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Table of Contents Introduction: The Rhetoric-Reality Gap Publicly, the governments of the United States and Great Britain often expressed a measured disapproval of apartheid. They voted for mild condemnatory resolutions at the United Nations and their diplomats spoke of the need for peaceful change. Yet, for decades, their actions behind the scenes told a very different story. The struggle against apartheid was not just a moral drama played out on the world stage; it was a key front in the Cold War. For Western policymakers, the white-minority regime in Pretoria was a problematic but strategically valuable ally in the global…
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Table of Contents Introduction: Turning Off the Money Tap While the sports boycott struck at the heart of white South Africa’s cultural identity, another, arguably more potent, form of international pressure was targeting its wallet. The divestment movement was a strategic, global campaign to economically isolate the apartheid regime by pressuring institutions to withdraw their investments from companies doing business in South Africa. It was a complex, multifaceted weapon that operated on both a moral and a financial plane. This movement, which grew from university campuses and city halls to the boardrooms of multinational corporations, did not merely aim to…