Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Jim Murphy Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jim Murphy (East Renfrewshire) (Lab)]

This is one of those occasions when everyone starts by saying that they are speaking on behalf of their constituents. It is something we often claim, but it is undoubtedly true on both sides of the House today. Many Members have begun their remarks by suggesting that everything has already been said, but each and every Member has found something genuinely new to share with the House. I hope that I can follow in that sprit.

I remember the first day I arrived in South Africa. I was 12 years old and had rarely been outside Glasgow, let alone travelled abroad. Unemployment at home had led my family to emigrate, to swap our Glasgow housing estate for the sunshine of Cape Town. The truth is that I had not properly prepared, or been properly prepared, for what would confront me in the shape of apartheid. Back then, to the extent that Nelson Mandela could be said to have mainland neighbours, I was one of them, because my family lived in what was probably the third closest building to Robben Island.

I remember the little things that would give me and others a sense of the bigger picture of apartheid. In the first week after we arrived, our family tried to form a friendship with the taxi driver who picked us up from Jan Smuts airport and his family. We suggested what was natural in a city surrounded by two oceans: a game of football on the beach. But for all the dramatic sandy beaches along the city’s two coastlines, we ended up on a dangerous, rocky, uneven pebble beach—all because, of course, the family with whom we were trying to forge a friendship were designated Cape coloureds. Apartheid granted to the black majority only the minority of beaches that were deemed too dangerous for white people to swim off.

As I stood on those mornings at my whites-only bus stop in my whites-only housing area to travel to a whites-only school, I could see Robben Island each and every day. Of course, Nelson Mandela was banned; people could not utter his name and it was a criminal offence to carry his picture. But there it was—his island prison, in full and clear view in Table bay for the city and the whole world to see and to know what was going on.

Occasionally we would see the violence ourselves in the city streets, and the protests and the actions of the authorities, but we would never hear about it on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s TV or radio news; we would need to listen to the BBC World Service on a small wireless in our house before we knew what was actually happening almost on our own doorstep. I was entitled to South African citizenship but I did not take it up, nor did I serve in the South African army. I left the country, and left my family there, when South Africa invited me, as it did every white teenage boy at the age of 17, to be conscripted into the apartheid army.

Ours was an ANC-supporting family. There are lovely pictures of my mother and the rest of the family standing in the long queue on election day with their ANC flags, in what was meant to be a secret ballot. It was not as though the ANC had not on occasion tested our family’s patience or loyalty, including way back in 1982 when it blew up the power station that my father had gone to build when we went there as immigrants.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

More work!

[Mr Murphy]

Okay—more work.

Of course, Umkhonto we Sizwe took care to make sure that it happened on a Saturday when no one was working on the building site, and no one was injured.

What was striking was the demonisation of Nelson Mandela, which was every bit as passionate as today’s speeches in this House in praise of him. We were told he was the reason there could not be a democracy, because he would take charge and turn the country to bloodshed. To understand Mandela’s achievement, we have fully to grasp the enormity of the fear that the white minority were encouraged to feel.

The state was structured to sustain apartheid in every possible way. Among many things, I was taught at school that apartheid was the natural order and was encouraged by the established Church to believe that it was the will of God—I remember being told that by a church minister. It was compulsory to learn Afrikaans. It would have been entirely understandable—regrettable, of course, but understandable—if the majority had sought revenge, because, after all, many of the black South Africans were treated worse than dogs by the white minority.

The Mandela of the state’s fabrication and the supremacists’ imagination was the rallying point against majority rule. When the time came for Mandela to cast his first vote at the age of 75, he was the bridge that most South Africans tentatively—initially—stepped across into liberation and, for them, the enormous perceived uncertainty of that democracy.

I say gently, in keeping with the tone of today’s contributions, that I do not believe that the British Government’s record on South Africa in that era will be judged with any sense of generosity. Apartheid South Africa was a cancer on a continent, but it was dealt with through the prism of the power politics of strategic cold war interests. It was allowed to destabilise not only its own country but Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, South-West Africa, as it was called, and many others besides. That is why I am so proud that my home city of Glasgow was the first city in the world to grant its freedom to the man imprisoned off the shore of my then adopted city.

Like others, I want to thank the many people involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Long before the rock concerts and the well-intentioned celebrity endorsements, they stood unglamorously on street corners asking people to sign a petition in honour of someone they had probably never heard of. That movement taught us that the simple act of not buying South African apples is a statement in itself, and that, in the right circumstances, politics and sport could and should mix. Anyone who says that sport and politics should never mix does not fully understand what happened in South Africa.

Many have spoken about the engaging nature of President Mandela. I can only turn to a story from my own mother. My right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) spoke about his mother’s fantastic relationship and friendship with Nelson Mandela. I cannot boast anything of that order. However, my mother never tires of telling me the story of one day when she was in Cape Town; I was not living there at the time. She was, as many people do, walking with her head down through the city streets during her lunch break, and she bumped into someone she only knew was a tall man. She looked up, and it was not just a tall man—it was Nelson Mandela. They spoke, and he inquired as to who she was, what she did, what she believed in, and what she thought. She said, “I apologise, Mr Mandela”—I do not know what was going on his mind; perhaps he was thinking, “She’s not going to vote for me”, which of course she did—“I do hope you don’t mind, but I have to get back to work, so we have to stop our conversation.” I do not know whether my mother is the only person who has done this.

When Mandela came to the UK and went to the grand receptions, the truth is that I, like others, was probably a little intimidated by him. I did not seek a photograph with him, because I had the sense, looking at his life, that one of the things that was not missing from it was the need to have a photograph taken with me.

We sometimes think of Mandela in different phases. We remember Mandela the freedom fighter of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the old black and white photographs. We refer to Mandela the global statesman in this, the internet age. But in my opinion not enough is made of Mandela the President. He introduced radical social reforms, including free health care, and gave many children the chance to go to school. As others have said, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did so much for the country.

One of Mandela’s greatest achievements was to defeat the phenomenon of our granting hero status only to those who die young, when those who are lost are missed not because of their achievements but for their unfulfilled and uncompromised promise. It is so rare for anyone to enjoy simultaneously a long life and near-universal love and respect, but Mandela captured and kept the sense of Camelot usually gifted only to those who are denied a life beyond middle age. A man born before the end of the first world war was to become the premier global cause of a digital age.

Even after Mandela left prison, the transition was painful—we have not focused on this enough today, understandably—with the provocation by state forces trying to create a civil war and the involvement of organisations such as Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging trying to incite tribal division.

This is ultimately a story of how the most powerful military force on a continent was defeated by an idea, and defeated by a group of undernourished prisoners on a barren rock in an Atlantic bay. The reconciliation after apartheid was a man-made miracle where millions of women and men played their part, but Mandela was undoubtedly the chemistry. In a troubled world, observers anguish that if only we had more Mandelas, so many of the problems facing us could be resolved. That is a pessimist’s view. I look at it in a different way, which is that at least we had one Mandela, and for that we should all be eternally grateful.