Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Robin Walker Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), who made it very clear that apartheid was a personal attack on many people. I cannot claim her level of personal involvement in the anti-apartheid campaign, but I want to speak in this debate for two reasons: the first a constituency reason and the second a family one.

The battle to overcome apartheid had some unlikely heroes and we have heard a great deal today about the most inspirational of all. Another inspirational figure to whom this House recently paid tribute was the Capetonian, England and Worcestershire cricketer, Basil D’Oliveira, who lived in my constituency for many years. His role in showing the cricketing world the unreasonable nature of apartheid and South Africa’s colour bar and in helping to strengthen the sporting embargo against apartheid has been well documented. He was no active political campaigner, but in many ways his quiet dignity was a greater challenge to the regime at that time than a more outspoken approach would have been.

It is typical of the great Madiba’s generosity of spirit that he personally invited D’Oliveira to have lunch with him in 1996 during a coaching trip to South Africa. At the end of their time together he rose from his chair, hugged Basil D’Oliveira and said:

“Thanks for coming, Basil…You must go home now. You’ve done your bit.”

While some in the Anti-Apartheid Movement were critical of Basil D’Oliveira for not being more outspoken and not publicly backing boycotts of South Africa, Mandela—ever one to recognise the bravery and dignity of others—gave him the full credit for doing his bit.

Basil himself described their meeting as

“one of the greatest days of my life”,

adding:

“He’s just a marvellous man and I’ve always thought a lot of him, read a lot about him and now I’ve actually met him—brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and to come back to the new South Africa has been absolutely marvellous.”

It was one of my greatest honours as Worcester’s MP to be at last January’s memorial service for Basil D’Oliveira and to be able to offer my condolences to his family, who live to this day in Worcester. I am sure that they, along with thousands of my other constituents, will be mourning the loss of Nelson Mandela.

As I said, the second reason I wanted to speak today was due to a family connection. My wife Charlotte was born in South Africa and spent the early years of her life there. Her father, Professor Jeremy Keenan, was a university lecturer at Witwatersrand, and to an outsider it might have appeared that they were among the comfortable white beneficiaries of the apartheid system. In fact, he spent years working with the ANC, travelling into the townships and homelands and using his privileged access as an anthropologist to document the appalling treatment of black people under apartheid, the pass laws and the use of control mechanisms, then passing on the information to his contacts in the ANC. While in South Africa, he wanted to dedicate a book that he had written about the Tuareg to Mandela, but under the laws of the day he could not have it published with a mention of that man’s name. He gave his dedication indirectly by speaking about the fact that his son was

“born in a land where drought is also not unheard of and where elders also live on islands”.

My father-in-law and his family had to leave South Africa in a hurry in 1987 when the Government of P. W. Botha cracked down hard on those suspected of supporting Mandela and his allies. The information he had gathered was to be compiled in a book that would have been called “Dying for Change”, but at the time the South African authorities were able to suppress such publications, and only now are the full details emerging. Other people engaged in shining a light on the regime or passing information to the ANC were murdered, and both he and his family suffered threats and intimidation from the security services, including multiple break-ins, and having their pets poisoned and the brakes on their cars tampered with.

Last year, I was able to travel to South Africa and join my father-in-law on his first visit to that beautiful country since the end of apartheid. We saw a country that still faces great challenges, in which there are still vast inequalities, but most of all we saw a country at peace with itself and a country in which young people of all colours and backgrounds can live with hope for the future. That is the legacy of Mandela. As Rabbi Sacks said of him,

“He permanently enlarged the horizon of human hope.”

There can be no more fitting epitaph than that.