Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

It is a real honour to follow so many passionate and eloquent speeches.

This morning I went to South Africa house to sign the book of condolence. It is still a really strange experience for me to enter South Africa house, having spent so much time on the pavement outside. Indeed, at one time I was convinced that the pavement there was particularly hard and cold, especially around midnight. I have since entered it in very different circumstances and in triumphant celebration of a free South Africa. The fact that the lobby of South Africa house has so many photographs of so many activists, including myself, makes it all the more welcoming.

This morning was different. It was sad—so very, very sad. As I signed the book in the name of Newcastle and anti-apartheid activists everywhere, I thought about how personal his death was for so many who had never met him personally. That was due to Mr Mandela’s towering personality, but it was also because apartheid was personal to so many of us who had never set foot in South Africa.

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has said, it is easy now to forget how widespread the support was for South Africa and how much British racists took comfort and, indeed, solace from white rule. At the heart of apartheid was injustice, discrimination and separation. Do hon. Members remember the Bantustans? The justification of apartheid was for separate development, with blacks being given their own so-called homeland.

The belief that the races could not live together was obviously taken very personally by a young child in Newcastle with a black father and a white mother. It was also taken personally by so many people throughout Newcastle, the north-east and across the country. I want to pay tribute to the international working-class solidarity that supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The idea that what someone was and what they could achieve should be defined by the colour of their skin was taken as a personal attack by black people, by white people, by all people.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement is the most successful mass-movement this country has ever seen. It was the focus of my own activism for many years, spent in its headquarters on what is now called Mandela street, and I eventually joined its executive. Indeed, the first time I entered the parliamentary estate was for executive meetings organised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain), Richard Caborn and Bob Hughes. I also want to pay tribute to Mike Terry who, tragically, died so young a few years ago, and to ACTSA—Action for Southern Africa—which is what the Anti-Apartheid Movement became.

Although the movement was successful, it was not simple. There were intense debates, concerns over tactics and alliances, and, of course, dirty tricks from the South African secret service and others. The evil of apartheid not only gave rise to the most terrible oppression in South Africa; it also corrupted its neighbours in southern Africa. Nelson Mandela was our strength, inspiration and source of unity. The minor debates and divisions within the movement were as nothing in comparison with the huge divisions within South Africa that were deliberately fostered over decades. Mr Mandela’s achievement in putting aside 27 years of imprisonment—much of it with hard labour—and in forgiving though not forgetting and in unifying his country is, therefore, all the greater. He did it not by playing to the fears in all of us, but by magnifying the goodness in all of us.

At a time when there are many debates about what it means to be the United Kingdom and a united Europe and about who we should let in, and at a time when asylum seekers are vilified and those on benefits are mistrusted, I believe that one of Nelson Mandela’s many lessons for us is that, if we do not live in the harmony that he sought, it is not because our differences are so very great, but perhaps because our politicians are not great enough.