clearly enough focused upon confronting the informal as well as formal structures of capitalist empire.”
Leo Panitch, York University, is co-editor of The Socialist Register and co-author of The Making of Global Capitalism
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– “John Saul is highly regarded for his honest and rigorous reading of postcolonial Africa. In this book, he turns his incisive mind to the antiapartheid solidarity movement in North America. Saul’s account, inflected by his own passionate participation in the movement, is sure to be provocative and provides a landmark text.”
Shireen Hassim, South African author and feminist activist, is Professor of Politics at the Wits University in Johannesburg
Table of contents:
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements: With Thanks 5
A. Concepts: Social Movements and Liberation Struggles 7
Chapter 1: On Progressive Social Movements 9 Chapter 2: On the Ambiguities of Liberation 19
B. The Context of Contestation 39
Chapter 3: Regional struggle: challenging white minority rule in
southern Africa 41
Chapter 4: Beyond southern Africa: The global liberation support/anti-apartheid movement 53
C. Cases: North America, for example 83
Chapter 5: The Canadian Case 85
Chapter 6: The US Front 135
D. The Fall-Out 189
Chapter 7: Snatched from the Jaws of Victory 191
E. Other apartheids 201
Chapter 8: Challenging “global apartheid” 203
Chapter 9: The Palestinian parallel 209
F. In It Together 221
Chapter 10: A Conclusion 223
Afternotes 233
