The Bottom Line The World Against Apartheid: Have You Heard from Johannesburg?

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

# Say, what's the word? Tell me, brother

# Have you heard from Johannesburg?

# Tell me what's the word now? Sister, woman

# Have you heard from Johannesburg? #

The South African white population

lived better than anywhere else in the world.

Where else do you get a marketing manager for Colgate toothpaste,

let's say...

In South Africa, he's living on an acre of land with a swimming pool

and tennis court, four staff in the back, two cars in the garage.

You had corporate jets, you had chauffeurs, it was Nirvana.

I always used to say a South African lifestyle,

a British passport and a Swiss bank account.

That's all you need.

For black South Africans, life was far less comfortable.

The whole political, economic system was exploitation.

The Africans were systemically exploited.

They were paid these extraordinarily low wages.

You're very angry because you're living in abject poverty

and there's nothing romantic about poverty.

You see the huge social price in the community where you grow.

You see it in your family, in your home,

in the relationship between your parents and what poverty does there.

And all because you're black.

And who are responsible for the policy of apartheid?

It is not only the white people of South Africa.

It's the great and powerful countries who are carrying on trade with that country.

It's the great business concerns who are drawing profits

from the sufferings of my people.

The anti-apartheid movement had been fighting to isolate

the South African regime for more than a decade.

But the major Western governments

refused to support economic sanctions.

It's these countries and their corporations

who are running counter-current

to the efforts of the anti-apartheid movement.

So you hold them largely responsible for the continuance of apartheid?

Absolutely, they are.

Oliver Tambo, living in exile,

worked closely with anti-apartheid groups around the world.

Their strategy was an all-out attack on South Africa's economy by trying

to persuade overseas investors to pack their bags and go home.

What we wanted to do was create a situation

where these companies pull out and there's a crisis,

economic crisis of major proportions

which will force the government and the international community

to then work to bring about change in South Africa.

We are not asking that you make a political decision.

We're not asking you to make an economic decision.

We're asking you to make a moral decision.

Those who invest in South Africa are upholding

and buttressing one of the most vicious systems

the world has ever known.

'Perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, there comes an invention

'so radically new it actually changes the way we live our lives.'

'Less than two seconds after you've touched the red electric button,

'the camera hands you the picture.'

'It can reveal the world to you as you've never seen it before.'

In 1970, Caroline Hunter, a chemist,

and Ken Williams, a photographer, were working for Polaroid

in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when something caught their attention.

It was really a fluke. Ken and I were going out to lunch

and as we passed through the workplace on our way out,

we saw an ID badge made for South Africa.

We looked at it and began to say to each other,

"We didn't know Polaroid was in South Africa."

In South Africa, what Polaroid did was...

they introduced the kind of technology that would give

the government a very effective hold on black people through the pass.

Black people had to carry a passbook at all times to prove

that their presence in the city was legitimate.

Those without jobs were expelled to rural homelands where it was

impossible to earn a decent living.

The passbook system forced migrant workers to live in townships

outside the white cities.

The penalty for failing to produce a passbook on demand was imprisonment.

We really had some sense that no-one is free unless everybody is free,

and that we had some relationship to black people everywhere.

And as workers, we had a right to say what happened to our labour

so we started off just asking the question,

what is Polaroid doing in South Africa?

We found out that Polaroid had been doing business

with the South African government since 1938 and had been supplying

the South African government with cameras and film

for the apartheid system.

And that there was great business.

I mean 22 million South Africans, that's a lot of film.

This was certainly viewed very quickly as a major issue.

It was something that affected our black employees,

it affected our white employees because they had assumed

that they were working for a company that was socially responsible.

Most people refused to believe that they were there

or didn't know enough about South Africa to care.

The company's first reaction was to try to deflect the whole issue.

So we realised we needed some help.

That's how we got in touch with Chris Nteta.

Polaroid lied about the pass.

One of the statements they made

was that everybody in South Africa carries a pass.

And I exploded that little myth because that's not true.

Only black people carry passes.

Do you have your pass on you?

You're the mayor of the place, but what does it say your status here is?

Well, in this reference book here it's stated that I am permitted

to remain in the area of Johannesburg as a casual labourer.

So you could be thrown out.

I could be thrown out any day as long as anything goes

slightly wrong with this reference book.

