Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

One of my earliest political memories is of being taken as a child by my parents to march against apartheid here in London. For my generation who came to politics in the ’70s and ’80s, this was the great progressive cause, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) said. I remember my mum coming back from the greengrocers in our very conservative part of suburban London having had a big argument about why she would not buy the Outspan oranges, which were from apartheid South Africa. It was the great cause.

The period in which I was most involved was when I was a student and when I was in the National Union of Students. Student politics often has a very bad name and can even be a term of abuse, but Nelson Mandela said education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world, and the United Kingdom student movement played a central role in the campaign to release Nelson Mandela and to bring an end to apartheid. Archbishop Trevor Huddleston said the student movement was the backbone of anti-apartheid, and Nelson Mandela served as honorary president of the NUS from 1969 until his death last week. Students were absolutely central to the success of the boycott Barclays campaign to get the bank out of South Africa, to putting pressure on universities and colleges to disinvest and to the boycott of South African goods. It was very striking that the various parts of the student movement, which disagreed with each other about just about everything else, could come together in unity and determination in the common cause to fight apartheid.

A number of Members on both sides of the House have mentioned Mike Terry. He was the first NUS executive member to have responsibility, more than 40 years ago, for work on southern Africa. He went on to be secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and only once apartheid was brought down did he follow the career for which he had trained and become a physics teacher. It was my pleasure to get to know him when he was a physics teacher at Alexandra park school in Haringey in north London and I was an Education Minister. As others have said, there is enormous cynicism about politics in this country and in other countries at the moment, but anti-apartheid and the struggle to release Nelson Mandela are surely politics at its very, very best.

Let me mention briefly two other issues. Several Members have spoken about what Nelson Mandela did and said about HIV and AIDS. I think it is fair to say that while he was in office, tackling HIV and AIDS was not a priority and, of course, his successor, President Mbeki, questioned the link between HIV and AIDS. It was only after he left office that Mandela’s role changed and was absolutely crucial. In 2000 he said:

“Our country is facing a disaster of immeasurable proportions from HIV/AIDS.”

He sought to break the taboo, and lives were undoubtedly saved as a direct consequence. As the Prime Minister said earlier, Nelson Mandela announced that his own son, Makgatho, had died of AIDS. At that time, about 600 South Africans were dying every day of AIDS-related illnesses, but often there was denial that AIDS was the cause of the deaths. Out of office, Nelson Mandela confronted that culture of denial.

Rightly, there has been a focus today on the commitment in the South African constitution to tackle racism and other forms of discrimination. The South African constitution was the first in the world to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. I wish to finish with the following story, which I found when preparing for what I would say today. It is a beautiful story about a black lesbian couple who got married—this was before marriage had been legalised, but a church was prepared to marry them. One of the families was not very happy, so they went round and started to beat the other family up. The fight ended up being taken to the police station in Soweto. The police station commander sat the two families down and pointed to a poster on the wall—a poster of Nelson Mandela. She said, “Listen. That man, the father of our freedom, says it’s okay for these women to be together. And if he says that, who are you to argue?” That sorted things out. That little story says it all: Nelson Mandela was a force for good, for decent values, for justice and, as all contributors today have said, someone from whom we can all learn.