The Stage: Apartheid, Human Rights, and the United Nations, 1966–70

This paper uses the apartheid debate to examine how decolonization affected human rights activism at the United Nations.  It is based on archival research in Great Britain, South Africa, and the United States.  My narrative focuses attention on the activities of Enuga Reddy.  Reddy was a bureaucrat at the United Nations who coordinated anti-apartheid activities at the U.N. Apartheid Committee between 1963 and 1980.  During his initial years of service, he mostly performed research and arranged meetings for the African diplomats who spearheaded the fight for South African sanctions at the General Assembly after second-wave decolonization.  However, as African-led initiatives began to falter in the late 1960s, Reddy developed and implemented his own program of action against Pretoria.  Specifically, Reddy turned attention away from the General Assembly and began building partnerships between nonstate activists in North America and Europe.  His stated plan was not to pressure the Security Council to accept sanctions—which had been the focus of African diplomacy in the early 1960s—but to use the discourse of universal human rights to mobilize anti-apartheid sentiment among domestic populations within the United States, Great Britain, and beyond.  These efforts, controversial within the United Nations in the late 1960s, not only altered the traditional role of the U.N. in foreign affairs, but also reset the trajectory of anti-apartheid criticism in the 1970s and 1980s.  My paper, in this regard, sheds light on the relationship between nongovernmental activism and the United Nations.  It explores a transitional moment in both the human rights and anti-apartheid stories, and demonstrates, in the process, how individuals appropriated, policed, and manipulated ideas to achieve political ends in the contentious period after decolonization.