Disinvestment from South Africa was first advocated in the 1960s in protest against South Africa's system of apartheid, but was not implemented on a significant scale until the mid-1980s. A disinvestment policy the U.S. adopted in 1986 in response to the disinvestment campaign is credited with playing a role in pressuring the South African government to embark on negotiations that ultimately led to the dismantling of the apartheid system.See the debate in Nature: "Boycott of Israel? It worked for South Africa", Steven Rose and Hilary Rose, Nature, volume 417, p. 221 (2002) and the response "Did an academic boycott help to end apartheid?", George Fink, Nature, Volume 417, Issue 6890, p. 690 (2002).

United Nations resolutions and embargos

In November 1962, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1761, a non-binding resolution establishing the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, and called for imposing economic and other sanctions on South Africa. Western nations and major trading partners of South Africa opposed the call for sanctions and boycotted the committee.Arianna Lisson, "The Anti-Apartheid Movement, Britain and South Africa: Anti-Apartheid Protest vs Real Politik" , Ph.D. Dissertation, 15 September 2000

Following the passage of this resolution, the UK-based Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) spearheaded the arrangements for an international conference on sanctions to be held in London in April 1964. According to Arianna Lisson, The aim of the Conference was to work out the practicability of economic sanctions and their implications on the economies of South Africa, the UK, the U.S., and the Protectorates. Knowing that the strongest opposition to the application of sanctions came from the West (and within the West, Britain), the Committee made every effort to attract as wide and varied a number of speakers and participants as possible so that the Conference findings would be regarded as objective.

According to Lisson, the International Conference for Economic Sanctions Against South Africa established the necessity, the legality, and the practicability of internationally organised sanctions against South Africa, whose policies were seen to have become a direct threat to peace and security in Africa and the world. Its findings also pointed out that in order to be effective, a programme of sanctions would need the active participation of Britain and the U.S., who were also the main obstacle to the implementation of such a policy.

The British response

The conference was not successful in persuading Britain to take up economic sanctions against South Africa. Rather, the British government remained firm in its view that the imposition of sanctions would be unconstitutional "because we do not accept that this situation in South Africa constitutes a threat to international peace and security and we do not, in any case, believe that sanctions would have the effect of persuading the South African Government to change its policies".

The AAM tried to make sanctions an issue in the 1964 general election in Britain. Candidates were asked to state their position on economic sanctions and other punitive measures against the South African government. Most candidates who responded said they supported sanctions. However, after the Labour Party swept to power, commitment to the anti-apartheid cause dissipated. In short order, Labour Party leader Harold Wilson told the press that his party was "not in favour of trade sanctions partly because, even if fully effective, they would harm the people we are most concerned about – the Africans and those white South Africans who are having to maintain some standard of decency there". Even so, Lisson writes that the "AAM still hoped that the new Labour Government would be more sensitive to the demands of public opinion than the previous Government." But by the end of 1964 it was clear that the election of the Labour Party had made little difference in the government's overall unwillingness to impose sanctions. Lisson summarized the situation at the UN in 1964: At the UN, Britain consistently refused to accept that the situation in South Africa fell under Chapter VII of the [United Nations] Charter. Instead, in collaboration with the U.S., it worked for a carefully worded appeal on the Rivonia and other political trials to try to appease Afro-Asian countries and public opinion at home and abroad; by early 1965 the issue of sanctions had lost momentum. According to Lisson, Great Britain rejected sanctions because of its economic interests in South Africa, which would have been put at risk if any type of meaningful economic sanctions had been put in place.

United Nations embargos In 1977, the voluntary UN arms embargo became mandatory with the passing of United Nations Security Council Resolution 418. On 20 November 1987 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a voluntary international oil embargo.

United States campaign (1977–1989)

The Sullivan Principles (1977)

When anti-apartheid activists in the U.S. found that Washington was unwilling to get involved in economically isolating South Africa, they responded by lobbying individual business and institutional investors to end their involvement with or investments in the apartheid state as a matter of corporate social responsibility. This campaign was coordinated by several faith-based institutional investors, who eventually came together to form the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. An array of celebrities, including singer Paul Simon, also participated.

