In the mid-80s, the UK was witnessing a surge in anti-apartheid sentiment. The cultural boycott had broad support from The Rolling Stones to Dusty Springfield, and the Specials’ 1983 anthem ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ was a rallying cry from UK marches to South African townships.

Simultaneous political shifts were taking place within British councils, as several declared Apartheid Free Zones. Sheffield led the way in 1981, severing ties with the South African government and South African companies, divesting funds, and banning South African sports teams from using council facilities. By 1985, over 120 councils had joined the Local Authorities Against Apartheid (LAAA) group, which shared proliferation strategies in a June 1986 Tribune anti-apartheid special.

Despite all this public opposition, parliamentary support for the movement was lacking. A recently elected Gordon Brown wrote a 1986 article for Tribune which exposed the deep ties between the Conservative Party and apartheid, including the business links between 32 MPs and South Africa, as well as those that linked South Africa to Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Dennis. These links and those of the broader capitalist class made Britain South Africa’s biggest financial backer (Britain contributed over one-third of the apartheid state’s overseas investment) and created political inertia, with the UK vetoing UN sanctions in 1987.

However, the wide network of links also represented an opportunity for UK activists opposed to white rule. In 1985, St. Paul’s in Bristol, a predominantly black working-class community, initiated the grassroots St. Paul’s Apartheid-Free Zone Campaign (SPAFZ) as an offshoot of the Anti-Apartheid Movement group (AAM). SPAFZ aimed to eliminate apartheid goods in the area through community organising and building a campaign that would later serve as a nationwide model.

Jagun Akinshegun, chair of SPAFZ, describes the campaign’s simple and emotive logic: ‘You hit people where it hurts because you hit their economy, which means they won’t have the money to buy arms to turn on the people.’ The strategy was similarly straightforward: contact all St. Paul’s shopkeepers, use persuasion and leaflets detailing apartheid connections to gain buy-in, and secure signatures on a campaign statement. This commitment, publicised in newsletters, bound shopkeepers to remove South African goods with regular spot-checks. Every one of the twenty-seven local businesses in the area signed up.

Gerard Omasta-Milsom, a former Bristol student activist turned AAM national organiser, explains the campaign’s dual structure, emphasising how local activism helped support the ANC’s demand for international sanctions. ‘It made it quite straightforward for the AAM to regard its role as implementing that,’ he says.

Maintaining a visible presence, the campaign also organised public events like picketing, vigils, apartheid-free breakfasts, and public meetings with African National Congress (ANC) representatives, all of which enhanced community engagement. Expanding beyond local businesses, a SPAFZ campaign letter influenced the Southwest Co-operative Wholesale Society boycott, leading to a nationwide boycott across the society’s 1000 stores in October 1985.

Encouraged by this success, the campaign went on to target larger retailers. After just three weeks of campaigning, including a petition, letter-writing, and weekly pickets of sixty-plus people, the Tesco store in Bristol’s Eastville became the first Tesco in the country to boycott South African goods in June 1986.

A similar approach was employed against the local Barclays Bank. Weekly pickets from 26 January 1986 discouraged entry, explained Barclays’ apartheid support, and led to sit-ins. After encouraging locals to close their accounts, the campaign successfully shut down the area’s Barclays branch in November 1987.

The campaign soon garnered widespread attention, and the AAM’s national leadership and ANC connections facilitated strategy dissemination. ANC National Executive member Francis Meli referenced the campaign in a June 1986 speech in West Lothian, urging communities to declare their own apartheid-free zones and picket supermarkets. He underscored how such actions contributed to a broader political project, weakening imperialism and strengthening the British working class.

In March 1987, Major General Joseph Garba, UN Special Committee Against Apartheid chairman, also visited St Paul’s to meet local anti-apartheid leaders and participating shopkeepers. SPAFZ organisers, via the AAM and LBS, toured the country from cities to rural communities. They spoke to campaigns in Merthyr, Butetown, Swindon, Stroud, Notting Hill, Handsworth, Brixton, Nottingham, Birmingham, and Liverpool, encouraging a flourishing network of grassroots anti-apartheid campaigns, all of which contributed in their own ways to the eventual fall of the regime.