Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Kevin Barron Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

I do not wish to detain the House long, but I thought I ought to say a few words.

In the 1960s, I, like many young men, saw the events in South Africa on television and in newspapers now and again and felt, as most people did, that that country was split on racial lines—indeed, other countries were split on racial lines as well.

I did not really understand what was happening in South Africa until in 1975 I left my small mining community and went to Ruskin college in Oxford. The college had a Kitson committee, named after David Kitson, who was one of the prisoners in South Africa at the time. He had been born in South Africa and had been over here working in industry for a while. He went to Ruskin on a trade union scholarship and was in jail in South Africa. I went to the first meeting of the Kitson committee and ended up being active in it later on. One of my fellow students told us about her life and her journey. She was from South Africa and had come out of South Africa in the boot of a car. She told us what apartheid was—it was not just segregation between white and blacks, but segregation over several areas. She said that she fitted into one of what were called the “Cape Coloureds” categories. She also said that she and her brother were at different schools. They lived with their family in their house, but they were at schools that were next to each other and when they used to share their sandwiches through the school railings they were shouted at by the pupils for mixing with the students in the school next door. Her brother was her twin brother. They had been born within minutes of one another and apartheid had segregated them because that was how the system worked. I could not understand how anybody anywhere could do that to anybody and I became active in anti-apartheid for many years. I remember Mike Terry very well and Charlotte street, as we used to go up there quite a lot, and I was active in the trade union movement, too. Her name was Rita Taberner, and she said something that has stayed with me all my life: how could politicians and Governments do such things to their own people? It is extraordinary that that could happen.

I have two other reflections, and the first is about when Mandela came out of prison. It was a Sunday—I remember it well. I had just left the Leader of the Opposition’s office, but I phoned him up and he was watching it, too. We could not believe what we were seeing. It was a bit like the Berlin wall. I never thought I would ever see the Berlin wall come down or that apartheid would end. Those were the two things in my politics of the ’60s and ’70s that I thought were there for life, and to see that happening was extraordinary. Of course, that was no easy journey for Nelson Mandela. He was dealing with the tensions in the ANC between where he wanted to go and where other members of the ANC wanted to go. Some did not think that that was the way forward; I understand that peace and reconciliation was his brainchild and that he had to fight hard for it to work. Many of us thought that it would end up in a bloodbath in South Africa—after my experience of 1975, I would not have been at all surprised if that had been the case. That was the level of the man and the people around him who wanted to go that way for South Africa and its people.

My other memory is from when Mandela spoke in Westminster Hall. One of your predecessors, Mr Speaker, Baroness Boothroyd—who is in the other place now—walked down the steps with him. She remembered that she had been part of the British black sash movement who used to stand outside South Africa house wearing black sashes, just as women in South Africa used to stand in Pretoria and other places wearing black sashes to complain against the regime, and she never thought that she would see such a speech happening.

Nelson Mandela was a giant of a man and the world has much to learn from what he did. We will have to wait to see whether the world is capable of doing that, but I wanted to pay my tribute to somebody who shaped my politics even though I was thousands of miles away.