Lessons from the student anti-apartheid movement
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A powerful campus protest and boycott movement in the US played a crucial role in helping to bring down apartheid in South Africa. Today, many US student activists are heading back to school, ready to continue the fight to end what they refer to as Israeli apartheid and genocide. What lessons do the veterans of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement see echoing today?
In this episode:
- Erin Lawson, Student Organizer
- Pearl Robinson, Professor of Political Science at Tufts University
- Bill Minter, Editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin
- Thula Simpson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pretoria
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Amy Walters, with Ashish Malhotra, Shraddha Joshi, Hagir Saleh, Duha Mosaad, and Natasha Del Toro, in for Malika Bilal.
The Take production team is Amy Walters, Ashish Malhotra, Catherine Nouhan, Chloe K. Li, Duha Mosaad, Hagir Saleh, Khaled Soltan, Marcos Bartolomé, Sarí el-Khalili, Shraddha Joshi, Sonia Bhagat, and Tamara Khandaker.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our lead of audience development and engagement is Aya Elmileik and Adam Abou-Gad is our engagement producer.
Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, we ask a big question. How is Freedom One? |
| 0:17.0 | Black and white, we are going to be free, all of us together. |
| 0:23.4 | How American students helped dismantle apartheid a generation ago, |
| 0:28.2 | and how today's students are rising to confront what many human rights groups call another apartheid regime. |
| 0:37.1 | I'm Natasha D'Ltoro, and this is the take. |
| 0:46.8 | I see this as nearing our South Africa moment, Palestine's South Africa moment. |
| 0:58.2 | Omar Bargudi. |
| 1:03.9 | He's known to many as the founder of the BDS movement, boycott, divest, and sanctions. |
| 1:10.7 | Since the war on Gaza, activists worldwide renewed calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel, arguing that this nonviolent |
| 1:12.8 | approach played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa. |
| 1:18.9 | BDS has been around since the early 2000s, encouraging individuals, organizations, universities, |
| 1:26.3 | anyone and everyone to keep their money out of Israel and anything |
| 1:30.2 | that supports the Israeli occupation. |
| 1:33.1 | But Omar learned about all this a few decades ago, in the 80s, when he was a student at |
| 1:38.1 | Columbia University. |
| 1:40.2 | And in 1985, I played a tiny role in a protest movement that |
| 1:44.7 | blockaded a key Columbia College building. |
| 1:47.8 | Colombia pays the bills. |
| 1:50.0 | A bar-tide kills. |
| 1:51.7 | Columbia University students say they will defy a court order to end their protest against the |
| 1:58.2 | The student blockade at Columbia University went into its |
... |
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