# Swing it up

# It says yes

# Take the shot

# Count it down

# Zip it up. #

Unable to get any action from Polaroid,

Caroline, Ken and Chris went public.

We were going around very actively speaking to high school groups,

to college groups, to anybody who would listen to us,

talking about the devastation of apartheid.

And the fact that we could make a difference,

that people in America could make a difference.

People here, black people especially,

in this country, can begin to make a contribution

to the liberation of black people in southern Africa,

not by going there but by doing something right here,

forcing United States corporations that are doing business there to withdraw.

We were in a total flak storm.

There was no escaping it.

It was a local issue.

It quickly became national, because apartheid was universally deplored.

Every part of the newspaper except sports and food

covered the story about Polaroid in South Africa.

I think we escaped the comic page probably too,

because nobody thought it was funny -

least of all us.

The revenues from that operation were a very small part of our total

international sales so we could easily have just stopped.

Great, why don't you pull out? You won't even miss it.

They said no, so we said, "That's very curious.

"The kind of pressure we're subjecting you to,

"to a normal thinking person, rational person

"would say 'I don't need this, let's pull out.'"

So there must be something bigger than what we were seeing here,

either the involvement is bigger than you're willing to publicly admit to

or there are other players who are telling you, "Don't."

Certainly, our board members, many of whom were on the boards

of other companies, it was a big issue for them.

Other companies expressed concern

and wanted to know how we were handling the issue.

One such company was General Motors, who had been in South Africa

since 1926.

Religious organisations began to

put their morals, their ethics, their social principles

on the same table as their money.

So in 1971, the Episcopal Church

decided to sponsor a shareholder resolution,

a petition to General Motors,

demanding that General Motors withdraw from South Africa.

GM board members refused the resolution that year.

But the next year, another minister would take up the cause.

GM had faced a lot of pressure about the fact it was an all-white,

male board and had no diversity on its board.

Last year's proposal for a black member of the board of directors lost until January,

Philadelphia Minister Leon Sullivan was named to the board.

They wanted a minority representative on the board

and they selected me.

So I'm being used by GM, so if GM uses me, I'm going to use GM.

I think didn't they know what they were getting

when they got Leon Sullivan on their board.

So at that first stockholder meeting, I took the microphone

and said I'm asking General Motors to leave South Africa

and every other company in America

to leave South Africa until apartheid ends.

And Leon Sullivan doesn't just speak, he preaches.

He spoke from the heart about the injustice that apartheid represented.

This was extremely embarrassing to the CEO

and the rest of the directors, of course.

Can you imagine a black man

for the first time in the history of the world

challenging a stockholders' meeting in a large corporation?

How do you think they reacted?

Angry! Angry!

Nothing like this has happened before.

Where did this come from? Why did we put him here?

General Motors' basic response,

as most companies at that point was, "We're going to stay there.

"We're going to do business there."

The pressure against GM went on for years and years and years of course

and they every year had a shareholder resolution on South Africa,

so the stockholders and the company and the management couldn't get away from it.

It was a major historical moment. It launched a thousand ships.

By the 1980s, virtually every company in South Africa

was receiving shareholder resolutions.

In Britain, the anti-apartheid movement focused its attention

on one of the oldest and most powerful banks in the world,

Barclays.

'When you're dealing with money,

'isn't it nice to know you can get a helping hand?

'You can at Barclays Bank.'

People started to realise, Barclays was actually not just

a major high street bank in Britain

but THE major high street bank in South Africa.

We were a very natural target, in fact if I were in their position,

I would probably have chosen Barclays myself.

There are a lot of countries where one disapproves of a regime.

Actually, you do quite well there,

trying to improve the lot of the people

and incidentally make money for your shareholders.

Going to shareholders' meetings was a joy.

You only had to have one share to get into a shareholders' meeting.

Or in my case, all you had to do was put on a suit on

and walk in confidently.

About a dozen of us or 20 of us all turned up

and it was the first time it had ever happened in Britain.

They immediately popped up

and said, "You can't introduce politics into investment.

"This is just finance and accountancy."

Sort of, "leave us alone to get the best return possible

from our investments," and we said, "Absolutely not."

People with the loudest voices like David Haslam would be

barking against the management,

"Why are you dealing with South Africa, where there's slave labour,

"there is murders and killings and so on going on?"

