For the first half of 2024, UCL students have been organising demonstrations against Israel’s attacks on Gaza. In May 2024, they joined university students across the world in establishing an encampment on the Main Quad led by the society Students for Justice in Palestine. The protesters have specifically criticised connections between UCL and Israel, calling on the university to divest from companies ‘complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and upholding the system of apartheid’ and establish partnerships with Palestinian universities and students.
The encampment follows a 34-day occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room by UCL Action for Palestine, which students renamed the ‘Apartheid Free Zone’, between March and April. Students held talks with Palestinian academics, reading groups, and other workshops.
These recent protests parallel previous activism by UCL students that challenged the university’s affiliation with past apartheid regimes. As part of my research for a revised campus history tour, I visited Special Collections to review material related to past student organising against UCL’s connections to oppressive governments in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
The Beginnings of Anti-Apartheid Activism at UCL
In response to students’ participation in anti-apartheid demonstrations in London, UCL students created the Joint Action Committee Against Racial Intolerance (JACARI) in 1963 ‘to further the cause of racial equality in any part of the world’. The society helped establish the South African Scholarship Appeal within the Students’ Union, which raised funds for scholarships that enabled Black South African students who were denied access to universities in their home country to study at UCL. The scholarship continued for over three decades. JACARI also joined anti-apartheid marches in London, donated textbooks to South African schools, and held talks and discussions about racism in London and abroad - including with a member of the African National Congress and the Trinidadian writer CLR James.
Students directly challenged the university administration’s ambivalent positions on apartheid activism. In March 1965, JACARI planned a ‘South Africa Week’ to educate students about apartheid and collect funds for ‘those who are suffering under apartheid’. As part of the initiative, they wanted to curate an exhibition in the South Cloisters with photographs and documents about the Sharpeville massacre. In 1960, South African police had opened fire on a crowd of Black protesters, killing 69 people and injuring over 180, many of them children. The Provost, Ifor Evans, rejected their request, writing to the Union that while ‘all the members of the College are likely to be against apartheid … apartheid is after all a political issue and, if we approve of this, we would have no grounds for turning down exhibitions on which opinion in the College might be much divided’.
Divestment was another major focus of students’ anti-apartheid activism. According to documents from the Socialist Society, a Students’ Union committee found that three members of the College Committee (UCL’s governing body at the time) led companies that operated in and supported South Africa and Rhodesia, and that the University and the Union invested in companies operating in those regimes. In 1969, the Students’ Union voted that the College should not invest in any company registered in South Africa, and that these committee members should either resign from their positions within these companies or from College Committee. In 1972, UCL students established an Anti-Apartheid group at the university, which organised demonstrations and challenged the university to sever its ties to apartheid regimes in southern Africa. The Union continued campaigning for divestment throughout the 1970s. These demands echo the calls for divestment from Israel and the military industrial complex that we see today.
Another tenet of students’ anti-apartheid activism focused on the direct connections between UCL and the University College of Rhodesia (UCR). In 1955, the University of London entered into a ‘scheme of special relation’ with UCR, which meant that UCR was granted a royal charter and its graduates received University of London degrees. University of London administrators argued that this relationship enabled them to ensure that UCR remained multiracial; students contended that the special relation legitimised the racist regime in Rhodesia.
On October 21, 1969, a group of about thirty University of London students marched to Senate House to protest the university’s connections to UCR. A group of administrators barred the doors and denied the students entry despite their library cards. When a group of protesters attempted to follow someone into the building, violence ensued. Students say that staff assaulted them, while the police charged the students with assaulting staff. One student was hospitalised, and five people (including one non-student) were arrested. According to the 1971 Students’ Union handbook, two students were eventually convicted of unlawful assembly and assault. One of those students was deported to America and then conscripted into the U.S. Army in Vietnam. The harsh consequences that these students faced strengthened student outcry about the university’s Rhodesian policies. Over 2,000 students gathered at a demonstration demanding the resignation of the Principal of the University of London, Sir Douglas Logan, and the Senate Clerk. It was at a Students’ Union meeting after the Senate House protest that students voted for divestment.
In 1970, the University of London began ending its special relation, but students argued this was initiated by Rhodesia’s Prime Minister Ian Smith.
Pro-Palestine Protest, Then and Now
Political education also links previous activism related to South Africa and Palestine. In their descriptions of the South African Scholarship Appeal, students wrote that the appeal would ‘educate the college community about the appalling racialism in South Africa and to raise their political awareness to oppose apartheid in all shapes and forms’. Pro-Palestine student groups in the 1980s also embraced an educational purpose. The Arab Society was established in 1971 to ‘to promote the understanding between students of the Arab’s problems, especially the Palestinian plight, to publicise Arab culture, and to create relations between Arab students and U.C. students’. In 1973, the society created a pamphlet about recent Israeli attacks in Libya, Lebanon, and Syria, and described the displacement of 1,500,000 Palestinians into refugee camps. In 1986, students established the Friends of Palestine Society. The society’s term card that year explained the history of Palestine and described upcoming events including a talk by Medical Relief Committee workers from the Occupied Territories.
The cover of the 1986 Friends of Palestine pamphlet features two poems by Palestinian writers. This mirrors current activists’ use of the poem ‘If I Must Die’ by Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian poet who studied for an MA at UCL in 2007. Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023. In the poem, Alareer tells the reader to sell his things to buy cloth and make a kite. One of the protesters’ demands is that UCL acknowledge Alareer’s death. Students organised a vigil in December and have also incorporated quotations from Alareer’s poetry and kites into their signs and iconography.
The current wave of pro-Palestine activism at UCL comes from a long history of student advocacy. From action challenging the university’s complicity in oppressive regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa to decades of student organising related to Palestine, students have reflected on their university’s relation to conflict. Today’s protests are an extension of this history of solidarity activism.
