Demands for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa gave today's pro-Palestinian student activists a blueprint to follow.

In recent weeks, university campuses within the United States were rocked by pro-Palestinian protestswith police being called to arrest protesters and threaten students with expulsion.

But the demonstrators’ tactics are nothing unusual. Acquisition of university buildings And Establishment of tent camps on lawns and courtyards of universities.

These students, whose actions are Years of the organization Led by Students for Justice in Palestine, they’re a part of a protracted history of radical student organizing.

There are echoes of each the protests against the Vietnam War within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies and, more recently, South African apartheid within the Eighties.

In the Eighties, US student activists campaigned for higher education to be “South Africa Free.” They called on universities to commit to divesting all assets held in foundations which can be linked to business relations in or with South Africa.

For the past decade, I even have researched and written about these black-led anti-apartheid movements. with a special deal with student campaigns.

By denouncing the complicity of universities, corporations and the federal government in South Africa's apartheid system, student activists were in a position to show that demands for divestment is usually a concrete and effective type of protest.

A movement that took a long time

Apartheid was a racist and exploitative project which had developed over a long time amongst white South African officials.

Racial segregation laws And Land expropriation policy created a captive, impoverished black population whose exploitation and disenfranchisement ensured the economic prosperity of the ruling white minority.

The idea of ​​promoting the sale of assets of firms doing business in South Africa originally got here from the rules of the South African liberation movementswhich called for a complete economic, cultural and diplomatic boycott of the country's white minority government.

The most significant South African liberation movements were the African National Congressfounded in 1912, and the Pan-African Congressfounded in 1959. The South African government banned each organizations in 1960which forces organizers to construct their movements in exile.

In response, anti-apartheid activists world wide developed creative ways to heed the decision.

In the late Nineteen Sixties, for instance, US students criticized US banks that provided loans to the South African government, calling them “partner[s] in apartheid.”

And the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee coordinated a sit-in at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City in 1965.

Following the 1976 Soweto Uprisingduring which South African police massacred not less than 150 children, some U.S. employees demanded the cancellation of their pension funds.South Africa Free”, and students at US colleges and universities organized among the first protests They are demanding the sale of their schools’ foundation funds.

The founding of the Committee against bank loans to South Africa made economic disengagement a central a part of the anti-apartheid movement within the United States, which grew stronger each on and off campus over the following decade.

Calls for divestment are growing louder

At its peak in 1985 and 1986 Protests for the whole economic isolation of South Africa appeared at greater than 200 colleges and universities within the USA

Whether enrolled at historically African-American colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, Ivy League schools, or public universities, students coordinated a national divestment movement and placed the problem of U.S. investment in South Africa at the middle of U.S. mental and social life.

The student organization formed the militant base of the US anti-apartheid movement and contributed to economic, political and cultural isolation the violent and repressive regime of the white minority in South Africa.

Students erected blockades, organized sit-outs, occupied buildings and built “Slums“ – that are modeled on the makeshift housing during which many black South Africans lived during apartheid – at greater than 100 universities.

This Protests in slums marked the culmination of nearly a decade of anti-apartheid organizing on campus. Thousands of scholars on a whole lot of campuses arrange camps to attempt to “No more “business as usual””, as student groups put it.

Persistence pays off

At schools across the countryUniversity administrations ordered the police to clear the slums.

The backlash from universities ultimately only increased support for the movement when the media flooded into the slumswhile faculty, parents and alumni gathered around the scholars.

The students in turn rebuilt their campsThey were joined by supporters from outside the university: musicians, politicians and activists of the New Left and Black Power. The presence of feminist political activists Angela DavisCounterculture activist Mario Saviopoet June Jordanauthor Amiri Baraka and organizer of Pan-Africanism Kwame Ture has helped to further draw the eye of scholars across the country.

The much-noticed determination of the scholars helped change public opinionFounded by black organizers Randall Robinson, Mary Frances Berry, Eleanor Holmes Norton And Walter Fauntroy, the “Free South Africa” movement – in close cooperation with the foreign policy advocacy group TransAfrica – led a whole lot of scholars and peculiar people in a vigil outside the South African Embassy in Washington, DC

Many of the activists and student protesters were arrestedBut by denouncing certain firms doing business in South Africa and popularising those firms' links to violence, oppression and massacres against blacks in another country, the scholars succeeded in investing in those stocks. riskier and fewer attractive.

After two years of sustained militant organizing and demonstrations, the coed anti-apartheid movement claimed to have persuaded colleges and universities to 3.6 billion US dollars – or $10.3 billion in today’s currency – from their foundations.

Revisionist history

In 1990, after 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela, Chairman of the African National Congress was released from prison.

At that point, South Africa's apartheid system was crumbling. The reinstatement of the liberation movements in 1990, the repeal of racial segregation laws in 1991 and the primary democratic elections in 1994 signalled the official end of apartheid, although discrimination and inequality exists in South Africa to today.

In the collective memory of the United States, the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid movements are generally viewed as legitimate struggles that US institutions inevitably supported.

Perhaps this is the reason the administration of the University of California, Berkeley, after Mandela’s death in 2013 claimed to be at the highest of student protests against divestment in South Africa.

That was a revision of history.

Actually, in Berkeley and on many campuses, administrators called the police, threatened to cancel their scholarships, others delivered to court and ordered the caretaker to tear down the huts.

Past as present

Activists, scientist and even former US President Jimmy Carter have Comparisons drawn between South African apartheid and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Many Palestinians discuss with the 708 km long separation wall that Israel built along the Gaza Strip as “Wall of Apartheid.”

Nevertheless, there are some notable differences between the 2 movements.

Divestment is tougher today because financial instruments are more complex than within the Eighties, partly because of the outsourcing of their management to investment firms and hedge funds. The size of many university endowments have also grown exponentially since then.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that divestment from firms doing business with Israel remains to be possible – and might be an efficient demand. Several university administrations have agreed to think about divestmentincluding Brown University, Northwestern University, Evergreen State College, and the University of Minnesota.

The US anti-apartheid movement of the Eighties helped overthrow the apartheid government of South AfricaAt that point, students within the campus occupations against apartheid were the primary to campaign for a change within the national consensus about US complicity in injustice in South Africa.

Time will tell whether today’s students can do the identical when it comes to Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinian people.