Conclusion: Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society

Abstract

In retrospect, support to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa might appear to have been something uncontroversial in most parts of the world. And sometimes it was. At certain moments, events in South Africa that were extensively reported by mass media and caused a moral outrage all over the world made it easier to get public attention for Anti-Apartheid organizations; as for example immediately after the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, the Soweto uprising in 1976 or the killing of Steven Biko in 1977. But to sustain support to the struggle in South Africa against apartheid through the decades from the 1950s until the 1990s, and especially to support the call for sanctions made by the South African liberation movement, was not always an easy affair. Even at those moments when the major media’s attention to, and explicitly expressed indignation over, the apartheid regime peaked, it did not necessarily mean that it was in favour of the Anti-Apartheid movement.