Alan Brooks was a lifelong campaigner against injustice who played a pivotal role in Britain’s Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Alan Keith Brooks was born in Bristol in 1940 and emigrated to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with his family at the age of 7. Having secured a Beit Trust scholarship at the University of Cape Town, he studied law and later lectured in the African Studies department.

He joined the South African Liberal Party and was recruited into the secretive, mostly white, African Resistance Movement. Brooks became a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962. In 1964, after a brief campaign of sabotage, ARM activists were arrested. Brooks was imprisoned for two years.

After his release he was deported to Britain. At Sussex University — which was also attended by his SACP colleague, later President, Thabo Mbeki — Brooks studied international politics. By 1969 he was the secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, in which role he organised protests against South Africa’s Springbok rugby team during the successful Stop the 70 Tour campaign.

During the mid-1970s Brooks was the director of research at the International Defence and Aid Fund in London. In 1980 the Fund published Whirlwind Before the Storm, an account by Brooks and Jeremy Brickhill of South Africa’s Soweto Uprising. By the time of its publication, Brooks and his family had moved to Mozambique, where he taught at a Frelimo secondary school.

In London he had been a member of the same SACP cell as Mbeki and within a year of his arrival in Mozambique, the African National Congress requested his services in Lusaka to establish the ANC research department.

Brooks’s career up until his brief tenure in Lusaka could have led him into government in South Africa in the 1990s, but the experience of working closely with Mbeki and the limitations on internal debate within ANC headquarters in Lusaka was more than he could tolerate.

In March 1980 Brooks wrote a critical report which declared that “the present situation is unhealthy. It would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a crisis.” The report described lack of leadership, lack of collective discussion, slovenliness, corruption and myriad interpersonal problems which caused friction and frustration.

He returned to England, resigned from the SACP and joined the British Communist Party, becoming managing director of its books and periodicals business. He then administered the Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Information Centre, one of the few reliable centres of information on South Africa’s undeclared war on its neighbours.

In 1988 he was appointed deputy executive secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, in which position he organised the Nelson Mandela march from Glasgow to London. Mandela’s release and the lifting of bans on anti-apartheid political organisations did not encourage Brooks to return to South Africa.

Instead, he turned his attentions to other international campaigns. From the late 1960s, when he had campaigned against the Vietnam War and supported African-American militants in the US, Brooks had always been concerned with global causes.

In the early 1990s he worked for the UN in Somalia, then emerging from a civil war, and in London he became a case worker for asylum seekers from Africa and Asia. During his last years, he was particularly preoccupied with Zimbabwe.

A determined individual, he believed that authority should always be challenged. He remained close to his former wife, Sarah, and his former partner, Joni McDougall.

He is survived by three daughters.

Alan Brooks, political campaigner, was born on May 18, 1940. He died on May 10, 2008, aged 67