Activism for Life, by Angie Zelter

Review by Steve Whiting

Angie Zelter is a social change phenomenon. She is a dreamer of campaigns, creative strategist, meticulous researcher, persuasive negotiator, movement organiser, team-player and leader by example. She has an irrepressible vision of justice and peace and, naturally, a world free of nuclear weapons. Activism for Life recounts her story.

It begins in 1970s colonial Cameroon, where Angie witnessed extreme inequality and everyday racism. Then she read an alarming article in The Ecologist on environmental destruction: ‘I’d had a university education. Why didn’t I know any of this?’ She’d woken up.

After an initiation at Greenham Common, her first project was the Snowball Civil Disobedience campaign of 1984. Encouraged by the words of a Quaker friend (‘Follow your spirit and act in the truth of that spirit’) Angie cut a hole in a fence at a military base in Norfolk, and asked to be arrested. Next time, the number of people tripled, then tripled again, then again… Through this campaign, she says, she was ‘able to experiment with how far to “disobey” the state and the courts and discovered it could be quite far’.

Angie takes us through actions to resist logging in rainforests; peace service in occupied Palestine; and Seeds of Hope Ploughshares, in which she and three other women disabled a fighter-jet destined for Indonesia. In a celebrated trial, they argued that they had committed a crime to prevent a greater crime, and were acquitted.

Quakers have shown strong support for many of these projects, conceived to revitalise the anti-nuclear weapons movement. Another landmark trial acquitted Angie, alongside a Danish activist, Ulla, and our departed Friend, Ellen Moxley, after they destroyed laboratory equipment serving the Trident system. Angie went on to set up Public Interest Case Against Trident, in which local magistrates were asked to start criminal prosecutions against the Defence Ministry for war crimes. And that seven-mile pink scarf linking Burghfield and Aldermaston? That was her idea too. More recently, she has founded XR Peace, part of Extinction Rebellion, recognising that the war industry is destroying the planet.

Angie’s activism encourages mass participation, from anxious first timers to seasoned activists. Her campaigns provide a safe environment, always with a supportive invitation to take the next step.

Activism for Life is an excellent campaigning textbook, and an inspiring read. It did leave me wanting to learn more about the inner Angie – her spiritual rootedness, and how she deals with fear, endures prison, channels anger – but that’s not this book. What she gives us here is a lifetime of actions taken and lessons learned.

Speaking truth to the hard face of power is something that Angie has taken further than most of us. But we must all do what we can. As she says: ‘It is better to try and fail than not to try at all… Never give up!’

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