"You are profiting from that. Is this the kind of profits you shareholders want?"

The usual business was,

"You are supporting the regime in South Africa" and we would answer,

"But we are not."

For instance, our branches would deliberately ignore the rules,

which were that whites had to go to a white cashier

and blacks had to go to a black cashier.

And we muddled that up.

They continued to disrupt the meeting and when they were asked to leave,

when officials approached them to remove them,

they lay down on the floor.

And after two or three years, the great body of people at the AGM

would get fed up with these people and would start shouting,

"Enough! Shut up! Go away!"

We were called "bastards" by a number of people.

We had no business to be in this place. "Get out and don't come back."

These were Members of Parliament, Peers of the Realm,

the gentry.

They were all supposed to be well-mannered people.

They were just... It was like a bear garden.

Have to admit, though, that we enjoyed provoking them!

# Money makes the world go around

# The world go around The world go around

# Money makes the world go around

# It makes the world go round

# Money, money, money Money, money, money

# Money, money, money, huh! #

US banks

were a major player at particularly strategic points

in South Africa's history. For example,

in 1960, right after the Sharpeville Massacre,

Citibank and some other banks lent money to the South African government,

in an effort to "stabilise the economy".

These were major US banks - Citibank, Chase Manhattan,

Bank of America - participating in this revolving loan

to the South African government.

# Two, four, six, eight Don't support a fascist state! #

Our goal was to try to affect public opinion, to try to get the bank

to recognise that a lot of people cared.

One of the hardest things that we faced in the early years of the bank campaign

was the challenge of...

helping people understand that they could affect what international banks did.

These were citadels of multi-national power and of financial power.

The normal person in the street had no thought whatsoever of being able

to affect the activities of an international bank.

It just seemed like moving the biggest rock in the world.

I think if one looks at the pressure on Barclays,

the worrying thing to us was the student accounts.

If you've got students' account,

almost certainly they would be

the leaders of the country in the future and important to it.

So if you could, so to speak, nab them then, there was a sporting chance

you would retain their accounts for their lifetime and they would be

the shakers and movers of society.

That gave us the opportunity of going to students,

where there were Barclays branches on campuses,

and tell people not to bank with Barclays.

We used to have mass account withdrawals,

so you would get a students' union to go in

en bloc and withdraw their accounts.

My daughter was a graduate student at Cambridge

and like the good daughter of a Barclays director in South Africa,

opened an account with Barclays Bank,

got a cheque book and then walked into her local store in Cambridge and wrote out a cheque.

The storekeeper said, "I won't take the Barclays cheque."

That brought it home to me how intense the pressure was.

Back in America, the pressure was beginning to have an impact, too.

We decided to form a committee

to try to decide what was the right thing to do.

Polaroid concluded that they WOULD remain in South Africa,

but that they would launch a programme to improve conditions

for their workers.

The Polaroid Experiment was establishing

an educational foundation, establishing training classes,

realign the wage scales.

Also, we said that our distributor was going to stop selling products to the government.

Polaroid became the first company doing business in South Africa

to publicly denounce apartheid.

We've been able to take what is a tiny activity and convert it into

a presence for doing a great deal of good.

We didn't buy it. We saw it as a strategy to try to take people

from paying attention to Polaroid's critical role in South Africa.

So Caroline and Ken took their case

to the United Nations Committee on Apartheid.

The Polaroid Experiment is an insult to any persons working for the liberation of black South Africa.

The very next week, on the anniversary of that day,

at the same hour, I was brought in and given my letter.

I was fired for "misconduct detrimental to the best interests" of a corporation.

Actually, firing me was

the worst thing they should have done, in terms of helping their cause,

because now I had 24 hours to work on the campaign.

What happened here began as a family dispute,

but the problem is being debated at the United Nations,

congressional hearings are scheduled for later this year

and every company and country with a vested interest in South Africa

is watching the Polaroid Experiment closely,

hoping to find a stance that would be acceptable

economically and morally.

I felt that South Africa was getting a raw deal.

We believed that something had to be done to counter the efforts

of people who were very effective in pushing the sanctions idea.

A Department of Information was created,

parallel to our Department of Foreign Affairs.

And that department was a propaganda department.

