According to the insert in Queen's Greatest Hits "I Want it All" became an anti-apartheid anthem among Black South-African youth. Is this true? If so how did that come about and what was the reception of the 3/4 White British Queen among Black youth?

It's likely that there's a very specific context to the blurb about 'I Want It All' in Queen's Greatest Hits II album, which is Queen's run of shows in Sun City, in South Africa in the 1980s. Specifically, Greatest Hits II was released in 1991, a period when the racist white South African government was beginning to crack under the pressure of international boycotts; Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, and eventually became President in 1994.

Through the 1980s there had been a United Nations 'cultural boycott' on South Africa, and significant amounts of political pressure on rock acts to avoid South African tours. In particular, Sun City was a luxury resort and casino in the bantustan of Bophuthatswana which inevitably catered to a rich white clientele. It was also seen, at the time, as the proof in the pie that the allegedly independent bantustans were basically a legal fiction. Sun City, because it attempted to get pop acts to come to South Africa to play to its crowd, became the focus of the cultural boycott in South Africa as far as pop acts were concerned; artists who chose to play at Sun City received a big backlash.

Queen chose to play a run of shows at Sun City in 1984. Furthermore, later in the 1980s, they allowed Sun City to use 'We Will Rock You' in advertisements which very clearly show the resort catering to a largely white clientele, which, well, they could have said no to.

This run of shows in 1984 led to a lot of criticism of Queen. The British press, especially in the then-very-politicised British weekly music magazines like the NME, went to town; the music journalist John Harris is clearly still angry at Queen in a 2005 piece in The Guardian twenty years later, calling Queen's statements at the time "cloth-headed, deluded, impossibly arrogant". They were blacklisted by the UN, and fined by the British Musicians Union. In the YouTube video above of Queen's arrival in South Africa in 1984, Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates, clearly pissed off, is heard calling Queen 'jerks'.

In 1985, a group called Artists United Against Apartheid released a charity single called 'Sun City' written by Steve Van Zandt of the E Street band, and featuring luminaries such as Miles Davis, U2, Run-DMC, Bruce Springsteen, Hall & Oates (and many more) singing a song with the chorus "I ain't gonna play 'Sun City"; apparently the demo of the song specifically referenced Queen in the lyrics (along with Rod Stewart, who also played Sun City in the early 1980s).

In this context, with lingering questions about Queen's politics through the 1980s, the liner notes of Greatest Hits II - 'the song has been heard as a rallying song for black South African youths' - are very clearly an attempt to put a ...better spin on their performances in South Africa than they had received in 1984. Queen, here, are trying to justify their Sun City trip by claiming they were doing it for their black South African fans too. Not many of which are present in the pictures of the crowd in the slideshow of this YouTube video, it has to be said.