by Alfie Hancox

[T]he empathy between the Black oppressed transcends the barriers of parochialism [and] reaches those similarly oppressed in Toxteth, Tottenham, Brixton, Soweto… (Gilroy et al. 1986, 14)

50 years ago, scenes of Black schoolchildren in the Soweto township rising against their oppressors, along with the bloody police response, burst onto television screens around the world. Hot on the heels of the liberation of nearby Angola and Mozambique, the Soweto Uprising on 16 June 1976 shattered the internal complacency of the apartheid regime, and inspired anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance globally.

Since the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, South Africa had become a “universal metaphor” of racial oppression and resistance that, as historian Elizabeth Williams (2015) has shown, had special resonance in the settler-colony’s former imperial sovereign, Britain. News and images from the land of apartheid were constant reminders of the UK’s own colonial legacy; reminders that mediated reactions within Britain to racial injustice abroad and at home, from the postwar “colour bar” to Enoch Powell.

The Soweto rising marked a new stage of anti-apartheid struggle. Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement, which advocated psychological and political freedom from colonial oppression, inspired a younger generation of Black South Africans, cut off from the exiled guerrilla leadership of the ANC-SACP (Ellis and Sechaba 1992).

After Soweto, Black consciousness was propelled beyond South Africa’s borders through transnational activist networks, radical literature, and Black music. Soweto carried particular significance to many second-generation postcolonial immigrants in the UK, who made emotional and political connections to South Africa when confronting the racism around them in Britain’s streets, shopfloors, and schools (Connell 2019; Ramamurthy 2013).

These transmissions of Black consciousness and urban resistance reshaped anti-racist politics within Britain, turning activist confrontations with state and far-right violence during the 1970s into battles to decolonise metropolitan space and culture. This grappling with British colonial complicities (Dowden 1994), in turn, strengthened and helped concretise international solidarity with African liberation.

Revisiting Soweto’s impact in Britain helps us see the material and ideological links that bind (and continue to bind) global racial capitalism, but also the “entangled and reciprocal flows of solidarity that serve to enact social change in more than one place simultaneously” (Yaffe and Brown 2014, 34). Such multidirectional solidarities energised an anti-imperial current within British anti-racism that, despite the intervening setbacks to liberation struggles globally, reverberates in our present conjuncture.

“We shall fight like lions”: Black British Youth in Revolt

A month after the Soweto events, aggrieved African-Caribbean youth rioted through the streets of the UK’s capital city. The disorder was provoked by an aggressive police invasion of the Caribbean Carnival in Notting Hill (ostensibly to arrest pickpockets), which met with a defiant reaction. Paul Gilroy (2013) recounts how, in a remarkable collapsing of Black Atlantic space and example of “acting locally and thinking globally”, some of the young Carnival rioters took up the chant “Soweto, Soweto”.

The Carnival disturbances signalled a new Black British youth assertiveness, forged in everyday resistance to racist schooling and police harassment. This emboldenment was accompanied by a Pan-African reawakening expressed through Rastafari subculture, with its symbolic opposition to the white power “Babylon system”. Nigerian-British journalist Onyekachi Wambu remembers how “[a]ll these resonances were going on and shaped how we saw ourselves in a concrete jungle, Bob Marley and others were singing about Soweto” (Williams 2015, 129).

Notwithstanding the deep-rooted routes of Black Atlantic resistance, Soweto’s visceral impact in Britain wasn’t exclusive to immigrants of African descent. South Africa’s universal significance to anti-colonial causes was foregrounded by Biko (2002, 72), who wrote of apartheid as “a microcosm of the global confrontation between the Third World and the rich white nations”. The 1976 rising also resonated with many racialised minorities in Britain from the Indian subcontinent, who were often the principal target of the far-right National Front’s racial vigilantism.

The British Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) formed in the late 1970s drew on earlier legacies of anti-colonialism and Black Power, along with Biko’s vision of solidarity between Africans, Indians, and those of mixed descent. The AYMs built a strong presence in the Bengali ghetto of London’s East End, and the sprawling Punjabi settlement in Southall, a suburb of West London, where teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered by white racists on 4 June 1976, twelve days before the Soweto events.

Chaggar’s killing along with police indifference spurred the formation of a militant Southall Youth Movement, which took as its logo a Black clenched fist. A protest by the Asian youth demanding police justice for Chaggar quickly escalated into an uprising, accompanied with chants of “We shall fight like lions” (Ramamurthy 2013). Another mantra the AYMs adopted directly from Soweto: “Don’t mourn—mobilise”.

The AYMs as well as groups like the British Black Liberation Front (Williams 2026), allied with networks of African political exiles, confronted the UK’s neocolonial collusion in apartheid (London Mining Network 2023), and its enduring ties with the wider white-minority axis of Southern Africa. But they also connected these imperialist links to the “internal colonialism” they experienced at home in Britain.

Britain Out of Apartheid, Apartheid Out of Britain

The transnational coordinates of Black political struggle in the 1970s stretched the horizons of UK-based movements for racial justice. Rousing “imagery of black, urban insurgency” from Soweto to Notting Hill, Southall, and Lewisham encouraged the thousands of white British activists campaigning against both apartheid abroad and state and far-right violence at home to connect these two issues. (Gilroy 2002, 162; Widgery 1986).

