“There Must be No Interference with the Free Choice of the Consumer”: markets, boycotts and anti-apartheid in Thatcher’s Britain

The anti-apartheid boycott of South African consumer goods was a foundational symbol and tactic of the solidarity movement that emerged in Britain in the late 1950s; by the late 1980s it was a feature of a social movement that, by some accounts, had persuaded over a quarter of British consumers to refuse to add ‘the Fruits of Apartheid’ to their shopping basket. Histories of the anti-apartheid movement have attested to the ubiquitous appeal of the consumer boycott (even when questioning its ultimate ‘success’), but its wider historical significance remains under-explored. The consumer boycott connected politics to forms of everyday action and practice: it was predicated on the assumption that political choices are made in supermarkets. The boycott was contradictory: a function of an individual consumer’s engagement in the market, an expression of their own moral choices and tastes, and simultaneously an act un-related to the practice of shopping and centred on the politics of anti-racism. This paper focuses on the interactions between consumers, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and retailers during the 1980s and makes some preliminary observations about their relevance to recent works exploring the contemporary history of neo-liberalism and the politics of consumption.