'Expensively produced kits like these, about 13,000 of them,

'have been sent to schools free of charge.

'The kit includes a slide presentation.'

'We have made this transition with our programme of multi-national development, known as apartheid..."

'..Where our black people can control their own destinies,

'protected by law from the exploitations of others, including whites.'

'We think of our programme of multi-national development as an enlightened programme.'

If only we can convince the world about the complexities of the South African situation.

If it can only explain to us our goodwill,

the world will understand and we will be reunited with the world.

So they arranged major investment conferences,

bringing top American business people

speaking out in favour of staying in South Africa.

They brought thousands of people to South Africa -

Americans, British, German people, Japanese people.

And I had 50, 100, more times, to lunch with these people,

to explain the merit of this policy.

Now, many of these people

have a glorious holiday in South Africa...

..and some of them were then kind enough to say,

"Yes, now we understand the complexity

"of the South African situation."

And that was regarded as huge progress.

GUNFIRE

Then, Soweto happened.

It was very difficult for us to explain, to a world that was

extremely unreceptive to anything good out of South Africa,

that this was just a little problem.

GUNFIRE

'There was a huge riot today in South Africa,

'in a black suburb of Johannesburg.

'Possibly 10,000 young blacks rioted against government policy.'

'South Africa's worst racial disorder in 16 years still appears to be out of control,

'as angry mobs roam the streets of Soweto.'

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

Soweto galvanised the anti-apartheid movement

and built the pressures on companies.

# Soweto blues

# Soweto blues. #

Soweto enabled us as campaigners to say,

"Look here, we told you what was going on.

"We told you there was a serious problem here

"and now they're shooting children."

# ..And all the children Soweto blues. #

'..and it is a time when you have got to start saying,

' "Yes, we can do something about this. We can challenge Barclays Bank,

' "we can challenge National Westminster Bank, "we can challenge Shell." '

'Students became political again.

'They demonstrated against investment in South Africa on over 100 campuses across the country,

'demanding that their universities sell whatever stock they held in companies that did business

'with South Africa. Several universities did just that.'

CHANTING: Freedom, yes! Apartheid, no!

Freedom, yes! Apartheid, no!

The Polaroid Corporation's announcement earlier this week

that it was ending the sale of its products in South Africa

because of the country's racial policies

is expected to have a major impact there.

'The withdrawal, the first time an American company has pulled out

'for political reasons, marks the loss of an important foreign client

'in South Africa.

'The Polaroid move comes at a sensitive time, as American companies in general

'are reviewing their operations in South Africa.'

The question raised was,

"OK, you want Polaroid out and that's it, guys, right? That's the end of the story.

"You wrap up and go out of business?"

We said, "No, we're just getting ready to fight."

"If it happens to Polaroid in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

"it's going to happen to GE, it's going to happen to General Motors.

"Everyone is going to be in line."

There were forces all over the world combining and we knew

moving towards applying full sanctions against South Africa.

We, at the time, felt that the gloves were off and the only way

we could promote South Africa properly, and effectively,

was through covert methods.

The South Africans spent 65 million rands,

that's nearly £40 million, on 170 secret projects, all over the world,

designed to further their interests and to neutralise their opponents.

If it was necessary to influence a particular journalist,

to stop writing anti-South African articles, for example,

anti-investment articles, if it was necessary for me to send him

to Hawaii with his girlfriend for a month,

then I should be able to do so,

for a month's holiday, at our expense.

Hardly a day now passes without new allegations being made

that the South African government paid politicians, paid journalists,

paid labour unions, for various services,

that they helped fund Jimmy Carter's Primary campaign in New York state,

that they helped fund a group of pro-South African MPs in Norway,

that they started newspapers and, more insidiously,

tried to buy their way into existing newspapers, to change their political stance.

We bought the Sacramento Union

and we were looking at the Washington Star.

We purchased 50% of the shares in UPI/ITV,

which distributes news form

to about 100 countries all over the world.

It was a very successful project, if I may say so myself.

Now, is that unusual? No.

Does the CIA do it? I hope so.

They've got properties around the world.

If a certain organisation, for example,

was trying to get companies to disinvest and withdraw

investments in South Africa, then obviously, we would put people

in that field and we would send out notices, cancelling the meeting.

We were collecting signatures and,

suddenly, we were getting sent back wodges of petitions

and when we looked,

the petition had been rewritten.

