Anti-Apartheid Activism: The Reasons and The Action

Anti-Apartheid Activism: The Reasons and The Action 

An evening of discussion, with panel contributions and clips from archival documentary footage

A panel discussion with clips of archive footage from documentaries about apartheid & the liberation of South Africa from the 1960s to 1990s. A special focus on activism against apartheid in the Manchester area.

Friday, April 25, 2025
6:00 - 7:00 PM
The Portico Library
57 Mosley StreetManchester, England, M2 3HY

Free to attend but registration required: Book here.

Panel discussants, and their focused topics, include:

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The evening will also offer a last chance to see Norman Kaplan’s All Shall Be Afforded Dignity Exhibition at the Portico Library.

This display of artwork marks 30 years since the first democratic elections in South Africa. Norman Kaplan’s linocuts and prints speak to what life was like under the apartheid regime and remind us of the enduring relationship between art and protest.

‘All Shall Be Afforded Dignity!’ is curated around the work (of the same name) that artist Norman Kaplan made in 1996 in response to a call for art to celebrate the Constitution of the new democratic South Africa. The exhibition is organised by Anti-Apartheid Legacy, Action for Southern Africa and The Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives.

At The Portico Library, Kaplan’s prints and political cartoons are displayed alongside three books from the nineteenth and early twentieth century on Southern Africa in the Portico Library’s collection. The display will ask visitors to consider the legacy of imperialism, conquest and romanticised visions of Africa, as depicted in Olive Schreiner’s Life on an African Farm and other selected items from the Portico’s historical collection.

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Statement from Norman Kaplan on the opening of the exhibition of his prints and cartoons at the Portico Library, Manchester, 13 March 2025

‘Greetings to all. I would like to thank the Portico Library for hosting this exhibition as part of the 30th Anniversary celebrating the end of apartheid in South Africa and ushering in a new democratic dispensation. I can think of no more fitting venue. It is, for me, a great honour and privilege for my work to be situated amongst such a wonderful collection of books in such a beautiful setting. It is an essential repository of history, art, politics, ideas, wonder and imagination, celebrating the achievements of the human spirit.

Marx commented that there was a time when ignorance was considered to be a negative quality. We are now living in an age where it is a quality, not only to be emulated, but applauded, lauded and rewarded. When the truth of history is being, not only, demeaned and distorted but, by the click of a finger on a keyboard, completely deleted. The poet Heinrich Heine prophetically wrote, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.” Today, this can be updated to “Where they delete books, they will ultimately delete people.” ‘

Artwork by George Nene (courtesy of Frontline States Ltd), as displayed on the cover of Art from the Frontline, the celebratory catalogue accompanying the 1990 exhibition of over 200 artworks by artists from the Frontline States (Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe), which toured Scotland, England and Ireland. In the Manchester area, it showed at Salford’s City Art Gallery.