Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
During the 1980s, as global antiapartheid sentiment grew, an international coalition of far-right activists arose to preserve racial hierarchy in South Africa and beyond. This groundbreaking book tells the story of how a transatlantic pro-apartheid movement attempted to defend white rule in South Africa—and forged enduring links between global conservatism and white power.
By mapping an international network of white supremacist organizations, Augusta Dell’Omo reveals a fundamental shift in far-right organizing in response to changing geopolitical realities. The pro-apartheid movement brought together a range of figures who sought to influence the conservative Western governments they saw as allies. As antiapartheid activism grew, the South African regime crumbled, and the post–Cold War order took shape, apartheid’s defenders adapted their ideology for a colorblind, human rights–centric, and neoliberal world. Their successes and failures shaped the antistatist trajectory of white supremacist organizing in the 1990s and beyond, planting the seeds for a global resurgence of the far right.
Saving Apartheid ranges from Reagan’s Oval Office to South Africa’s bantustans and from white women’s grassroots organizing to evangelical broadcasting, illuminating how an unlikely coalition reimagined white supremacy. Uncovering the surprising influence of apartheid’s defenders, this book offers a prehistory of the present.
— Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s
This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the motivations and constructions of global far-right networks. Dell’Omo deftly moves the literature beyond those who successfully organized against apartheid to reveal the ordinary people—from conservative Christians to Black Bantustan leaders—who united across the Atlantic to defend it.
— Jill E. Kelly, author of To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800–1996
This is a compelling and comprehensive study. Dell'Omo deftly draws together primary sources from a range of archives to uncover the networks connecting the pro-apartheid movement to the global far-right and white supremacist movements of the 1990s, clearly and cogently illuminating the tactics and rhetoric of these groups.
— Lauren Frances Turek, author of To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations
This riveting book moves beyond a predominantly state-centric understanding of Western support for apartheid to reveal how everyday actors in the United States and South Africa organized in defense of apartheid. While these campaigns eventually failed, they prefigured present-day transnational far-right networking. A crucial book for analyzing twenty-first-century global white supremacism.
— Christi van der Westhuizen, author of White Power and the Rise and Fall of the National Party
Introduction
Part I: Building the Pro-Apartheid Movement
1. Telling the Story of White Power
2. The Only True Friends South Africa Has
Part II: An International Antisanctions Campaign
3. Making and Breaking Constructive Engagement
4. White Women for Apartheid
5. Breaking with the Republican Party
Part III: White Power Without Apartheid
Interlude: Apartheid Theology
6. Human Rights for White Power
7. The Colorblind Far Right at Apartheid’s End
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Archives
Notes
Index