It was all put in straight, kind of, East-West conflict,

that this was something the Communist countries were doing,

making out that what we were after was a Communist South Africa.

The anti-apartheid movement, in Britain, in particular,

was a great pain in the neck to us.

They managed to almost burn down our offices.

Someone poured diesel fuel through the front door,

then petrol and lighted rags.

And we arrived in the offices

and there was a huge hole burnt in the floor.

What is the morality of doing that?

If you found yourself in the position that we found ourselves,

that we had no voice in the General Assembly of the United Nations

or any important forum in the world, when it came to the future survival

of South Africa then, of course, rules and regulations don't apply.

And then, I think morality flies out of the window.

South African Intelligence had this kind of target list,

which was key people involved in anti-apartheid.

So there was some of us, like Bob Hughes, who was an MP then,

and myself, who were British.

But the South Africans, Ruth First was on it.

And of course, Ruth was killed.

This parcel bomb came and exploded and killed her.

And you began to think,

how safe were you, how much care did you have to take?

There was a need for another push.

Nelson Mandela was still in jail, people were still in exile,

and I decided I should try to end it and I should try to end it my way.

I saw that I wasn't going to be able to bring out all the companies,

so I had to find a way to use the strength of the companies

to change the conditions to what I wanted.

For a year and a half, I had meetings with corporate executives, to forge

an agreement on a set of principles for doing business in South Africa.

And out came what is known as The Sullivan Principles.

Equal rights for blacks, upgrading of blacks, education for blacks,

internally and externally.

I said, these little six lines

are going to help change South Africa and end apartheid.

And it is going to be done with the help of God

and the strength of corporate power.

Corporate power. And your prayers.

We are in South Africa, we have been there

for more than 50 years.

We are trying to improve things

in South Africa for the people

in South Africa, for all the people.

General Motors, in the last six months,

ran a series of ads in South African newspapers,

encouraging people to buy General Motors' cars,

in exchange for which, for each General Motors car purchased,

General Motors of South Africa would make a contribution

to the rest and relaxation fund of the South African defence forces.

So for us to talk about General Motors as doing so much for black people in South Africa

because they integrated the bathrooms

is precisely the kind of irrelevancy

that I have been trying to talk about.

Making changes in their workplace was not changing the system.

They were simply creating a safe haven -

when somebody came to work.

They still walked out that gate

as a person without a vote, without real rights.

Those same companies that were Sullivan signatories were paying

52 times in taxes to the South African apartheid regime

as much as they were spending on Sullivan Principle programmes.

Those programs had a minute, minute impact, compared to

the ongoing impact of living under apartheid.

The Sullivan Principles were extremely useful

for the South African government,

because it was a change of strategy on the part of an influential

African-American, who decided that he could work within the system,

as long as American companies conformed to his principles.

South Africa was under substantial international pressure

at that stage and anything which was seen to alleviate that pressure was

welcomed, particularly if it wasn't anything which was viewed

as subversive, or overtly political.

Corporations could now point to a moral reason

for remaining in South Africa. Within a year,

most of Europe had adopted codes remarkably similar to Sullivan's -

The European Codes of Conduct, with many notable adherents.

In our statement of business principles in South Africa,

it says that we are the enemies of racism.

One of the worst things about the system

is that black people went to work in other places in South Africa

and couldn't take their families.

We built family houses.

Beautiful village, you can go and see.

Schools and clubs. So by being there, we did a lot of good.

Oil. The one area where South Africa was even more vulnerable.

Multinational oil companies became a key target

for the anti-apartheid movements.

In South Africa, they got all sorts of things,

silver and gold and diamonds and wolfram

and titanium and lead and zinc, but no oil. So it's all imported.

The Shell company had a commercial slogan

here in the Netherlands, "Shell helps".

So we could immediately use that - "Shell helps apartheid" -

and we could prove it.

They had to offer their facilities for the police

and military to use, if there was a state of emergency.

And they had to help the government build up a strategic oil stockpile

to help defend itself against the oil embargo.

So, we told Shell that they should get out and Shell said, "We can't."

Once you are there, you are caught. You cannot take a pipeline

or a refinery with you, like a shipping company,

you can't sail away.

Once we are there, we are the prisoners of our investment.