Particularly after Soweto—which provoked a large symbolic funeral in London—British anti-racist movements made constant discursive, visual, and lyrical juxtapositions between racial oppression and resistance in South Africa and Britain. Left-wing evocation of Black militancy was sometimes instrumentalist, and didn’t always entail critical introspection about racism within British culture. Yet the cumulative effect of these transnational political identifications was to produce novel awareness of Britain’s imperial afterlives.

Apartheid analogies powerfully subverted complacent national narratives of British multiracial tolerance. They also helped make visible the “homegrown” colonial roots of the “Nazi” National Front, encouraging tentative steps to addressing the complexly tangled legacies in Britain of war and empire. Black and multicultural leftist opposition to the Front’s menacing street presence and segregationist vision of “apartheid Britain” became emblematic of a wider political struggle against colonial aftershocks in the metropole (Back 2017; Gidley 2023).

The infusion of British anti-racism with anti-colonial sentiment was exemplified by Rock Against Racism (RAR), the dynamic left-wing cultural movement against the National Front. Its huge music concerts were staged in collaboration with the Anti-Nazi League, itself roused into action by the inspiring victory of Black youth over the forces of fascism and state racism in multiethnic Lewisham (Hancox 2026).

RAR’s framing of British racism as mimetic of apartheid was encouraged by reggae artists imbued with Black consciousness like Steel Pulse, who wrote a powerful tribute to Steve Biko after his murder by South African police officers in 1977. One RAR concert projected photos of Biko’s African mourners, superimposed with the words “He will be revenged”.

The collapsing of mental boundaries between Black resistance in Britain and South Africa helped to cement solidarity with the anti-apartheid cause. A speaker at the 1978 Rock Against Racism Northern Carnival was Bolton Asian Youth Movement co-founder Ramila Patel, who had been “profoundly inspired” by the Soweto Uprising. Patel later became one of the British activists recruited by the ANC-SACP for covert missions in South Africa (The Meteor 2020).

Another anti-apartheid activist who viewed the fight against racial oppression in Britain and Africa as one was Blair Peach, who was killed by a police truncheon during the anti-fascist Southall Uprising in 1979. Like Biko, Peach became an anti-racist martyr; a connection voiced in the slogan “Southall–Soweto–Same Struggle” (Big Flame 1980).

The transposing of Black anti-imperial politics into the metropole increased awareness and recognition in Britain of the global dimensions of apartheid (Dowling 2025). As a Coventry-based anti-fascist group insisted, “[t]he present impetus of racist and fascist organisations in Britain have the same roots as apartheid in South Africa”. Consequently, the “struggle against these divisions and for the overthrow of the imperialist system that has created them is world-wide” (CCARAF c.1977).

The call of “apartheid out of Britain” was not just about South African goods but, as some activists increasingly identified, the (neo)colonial structures embedded in the British state and society. This signalled a more radical solidarity, going beyond abstract language of human rights, to confront the political connections and “spatial coimplication of colonialism, racism, and genocide” (Rothberg 2009, 107). Comparisons to Soweto didn’t necessarily erase the obvious differences between Britain and the settler-colonial African context, but instead eroded liberal myths of British multiracial and “postimperial” innocence.

Transnational Black consciousness endured in the 1980s, when the spirit of Soweto was conjured by the British inner-city uprisings of 1981 and 1986 (Brown 2011). By the time a free Mandela visited London in 1993, and compared police failings after the racist murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence to the situation in South Africa “where Black lives are cheap” (Pilkington 1993), the anti-imperial strands of global justice struggles had receded. But this loss was not permanent.

From Soweto to Gaza

The legacies of colonialism in Africa and beyond have long survived the formal dismantling of the apartheid system. From Rhodes Must Fall to Black Lives Matter, young activists have picked up the mantle of resistance to racism and imperialism globally.

Above all, the fight against what Biko identified in Soweto as settler-colonial fascism has today crystallised around Palestine, whose liberation cause has deep ties with Africa (Farrah and Dadoo 2026). The transnational dimensions of Israel’s racial genocide have been met by oppositional South–South and South–North solidarities, while the global visibility of the ANC’s black, green, and gold tricolour has been matched by the Pan-Arab black, white, green, and red. Once again, the anti-colonial front has seeped into the citadels of the Global North, where the words Free Palestine are permanently embedded in the “postimperial” urban landscape.

Another echo can be seen in the role of Black and Brown activists (especially those racialised as Muslim) in linking imperialist support for genocide (CAAT 2025) to the racist bordering and carceral violences experienced within Western capitalist democracies. This revived anti-colonial consciousness is reflected in the resurgent interest in Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian guerrilla-poet assassinated in 1972, whose parallels with the life and thought of Biko are explored in the recent work of Professor Haidar Eid (Bergh 2024).

Like Soweto, the global implications of Gaza have expanded political awareness of exploitation and oppression in ways that don’t detract from solidarity, but rather strengthen it by reminding us, as BLM UK has insisted, that “Britain is not innocent”.

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Featured image: left—“Johannesburg/Soweto” by April Killingsworth, CC BY 2.0; right—“Anti National Front Demonstration Brick Lane 1978” by Alan Denney, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. Both photographs have been cropped by the author.