The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM) was occasionally too effective for its own good. On January 10th, 1970, Nelson Mandela and his fellow African National Congress prisoners on Robben Island were unexpectedly beaten up by their jailers. “Because your friends in Ireland protested against our rugby team,” was the explanation, citing a demonstration that had taken place earlier that day outside Lansdowne Road.
As Connal Parr shows in his thorough, respectful but far from starry-eyed history, the IAAM punched well above its international weight. “We have come here to thank you for not forgetting us,” the newly released Mandela declared when he made Dublin one of his first ports of call in 1990. Despite this proud legacy, the IAAM was also an awkward coalition of academics, politicians, artists and trade unionists who frequently clashed over tactics.
Parr has subjected the IAAM’s archives to rigorous analysis and interviewed many surviving members. Inevitably, however, Solidarity and Pressure (a disappointingly bland title) is dominated by its subject’s mercurial leader. Kader Asmal, a Natal-born, dapper, chain-smoking lawyer of Indian heritage, landed a teaching job at Trinity College Dublin in 1963 and almost immediately started building the IAAM from his Foxrock living room.
Parr pays full tribute to Asmal’s lobbying skills (“Being an absolute pain in the backside was as important as winning friends”), noting how he pioneered the strategy of using sports and cultural boycotts to make South Africa global pariahs. The IAAM was particularly vigorous in its shaming of Irish musicians who performed there, prompting an irritated Chris de Burgh to claim he knew more about apartheid than “99 per cent of the armchair liberals”.
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Parr’s forensically detailed narrative, however, also includes several quotes from IAAM supporters recalling Asmal as pompous, hot-tempered and “an out-and-out Stalinist”. The heroic Dunnes Stores women who went on strike after refusing to handle South African fruit felt patronised by Asmal’s “cheese and wine brigade”, while taoiseach Garret FitzGerald resigned his IAAM membership in 1984 over its decision to let Sinn Féin join.
“We were the biggest f***ing thorn in their sides [apart from the British AAM]!” Asmal boasted when he became a government minister under Mandela and examined the old regime’s files. This impressively clear-sighted book confirms that even the noblest political campaigns can get a little prickly sometimes.
