Jeremy Corbyn's 1984 Arrest at an Anti-Apartheid Protest in London

Through the 1980s, the pavement outside South Africa House on Trafalgar Square in London became one of the most sustained sites of anti-apartheid protest in Britain, as activists from the Anti-Apartheid Movement and its affiliated City of London Anti-Apartheid Group maintained a near-continuous picket demanding the release of Nelson Mandela and an end to apartheid rule. In June 1984, the Metropolitan Police moved to ban demonstrations directly outside the embassy, a restriction protesters viewed as a direct attempt to shut down one of the movement’s most visible and disruptive tactics. Rather than comply, members of the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group organized a deliberate campaign of civil disobedience to defy the ban and force the police to either back down or make mass arrests.

Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbench Labour MP representing Islington North who had been active in anti-apartheid campaigning, joined the picket during this period of defiance and was arrested alongside roughly 100 other demonstrators for breaching the ban on protesting outside the embassy. Research by Dr. Gavin Brown, a geographer who studied the British anti-apartheid movement’s archives and protest photography, later identified Corbyn as one of a small number of sitting politicians arrested during this specific wave of embassy protests, most of whom were otherwise unfamiliar faces among the broader body of activists risking arrest. A photograph of Corbyn’s arrest, taken by photographer Rob Scott, resurfaced decades later and became widely circulated as documentation of his activist record predating his rise to national political prominence.

The sustained pressure from the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group’s civil disobedience campaign contributed to the eventual reversal of the police ban, restoring the protesters’ ability to demonstrate directly outside the embassy, a small but concrete tactical victory in the broader, decades-long British anti-apartheid campaign that combined direct action, consumer boycotts, and parliamentary pressure through the 1980s. Corbyn’s 1984 arrest sits within that wider British movement, which also included high-profile figures maintaining a four-year continuous picket outside South Africa House beginning in 1986 and helped keep sustained public pressure on the British government to support sanctions against Pretoria, even as Margaret Thatcher’s government resisted the harshest measures being pushed at the Commonwealth and United Nations level.