Robert F. Kennedy's 1966 Tour of South Africa and Tanzania

In June 1966, US Senator Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy, undertook a tour of southern and eastern Africa that made him one of the most prominent American political figures to confront apartheid directly on South African soil. Kennedy had been invited by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), the country’s leading anti-apartheid student organization, to deliver its annual Day of Affirmation address. He arrived in South Africa on June 4, 1966, accompanied by his wife Ethel and a small group of aides, at a time when the apartheid government routinely denied entry visas to prominent critics and closely monitored the visits of those it did admit.

The centerpiece of the trip came on June 6, when Kennedy addressed roughly 18,000 students at the University of Cape Town. His speech, since remembered as the “Ripple of Hope” address, drew an implicit parallel between South Africa’s racial order and the unfinished business of civil rights in the United States, and included the line for which it is best remembered: that each person who acts against injustice “sends forth a ripple of hope,” and that countless ripples from different sources can “build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” During the same South African leg of the trip, Kennedy met with Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC president and 1960 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was living under a government banning order that restricted his movement and barred South African media from quoting him; the meeting was one of the only ways news of Luthuli’s views reached the South African public that year, since foreign correspondents traveling with Kennedy could report what a domestic outlet could not.

From South Africa, Kennedy’s tour continued north to Tanzania, where he met President Julius Nyerere in Dar es Salaam around June 10, 1966. Newsreel footage from the visit shows the two leaders touring the grounds of State House together with their wives, part of a broader diplomatic welcome Nyerere extended to a rare high-profile American visitor sympathetic to African liberation movements at the height of the Cold War, when Tanzania was already hosting exiled fighters from South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia. Kennedy’s African tour, and the Cape Town speech in particular, became a touchstone moment cited by later generations of activists on both continents, remembered as one of the few instances an American official of his stature spoke directly against apartheid inside South Africa rather than from a distance. Kennedy was assassinated less than two years later, in June 1968, while campaigning for the US presidency.