Humanitarianism and Human Rights in Global Anti-Apartheid

This chapter examines two concepts that played a significant role in providing an ideological framework that was able to foster global solidarity with the aims and agendas of South African liberation movements. International solidarity against apartheid relied on the effective reconciliation of global and local issues; on the capacity of activists to imagine themselves as part of a global endeavour that was at the same time connected to local concerns and everyday experiences. This chapter argues that humanitarian ideals helped to shape a set of shared assumptions regarding racial equality and framed global responses to the development of apartheid around perceptions of ‘victimhood’ ‘crisis’ and universal needs. At the same time, global anti-apartheid was consolidated within supra-national organisations such as the UN and became a focus of the nascent discourse of human rights. Ultimately, global anti-apartheid was constructed in the minds of individual activists; concepts of humanitarian need and human rights were significant insofar as they prompted activists to imagine the ways in which they were implicated in the injustice of apartheid.