Break All Ties With Apartheid!

Break All Ties with Apartheid is a 1977 political poster designed by Mary Nash for the American Committee on Africa. Produced during the early years of organized boycott campaigns, the poster reflects a shift in anti-apartheid activism toward confronting the economic systems that sustained the regime.

By the late 1970s, activists were increasingly focused on the role of multinational corporations and extractive industries in South Africa. The diamond trade in particular, dominated by companies such as De Beers, played a central role in the country’s global economy, generating immense wealth while apartheid enforced racial exploitation at the level of labor and land.

The poster makes this relationship visible. Figures are shown enclosed within a diamond, while corporate logos and a Krugerrand coin surround them, linking human exploitation directly to global systems of profit and consumption. Rather than presenting apartheid as distant or abstract, the design connects it to materials and markets that circulated internationally.

This is not simply a poster that raises awareness. It identifies specific points of intervention and asks viewers to reconsider their relationship to them. The message is not only to recognize injustice, but to act by cutting financial ties and refusing participation in the systems it exposes.

Including this work in the People’s Graphic Design Archive helps document how graphic design functioned as a tool for accountability within the anti-apartheid movement. While the political role of boycott campaigns is widely acknowledged, the visual materials that made those systems legible to the public are less consistently preserved. Archiving this poster helps recover how design translated complex global economies into something visible, immediate, and actionable.