We pushed in the churches that if Shell was not willing to

withdraw, then people should begin to boycott the Shell products.

And that made us very angry.

It was grossly unfair, and into ridiculous detail he went,

for instance, the pension fund of the clergy in this country

was no longer allowed to deal in Royal Dutch shares.

They sell them, I trust, at a profit, but never mind, they sell them.

They wouldn't have anything to do with a devilish outfit.

We did give Shell a very hard time.

And they were worried that we actually were targeting them.

And picketing Shell garages was hilarious,

because the managers used to go berserk.

If you don't mind, get your bloody camera away from me!

We turned away every single car, but two,

from that garage during the time we were picketing it.

I can remember,

late one evening,

I got a phone call from a local petrol station owner,

who was so upset,

saying that he didn't want to go bankrupt

because of something happening at the other side

of the globe and for things that he was not in any way responsible for.

So in the end, we made a deal with these local people,

saying that if they put up an anti-apartheid poster,

saying that Shell should withdraw from South Africa,

they would be exempted from the boycott, locally.

Shell Oil might have the money,

but we have the people,

and without the people, they can't make the money.

Well, you know, we've been talking all week long

about the Shell Oil Company

providing fuel for the South African military machine,

and we want you to do something about it.

Take your Shell credit card and cut it up, literally.

You could hear that "Kchh-kchh!" over the radio.

This is Roger Clemens of the Boston Red Sox. Help end apartheid in South Africa.

And plenty of listeners are heeding the call.

I was sitting at my desk

at the Interface Centre of Corporate Responsibility,

opening the mail, when a big, fat, unmarked package arrived.

It was an elaborately developed strategy

to discredit, to derail and to deflect the boycott.

It dealt with everything from how to deal with student groups

to trade unions, to how to undercut momentum

of the religious community, to how to deal with the black community.

We don't know who it was,

but we do know it was somebody inside leaked a copy to us.

And when it came out and church leaders read about how Shell

was going to try to dupe them, they were just absolutely furious.

'Today, the World Council of Churches urged its members to organise

'boycotts of Shell for supplying South Africa with crude oil and coal.'

The World Council of Churches had, more than anything else,

to have a federation of all Protestant

and Greek Orthodox churches in the world writing a piece of paper,

a declaration, singling out one corporation in the whole world...

for embargo, for punishment, called Shell.

In the name of God and the law of Jesus Christ, that cannot be done.

Shell never left South Africa.

Don't you encounter things in your life about which you feel

very bad, that you can't do much about?

I mean, how holier-than-thou, please, huh?

We had no option. We had no option.

The only option was... the only option was to leave.

Hmm?

Even though it did not stop the flow of oil to South Africa,

what the oil embargo did over time

was to impose an apartheid premium

on every barrel of oil that South Africa imported.

'The white man in South Africa is feeling the pinch.

'Last week, petrol prices went up by more than 40% overnight,

'threatening many a lavish lifestyle.

'For some people, nothing is going right.'

The petrol, we can't afford it at all.

The worst thing that has happened to me all year.

This is worse than Tutu getting the Peace Prize...really.

It's estimated that that embargo cost the South African government

more than 20 billion between 1979 and 1985.

And that is a particularly interesting number, 20 billion,

because it is the approximate amount of South Africa's foreign debt.

South Africa was living on foreign loans.

The entire stability of the South African currency

was based on support

they were getting on the basis of these loans.

It became clear to us that if you can stop

outside banks lending to South Africa,

which kept the whole apartheid system rolling

and meant they were able to

develop economically, if you could cut off

that flow of blood, really, into the apartheid system,

then it would soon begin to wither.

The banks would say, "But if we withdraw,

"the whole society will collapse." And we were saying,

"Well, that probably is what it's going to take."

CHANTING

In 1983, the mood in South Africa changed.

Under the banner of the newly-formed United Democratic Front,

opposition to the apartheid regime stepped up a gear.

Suddenly, the struggle became of a different nature.

Here you could see something

which really had a capacity to change things.

On the ground in our country,

the masses of South Africans had just reached a point

where it was impossible to, in fact, through sheer brute force,

suppress people.

We want all of our rights, and we want them here and we want them now!

CHEERING

'The United Democratic Front was formed in August 1983

'as an umbrella organisation

'unifying some 700 groups opposed to separate racial development.'