Part of this campaign centered around the so-called Sullivan Principles, authored by and named after the Rev. Dr. Leon Sullivan. Leon Sullivan was an African-American preacher in Philadelphia who in 1977 was also a board member of the corporate giant General Motors. At that time General Motors was the largest employer of black people in South Africa. The principles required that, as a condition of doing business, the corporation ensure that all employees be treated equally regardless of race and in an integrated environment. These principles directly conflicted with the mandated racial discrimination and segregation policies of apartheid-era South Africa.

While part of the anti-apartheid movement lobbied individual businesses to adopt and comply with the Sullivan Principles, the movement opened an additional front with institutional investors. Besides advocating that institutional investors withdraw any direct investments in South Africa-based companies, anti-apartheid activists also lobbied for the divestment from all U.S.-based companies having South African interests that had not yet adopted the Sullivan Principles. Institutional investors such as public pension funds were the most susceptible to these lobbying efforts.

Public companies with South African interests were confronted on two levels. First, concerned stockholders submitted shareholder resolutions (which were routinely rejected due to management proxy votes), and they could affect corporate reputations. Second, the companies were presented with a significant financial threat if major institutional investors decided to withdraw their investments.

Achieving critical mass (1984–1989)

The disinvestment campaign in the United States, which had been in existence for two decades, gained a critical mass following the black political resistance to the 1983 South African constitution, a document that further solidified the system of racial segregation and discrimination. Richard Knight writes: In a total rejection of apartheid, black South Africans mobilized to make the townships ungovernable, black local officials resigned in droves, and the government declared a State of Emergency in 1985 and used thousands of troops to quell "unrest". Television audiences throughout the world were to watch almost nightly reports of massive resistance to apartheid, the growth of a democratic movement, and the savage police and military response.Richard Knight. Chapter: "Sanctions, Disinvestment, and U.S. Corporations in South Africa". Sanctioning Apartheid (Africa World Press), 1990

The result of the widely televised South African response was "a dramatic expansion of international actions to isolate apartheid, actions that combined with the internal situation to force dramatic changes in South Africa's international economic relations".

Higher education endowments

Student anti-apartheid activists in the US demanded that their colleges and universities divest from companies that traded or had operations in South Africa. At many universities, students and faculty pressured the board of trustees to take action on the issue. The first anti-apartheid organization on university campuses in the United States was CUAA, founded by Ramon Sevilla at the University of California, Berkeley. Sevilla had support from Nelson Mandela, with whom he was in communication while Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, and he was also in contact with the African National Congress (ANC).

Some of the most effective actions in support of divestment from South Africa took place in the years 1976–1985. Sevilla travelled throughout the US and Europe gathering support for sanctions against South Africa, and he led a successful effort to force the University of California to divest all of its investments in companies doing business in South Africa. In an anti-apartheid protest in April 1986, 61 students were arrested after building a shantytown in front of the chancellor's office at UC Berkeley. At Occidental College in Los Angeles, future US president Barack Obama was one of the divestment activists.

As a result of these organised divestment campaigns, the boards of trustees of several colleges and universities voted to divest completely from companies with major South African interests. The first of these was Hampshire College in 1977.

These initial successes set a pattern that was later repeated at other campuses across the country. Activism surged in 1984 on the wave of public interest created by the wide television coverage of resistance efforts of black South Africans. According to Knight's analysis, over the next few years the number of educational institutions fully or partially divesting from South Africa increased as follows: 1984 1987 1988 Number of institutions divesting 53 128 155

Michigan State University The disinvestment campaign on campuses began in 1977 at Michigan State University and Stanford University.Schutt, Randy. "A Powerful and Inspiring Campaign: A Short History of SCRIP's Efforts to End Stanford University's Support of South African Apartheid in 1977". Vernal Education Project. 3 February 1998.D. (pseudonym), Bob. "Students Organize Against Stanford's Investment Policy". Grapevine. Volume 5, Number 6. Palo Alto, Calif. June 1977. It had some early successes in 1978 at Michigan State University, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Following the Michigan State University divestiture in 1978, the Michigan State Legislature in 1982 voted for divestiture by all of Michigan's public colleges and universities, an action later struck down as unconstitutional by the Michigan Court of Appeals in response to a suit against the Act by the University of Michigan.

Columbia University