Mike Terry:MIKE TERRY, who has died aged 61 of a heart attack, ran Britain's Anti-Apartheid Movement (AA) for nearly two decades until it went out of business, mission accomplished, in 1994. Among British political campaigns, only the battle against slavery and the unfinished business of nuclear disarmament had lasted longer.
Then he turned to teaching, and was taken ill after a workout at a gym in preparation for a charity run in aid of a South African school project.
Although Mike was born in north London, his life was dedicated to and shaped by Africa. His father Paul was a BBC sound engineer, and his mother Elizabeth was active in the Congregational Church.
On finishing his A-levels at Mill Hill school, north London, Mike went to southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to teach in a mission school, and encountered racism for the first time.
A white truck driver who gave the hitch-hiking teenager a lift shouted: "It's bastards like you that will hand us over to the 'munts' [pejorative term for black Africans]." But he also found the missionaries paternalistic towards black people. He studied physics at Birmingham University.
It was 1969, the year of on-field demonstrations against the touring Springboks rugby team. On leaving, he became national secretary of the National Union of Students, responsible for international policy.
Two years at the research department of Canon John Collins's International Defence and Aid Fund led him, in 1975, to AA's cramped rooms in the district of central London known as Fitzrovia. For several years it had been presided over by Ethel de Keyser, an emigré South African, as was most of the leadership at the time. During her tenure, the struggle had been in the doldrums. All changed nine months after Mike took over, with the Soweto student uprising of June 1976, followed by the murder of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko in September 1977. These events at last stirred the British public to thoughts of sanctions, the central theme of the AA story.
Mike, a self-effacing team man, and a tiny nucleus of assistants and advisers built up around 200 local AA groups across Britain, and they gave the sanctions campaign a cutting edge.
But it cried out for a symbolic figure - one who at the time was languishing in prison on Robben Island. A UN civil servant, Enuga Reddy, discovered the date of Nelson Mandela's birth and pressed Mike into action.
On Mandela's 60th birthday, July 18th, 1978, a group of Labour MPs at the House of Commons cut a cake with 60 candles. It was the spark that made Mandela and the freedom struggle inseparable.
Tall, sometimes stooping from a workload that others might have buckled under, Mike commanded enormous respect from the growing number of AA employees. "Sometimes we would be in the office until 5am and people slept there," he recalled.
When rebellion swept through South Africa's townships in 1985, Pretoria imposed a state of emergency. Support for sanctions mushroomed. In 1994, after the democratic elections that swept Mandela and the ANC to power, AA was disbanded.
Mike made a clean break. In his late 40s, he retrained as a teacher, and taught at two London schools. He received an OBE for his AA work. His partner Monica Shama, Andrew, his son by an earlier relationship, and his mother Elizabeth, survive him.
Michael Denis Alastair Terry: born October 17th. 1947; died December 2nd, 2008