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A disinvestment policy the US adopted in 1986 in response to the disinvestment campaign is credited with playing a role in pressuring the South African government to embark on negotiations that ultimately led to the dismantling of the apartheid system.[2]
Higher education endowments
Student anti-apartheid activists in the US demanded that their colleges and universities divest from companies that traded or had operations in South Africa. At many universities, students and faculty pressured the board of trustees to take action on the issue. The first anti-apartheid organization on university campuses in the United States was CUAA, founded by Ramon Sevilla at the University of California, Berkeley. Sevilla had support from Nelson Mandela, with whom he was in communication while Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, and he was also in contact with the African National Congress (ANC).[citation needed]
Some of the most effective actions in support of divestment from South Africa took place in the years 1976"1985. Sevilla travelled throughout the US and Europe gathering support for sanctions against South Africa, and he led a successful effort to force the University of California to divest all of its investments in companies doing business in South Africa. In an anti-apartheid protest in April 1986, 61 students were arrested after building a shantytown in front of the chancellor's office at UC Berkeley.[8] At Occidental College in Los Angeles, future US president Barack Obama was one of the divestment activists.[9]
As a result of these organised divestment campaigns, the boards of trustees of several colleges and universities voted to divest completely from companies with major South African interests. The first of these was Hampshire College in 1977.
These initial successes set a pattern that was later repeated at other campuses across the country. Activism surged in 1984 on the wave of public interest created by the wide television coverage of resistance efforts of black South Africans. According to Knight's analysis,[6] over the next few years the number of educational institutions fully or partially divesting from South Africa increased as follows:
Those that will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.