IT WASN’T just the US Civil Rights movement and its leaders like Jesse Jackson who supported the anti-apartheid struggle. The truth is, hundreds of ordinary Americans, sent money, literature and goodwill to the movement within our country.

Watching President Ramaphosa address the Jackson funeral last month, I wast struck by the immediate contradiction. On the one hand a narrative and foreign policy that rejects the United States, while on the other, an attempt by our country to embrace the civil rights movement.

I personally received aid packages. My job at South Press and New Nation was literally sponsored by USAid and the Catholic Bishops Conference. Titles like Grassroots and New Ground would not have reached the newsstand if it were not for Nordic Aid and other foreign aid donors, none of which were located in the Middle East.

Jesse Jackson alongside exiled South Africans like Dennis Brutus, was responsible for the massive movement against apartheid that camped out on US campuses, and resulted in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 (CAA), a landmark U.S. law passed by Congress to force the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid system.

CAA imposed significant economic sanctions, including bans on new investments, bank loans, and imports of goods like coal and textiles, effectively forcing numerous U.S. companies to withdraw from the country. The same piece of legislation gave birth to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in the early 1990s as South Africa transitioned to democracy, and CAA was repealed.

And it wasn’t just the USA which did this. Israel imposed sanctions on South Africa one year after the CAA was passed, severing ties in 1987. “There is no room for discrimination, whether it’s called apartheid or any other name“, then foreign minister Shimon Peres said in the New York Times. “We repeat that we express our denunciation of the system of apartheid. The Jewish outlook is that every man was born in the image of God and created equal.”

Yet the lie and propaganda continues today, perpetrated by ultra-leftists who claim that it was Cuba, Iran and North Korea, rather than a mass democratic movement, that liberated our country, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Take the bizarre Cuban claim, which is really a claim about its involvement in the Angolan war, most notably the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in which Soviet supplied MIGs piloted by Cubans were able to stop the SADF offense, in what was also referred to as the Border War. Hardly a victory.

Or the Iranian claim, which ignores a series of covert arms-for-oil deals made with the apartheid state by the Mullahs, deals which literally propped up the regime even while the West had embargoed and sanctioned the country.

Ask any brainwashed idiot and they will spin a one-sided yarn about solidarity that invokes a spy vs spy, Cold War narrative. Okay, so what if the Americans never supplied us with weapons, preferring to send dollars while the Soviet Union literally dumped cheap AK47 rifles across the continent and trained combatants in the belief that the future would be Red, and everyone would be living under International Communism?

That story didn’t end well.

While our negotiated peace and democracy has matured, it is time that we re-appraise the myths we tell ourselves and future generations, lest we make the mistake of thinking Jesse Jackson was a communist from Russia instead of a US civil rights leader