I remember this well. Opposition to apartheid was taking hold in the US because the minority government in South Africa was so friggin’ awful and brutal that even Americans were having a hard time defending it, particularly with our own version of apartheid still fresh in our memories (and still, then as now, extant in parts of the South and in our country’s dying inner cities).
This happened at a moment, during the awful, pivotal Reagan years, just before the Republican agitprop machine had re-energized and weaponized racial malice to the staggering degree that exists today: when the Southern strategy still operated in the shadows, delicately, packed with dog-whistles and genteel code.
The right didn’t want divestiture, because their corporate buddies were profiting hugely from South Africa, and also because as reactionaries they believed profoundly in two things—the entitlement of the rich to do whatever they wanted to do in pursuit of profit, and the White Man’s Burden: but they couldn’t come right out and say any of this, because apartheid was so bloody awful, and because their friends the Afrikaners were giving the Master Race a bad name, as powerful white people so often do.
So they hit on this line: We don’t like apartheid, but if we do anything to defund the profiteers, it’s the workers who’ll be hurt. Sure, apartheid is terrible, the Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, but if we pull our money out of South Africa, workers will go hungry, and as Republicans we just can’t bear the thought of hungry workers.
To give you some context for what utter, malignant, Republican BS this was: Pat Buchanan was spouting this same line at this same moment. This was Party Line on the fringe right that was beginning to consume the entire Republican Party.
Although the timeline is a little before the invention of the Frank Luntz mantra mills, Koch money was already flowing into the whole agitprop grift machine at this point, so there were plenty of reactionary pundits who came up with the same talking points at the same moment. Buchanan and Kobach—racist reactionaries then as they are today---- were just two loyal laborers in the dark money army.
In fact this attack on divestiture was one of the earliest examples of the Orwellian, inside-out blather, the malicious inversion of reality, that has by now become the Republican facon d’etre, the contemptible and easy lies that allow them to make pious utterances seemingly out of the highest and noblest of motives, meanwhile doing everything they can to subvert ethics, basic humanity and common decency in pursuit of power and profit. Kind of like what Mad Donald is doing to affordable care right now. Kind of like what the Republicans in Congress are doing to literally everything right now.