Tributes to Nelson Mandela

David Anderson Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) said that Mandela hated to be classed as a saint. What he wanted to be was a sinner who was helping others. I will talk about some of the people he tried to help in his country while he was in prison and about some of the people around the world who helped him.

On 16 September 1986, 177 miners were killed at the Kinross gold mine in the Eastern Transvaal when a welder’s spark ignited plastic foam lining the wall of a tunnel. That foam was banned in other mines around the world, but such was the contempt that the owners of the gold mines in South Africa had for their workers that those 177 miners were just the latest figure. The number would reach 96,000 people between 1900 and 1993. A British miner who worked at the mine said:

“They didn't stand a chance—they were trapped by the smoke.”

They were killed “where they stood”. The leader of the union at that time, Cyril Ramaphosa, said:

“We are horrified that this type of accident can take place in this day and age in the mining industry. In our view we are obviously back to the dark ages of mining—and there doesn’t seem to be much improvement in safety standards”.

What compounded the disaster was that the owners of the mine delayed the announcement that it had happened. They then refused to name the 177 individuals and instead announced them by ethnic group. They were Zulu or Bantu. Such was the contempt that people were not even named when they died. That contempt was further compounded when the union asked to hold a memorial service. It was banned from doing so in South Africa. I am proud that, even though we should not have had to do it, the National Union of Mineworkers, of which I was a member at the time, smuggled Cyril Ramaphosa out of South Africa and held a memorial service in Sheffield cathedral. The great role that that city played was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). That should not have been necessary, but it is a tribute to ordinary working people around the world that they did such things.

I will talk briefly about some of the people in this country who worked for South Africa. The leader of my party said earlier that there are millions of names that we do not know. I want to mention four names: John McFadden, a Glaswegian, Rita Donaghy, now Baroness Donaghy, and Ralph Gayton, who are three former presidents of my union, Unison, and its predecessor, the National and Local Government Officers Association, and Jan Stockwell, who was an international officer of the same union. They spent weeks in 1984 going to Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. They took travellers cheques to that country, cashed them and put the money in the hands of ordinary men and women so that they could build and organise trade unions.

That trade union movement was there all the time to support the struggle against apartheid and it was there when Mandela came out of jail. That provided a network that he could build on. That is where he got his strength from when he came out of jail. It was on that group of people that he built the democratic society that we know today. The TUC in this country gave Nelson Mandela a gold medal in absentia and launched a major campaign, working with the boycott campaign. Rodney Bickerstaffe, who was the general secretary of Unison and the National Union of Public Employees, visited Mandela in jail and brought back a smuggled tape, which was played at the TUC conference. When millions of people do the right thing, it is the epitome of what trade unions and ordinary working people can do when they come together. Nelson Mandela was hugely proud of and grateful to trade unionists across the world, and he identified himself clearly as one of them.

In closing, I wish to refer to a quotation that has been mentioned at least twice today, most recently by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). Nelson Mandela said that people can be taught to love in the same way that they can learn to hate. Showing international trade union solidarity, that quote is on the US Labour Against the War website. Ordinary people are coming together to support a great man who really made a change in the lives of other ordinary people.