National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation

NATIONAL ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENT IN SOLIDARITY WITH AFRICAN LIBERATION. Founded by more than 900 people in Chicago in October 1973, the National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation (NAIMSAL), was a CPUSA-initiated and led African solidarity organization that called for comprehensive sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

At NAIMSAL’s founding convention, African American CPUSA leader Henry Winston, who was considered the moving force behind the organization, called for a “massive anti-imperialist movement to compel the unseating” of South Africa from the United Nations. Anti-apartheid work in solidarity with the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) would become a central component of NAIMSAL’s work for years to come. Among other activities, by March 1975 NAIMSAL would deliver 100,000 signatures to the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid demanding sanctions against the racist regime.

NAIMSAL not only campaigned against apartheid in South Africa, but also fought against Portuguese colonialism and the white-minority Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) government. It supported numerous African liberation organizations, such as South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), as well as the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), among others.

For much of its existence, Communist Tony Monteiro, considered the youthful head of the movement that spearheaded the campaign to expel South Africa, served as NAIMSAL’s executive secretary. Monteiro and other NAIMSAL leaders, such as Carlton Goodlett and fellow CPUSA leaders Ronald H. Stevenson, Roscoe Proctor, Charlene Mitchell, and Angela Davis, participated in international conferences designed to bring domestic pressure to bear against colonialism and imperialism, and for African liberation.

Though headquartered in New York, NAIMSAL chapters were established throughout the United States. Coupled with grassroots activism and local protests, NAIMSAL chapters invited ANC, SACP, and South African Congress of Trade Unions leaders, among others, to the United States to speak at union halls, college campuses, churches, and with elected officials, often in defiance of the State Department.

For example, the Philadelphia NAIMSAL chapter protested South Africa’s participation in the International Lawn Tennis Associations Federation Cup tournament. The Rhode Island chapter helped initiate and lead the struggle against the sale of the South African Kruggerrand and met with the vice president of the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Bank; it also hosted ANC leader Themba Vilakazi, who noted that “mass pressure” has “slowed the buying of South African gold by U.S. banks, which was a victory against apartheid.” The Chicago chapter hosted Dr. Callistus Ndlovu and Mtshana Ncube, both ZAPU leaders. Ncube articulated a familiar theme, highlighting NAIMSAL’s duel role as an African solidarity organization and an organization fighting for African American equality. “The enemies of the Zimbabwe struggle for self-determination are the same enemies of Afro-Americans fighting for human rights,” she said. The Los Angeles chapter, under the leadership of Frances E. Williams, fought to prevent the building of the South African Consulate.

NAIMSAL leaders also facilitated dialogue between African liberation leaders and prominent Black elected officials, such as Coleman Young, Harold Washington, and Gus Savage, and Black trade union leaders, such as Cleveland Robinson. Many NAIMSAL affiliated Black elected officials and trade union leaders (for example, through the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists in St. Louis, MO), led the domestic divestment movement against the apartheid regime.

NAIMSAL was an early advocate for the freedom of Nelson Mandela, too. By the mid-1980s, NAIMSAL along with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the United States Peace Council, presented tens of thousands of petition signatures to the United Nations calling for the release of Mandela. NAIMSAL’s support of Mandela would not be forgotten; in 1991, as socialism was collapsing Mandela invited CPUSA leaders Charlene Mitchell and Angela Davis to his Soweto home to thank them and their U.S. comrades for their years of support.

Like the Communist-led Council on African Affairs in the 1940s and 1950s, NAIMSAL sought to merge anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism with the struggle for African American equality. It challenged late Cold War militarism, anti-communism, and racism, while building a cross-Atlantic solidarity movement in support of African liberation. NAIMSAL “can be the vehicle for the isolation of South Africa from all progressive mankind. It can also be the vehicle for forcing the U.S. break diplomatic and trade relations with South Africa and for driving South Africa out of the UN,” noted CPUSA leader Roscoe Proctor in 1973. While there were a number of domestic organizations protesting South African apartheid and fighting for African liberation, this is NAIMSAL’s legacy.

According to Charlene Mitchell, NAIMSAL “laid the basis for the larger African liberation support movement that developed in the 1980s.” And Winston, through his connections with African leaders, guided NAIMSAL and injected “a consistent anti-imperialist content to the then-developing movements in solidarity with African liberation.” Additionally, to the then Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL) leader, Joe Sims, “We knew that the SACP and ANC were calling for sanctions. NAIMSAL provided the opportunity to place that issue front and center. It laid the basis for the broader anti-apartheid movement to grow.”

For 18 years, NAIMSAL struggled to build cross-Atlantic solidarity with African liberation movements. It led protests, testified at the UN, participated in international conferences, defied the State Department, fought to free Mandela, and introduced a new generation of union, community, and student activists to anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist international solidarity – concepts thought to have become marginal after the near destruction of the Communist-led left and the demise of the Council on African Affairs and the Civil Rights Congress in the mid-1950s. Though never large, NAIMSAL would continue until the early 1990s when the demise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, as well as the split in the CPUSA, made its continuation untenable.

Horne, Gerald. White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. the Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela. New York: International Publishers, 2019.

Pecinovsky, Tony. Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 2019.

Winston, Henry. Grasp the Hand of Solidarity, Political Affairs, February 1974.