Word: africa
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Amid a brewing global debate about how best to address the system of racial apartheid in South Africa, Harvard’s graduating classes in the mid-1980s sought to bring the issue closer to home. Beginning with the class of 1983, graduating seniors created an alternative fund to the traditional senior gift called the Endowment for Divestiture in an effort to pressure the University to divest its endowment funds from companies doing business in South Africa—a call that echoed the United Nation’s similar recommendation...
...divestiture first arose as a major issue in the late 1970s when a group of students seized then President Derek C. Bok’s office in 1978 and later organized a torchlight procession through the streets of Cambridge to protest Harvard’s continued investment in South Africa. Approximately three thousand people participated in the torchlight parade, which was followed by a day-long blockade of University Hall...
...University’s ownership of stock in companies that conducted business in South Africa and the country’s status as an apartheid state continued to stir debate on campus well into the 1980s and attracted national media attention...
...Crimson in September 1985 reported that the University held about $430 million in South Africa-related investments. This amounted to about 19 percent of the $2.3 billion endowment...
...student-led push for Harvard to divest from companies doing business South Africa came amidst the country’s continued marginalization from the international community—South Africa had been barred from the General Assembly of the United Nations and was not allowed to participate in the Olympics. The South African government also faced other countries’ attempts to ban international trade with the state and it desperately needed loans from the International Monetary Fund...