On Building a Social Movement focuses, as its sub-title suggests, on the North American campaign for southern African liberation. It does so by first evoking both the region-wide battle for liberation from racial oppression that emerged in southern Africa between 1960 and 1994 and the world-wide mobilization of support for that regional struggle which emerged alongside it. It then examines in some detail the building of movements in both Canada and the United States designed to contribute to this notable global effort. These movements sought to publicize the positive goals and concrete undertakings of the liberation struggles on the ground in southern Africa while also focusing public attention on the policies of the governments and the corporations in North America that pulled the two countries focused on in this book to the wrong - the racist and exploitative - side of this African contestation.

 “Solidarity is the soul of the workers’ movement. This is a book about one of history’s greatest international solidarity movements: the anti-apartheid movement and that in support of the southern African liberation struggles more generally. It provides an inspiring and incisive account that raises sharply the question of what could have been had our revolution not lost its way by succumbing to neo-liberalism’s false hopes and dead-end solutions.”
--Trevor Ngwane, veteran South African activist and writer

“John Saul offers far more than a comprehensive analysis of the historical development of Southern African solidarity movements in North America. He issues a call for an emancipatory politics and practice that locates battles for liberation in a larger context and in relationship to each other. He also challenges us to demystify the national liberation movements many of us worshiped in order to see not only their strengths and weaknesses, but in order to understand the forces that have ground many of them to a halt. What an outstanding piece of writing!”
--Bill Fletcher, Jr., former President of TransAfrica Forum; host of The Global African on Telesur-English

“In his characteristically engaging conversational style, combining intimate first-hand knowledge and lightly-worn scholarship with strong opinions, John Saul takes the reader vividly into the heart of the Canadian and American movements that supported the anti-apartheid and liberation struggles in southern Africa.”
--Colin Leys, co-editor, The Socialist Register