And every aspect impinged on the business community.

Militant trade unionism...

..consumer boycotts,

civil unrest in the townships,

therefore, you can't make deliveries of your goods.

South Africa became increasingly ungovernable

and, internationally, the anti-apartheid movement took off.

# We are not isolated by distance

# But by greed and our racist history. #

Suddenly, all that work that we'd done on Barclays or picketing supermarkets came to fruition.

Up until then, people hadn't seen quite what effect,

how that would really make a difference,

whereas now, they could see that it meant something.

# When the system starts to crack

# We'll have to be ready to give it all back. #

The papers were full

and the television screens were full of pictures

of huge demonstrations in South Africa...

..and the very vicious response by the South African government.

Remember, the government was telling the world

that things were changing, that they were gentle.

And yet they came down with an iron fist.

On Saturday, the country's State President, P W Botha,

declared a state of emergency in South Africa.

The township riots, he said, must stop.

In South Africa today,

military sources recorded

that a peaceful compromise cannot be reached!

We must maintain control!

'Increasingly there was concern in the bank

'with the apartheid policies of South Africa.

'There were two elements in my mind,

'on the one hand abhorrence with apartheid,

'but also there was, and I have to be honest about this,

'a clear business reason.

'The forces in the world who isolate South Africa

'was making it less and less credit-worthy.

'The country was becoming "unbankable."

'And I wanted out.'

Because of the activities of the UDF

Chase Manhattan got nervous about the state of emergency.

They asked themselves what were the chances of their loans being repaid

in a country that looked like it was about to go up in smoke

and Chase did the economically, as well as politically, prudent thing

of deciding not to roll over its loans.

And when Chase Manhattan,

Mr Butcher, started butchering us,

it was like a domino effect.

'First thing this morning the rand was plummeting,

'down five cents against the dollar in less than an hour.

'One dealer busy dumping the South African currency

'called trading "hectic and disorderly".'

I'm just busy, I'll come back.

'The selling is principally from the United States, Britain and France.

'Investors are jittery over the increasing financial

'and diplomatic isolation of South Africa.'

The one thing we couldn't manufacture was dollars

and Deutschmarks.

That we couldn't.

And that eventually became the Achilles heel of the whole economy.

'In about an hour's time

'the President of South Africa, Mr PW Botha,

'will begin a speech in Durban City Hall.'

The speech is being billed

as the most significant in South Africa for many years.

It was a very dangerous situation.

But here was something

of great importance,

that would be a watershed

in a very positive and constructive sense of the word.

That speech was a kind of turning point in South Africa's history.

I believe that we are today crossing the Rubicon in South Africa.

There can be no turning back.

It was supposed to be a rather reform-orientated speech,

but he was in a bad mood that evening.

South Africans' problems will be solved by South Africans

and not by foreigners.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

We are not going to be deterred from doing what we think best,

nor will we be forced into doing what we don't want to do.

I just knew that this was a major disaster,

and we would feel the negative impact almost immediately

and we did.

It devastated the economy.

All our creditors want their money back and we could not supply it.

Like your mortgage holder

telling you tomorrow, I want to have full payment of that mortgage

otherwise your house is mine.

And it created the most serious financial crisis for South Africa.

If there was really a time that I and my colleagues was scared,

it was the second half of August/September of 1985.

Because we realised that we are all nearly bankrupt.

I felt enormously related, enormously happy.

Like one of the major occasions.

I myself personally came to the conclusion when I heard this

that this was the end, we are now seeing the end of apartheid.

The South African government had no way out.

Finance is the lifeblood of any company.

The international banks were very important.

To have that arbitrarily cut off was a devastating blow.

Three South African business leaders

flew to the neighbouring country of Zambia today

for unprecedented talks on the future of their country

with black guerrilla leaders outlawed by the South African Government.

The businessmen, who control much of South Africa's vast wealth,

were acting independently of their government.

The African National Congress has been banned as a terrorist organisation.

I had the conventional view of the ANC as the devil incarnate,

white-hating, murderous, terrorist, Communists,

Moscow-dominated puppets.

This was the common perception of them.

'The meeting was held behind the closed gates of a game reserve in Eastern Zambia.

'The white businessmen represented the highest levels of South Africa's non-government power structure.

