Mandela’s solidarity mantra can end tyranny of Trump
WHEN I was small, shopping felt like a one-woman political protest by my mother.
In the supermarket, the labels of tins and fresh fruit were forensically examined for their country of origin.
Anything on her boycott list, of which South Africa was top, was hurriedly dumped back on the shelf, like contaminated waste.
A series of bewildered shop managers were asked why they were trading in goods from the evil apartheid regime.
I found myself trudging in the rain with her, on a tour of grocers to find oranges of acceptable provenance, and it felt like such a drag.
But today, as the world celebrates the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, I feel only pride.
There was an army of men and women like her, emotionally invested in a struggle 6000 miles from their home.
So many citizen activists – in Scotland and beyond – recognised that, however small their contribution, they could help pave the way for South Africa’s long walk to freedom.
In 1981, Glasgow became the first in the world to confer on Mandela the freedom of the city, as he sat in a prison on Robben Island.
In 1994, a freed Mandela thanked a 15,000-strong crowd in George Square for refusing to give up on him.
As the cameras scanned the crowd that day, those singing and dancing and cheering for Mandela were an eclectic bunch – women in rain mates, men in cloth caps, teenagers with pink hair, ordinary people of international consequence.
That Thatcher had called Mandela a terrorist did his cause no harm in Scotland. After all, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Like millions of others around the world, I joined the anti-apartheid movement, marched in Glasgow and London and chanted outside the South African embassy.
Sometimes I doubted anything we did made a difference and felt that we were shouting into a void.
Last week, I was in the South African township of Soweto as back in that same George Square where Mandela had stood, thousands gathered to protest the visit of Donald Trump.
In the sprawling township, the cause that had once seemed so distant and abstract felt tangible.
A local young man, from a Soweto company Lebo’s Tours, took us on a bike ride along streets – some potholed and muddy, others suburban and middle class. I had never been to Soweto but it looked so familiar, this arena, watched by the world, which was host to demonstrations, many by schoolchildren, which ultimately transformed the socio-political landscape in South Africa. Our guide took us to Mandela’s home and to the memorial centre named after Hector Pieterson, the 12-year-old shot dead during the June 1976 uprising, in which 176 people were killed by white police. In the small square was the iconic photograph of Hector’s limp body being carried by high school student Mbuyisa Makhubo, which helped galvanise a worldwide antiapartheid movement. Sitting having lunch in Soweto, I thought of the mums like mine and their small acts of solidarity. Mandela called them “men and women who regarded the whole world as a theatre of their efforts”. Watching on TV, Trump being pilloried back home in Scotland, I felt great pride in our small country and its chain of defiance. A young Mandela, holding up first an index finger, then pulling it into a fist, used to describe how solidarity would overcome apartheid. He said: “Alone, we have no power but together, we have the power to change the world.” In this time of the tyranny that is Trump, his words have never felt more relevant.