'A year ago it would have been unthinkable

'and indicates business' deep concern

'that the end is coming.'

The meeting started off, I suppose,

with a lot of reserve on everyone's part.

Naturally, the South African businessmen

gravitated towards one side of the circle

and the ANC on the other side of the circle,

and the ice was broken

when Oliver Tambo made some quip about the division,

the apartheid of the seating arrangements, if you like,

at which stage everybody burst out laughing and we mixed in.

Then there were the,

one, I suppose, would call them,

thick cobwebs of incomprehension and misunderstanding...

about where WE were coming from.

The ANC executive, at least half of them,

were members of the South African Communist Party.

We were concerned about this -

we're businessmen, we're capitalists,

we believe in the Western democratic systems,

private initiative,

all these sorts of things.

But they said that the Communists on the ANC executive

were ANC members first, and Communist Party members second

and that ANC was not a Communist organisation.

They used Sweden as an example of a model democracy.

I was surprised at that.

We ate our lunch sitting on a wall, very informally,

chatting about things in South Africa.

It was obvious to me the ANC had an overwhelming nostalgia

to return to South Africa, which they were then unable to do.

They talked about places they had been in as kids,

had grown up in.

And I found it very easy to like them, on a personal level.

The meeting with the businessmen de-demonised the ANC.

After that meeting, the business community was convinced

that they can risk the democratisation of South Africa.

No question that it was the turning point.

We lit the fuse

and then it just ran from thereon.

Meetings with the ANC then became, over a period of 18 months, flavour of the month.

Of course, Botha was furious at that stage. There was this attitude -

nobody in South Africa should talk to these murderers.

Irrespective of the international consequences,

we will not be untrue to our forefathers,

to our beliefs, to our values.

Come what may, we will resist

these diabolical forces. It doesn't matter what is the cost.

Good evening.

One of Britain's biggest investors in South Africa, Barclays Bank,

have announced they're selling up.

It's the largest pull-out of foreign business to date in South Africa,

which has already seen seven major American corporations withdraw.

From the white minority government's point of view,

this is the most ominous pull-out yet.

Barclays say the decision's been taken for largely commercial reasons,

although they concede that years of campaigning

by anti-apartheid groups has also been a factor.

CHANTING

The Boycott Barclays campaign, a lot of people said,

"Oh, it's just a pathetic kind of gesture and it wouldn't made any change,"

but as a result, Barclays lost £7 billion-worth of business.

In 1969, I think we

got about 40% of the total number of new students' accounts going

in this country. In 1986, we were down to 13%.

CHEERING

People were just euphoric.

It was a great time. We really enjoyed ourselves.

We converged on a pub and got drunk.

I'd been campaigning for nearly two decades to get Barclays out.

I mean, they brought banking to South Africa,

they developed banking in South Africa.

And now even the British, even the British,

with all their historical connections to South Africa,

even they now were taking their money out.

Mrs Thatcher took a fairly hard line over the whole thing.

She would have seen it rather like

Sir George Gardener.

that very right wing MP. He rang me up to say

that we were behaving like miserable curs,

giving in to pressure.

Well, up to a point it was true.

We had a business to run and it was the right business decision to go.

It was a tremendous victory, it was our first real victory.

The rush by business to get out of South Africa is becoming a stampede.

'Foreign money has been leaving South Africa

'the most spectacular way - disinvestment.

'Some of the biggest names in business pulled out.'

'Coming as it does, after disinvestment by big American companies, like IBM...'

'..reduced or sold their investment in South Africa.'

'More than 20 companies have divested corporate holdings in South Africa.'

'The decision was made necessary by the worsening political and economic situation.'

The Ford Motor Company is shifting gears

and backing out of South Africa.

By the time Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, 155 US corporations,

98 British companies,

and more than 100 from other countries had left South Africa.

The real thing that harmed South Africa was disinvestment,

the withdrawal of investment from South Africa.

In you can isolate an open economy such as ours,

it's really like standing on somebody's oxygen pipe.

The fact that they couldn't just go outside of South Africa and do business

actually made them think about what was happening in their country

and that maybe they had to do something about it.

I think it's important for people to realise that you can make an effort

and you can make a change,

even though your part of it will be very small.

It's a drop in the ocean, but the ocean is made of drops.

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