Canada spent too long on the wrong side of apartheid
Last week, the world mourned the death and celebrated the life of Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada, a stalwart in the fight against South African apartheid, and close confidante and parliamentary adviser to Nelson Mandela. (Kathrada was sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Mandela in the infamous Rivonia Trial of 1964, and was incarcerated for more than 26 years,18 of them on Robben Island.)
There is now a prevailing mythology in Canada that our government was a steadfast champion of the struggle against apartheid. However, this is more idealized history than an accurate rendition of reality.
As political science professor Linda Freeman documented in her book The Ambiguous Champion: Canada and South Africa in the Trudeau and Mulroney Years: “Canadian officials, like their counterparts in other Western countries, made increasingly strong statements against apartheid, but continued to support full economic and diplomatic relations with the white minority regime . . . and denied meaningful support to South Africa’s black population” for decades after South Africa first implemented apartheid officially in 1948.
Throughout the 1950s, Canada repeatedly voted against or abstained from resolutions condemning the racism of apartheid at the United Nations. Canada also refused to sign the 1973 UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid; like other Western states opposed to the convention, Canada was worried that its own citizens and corporations might face prosecution for aiding and abetting apartheid.
Canadian companies, such as Bata Shoes, which had two plants in the KwaZulu bantustan, took advantage of the low wages made possible by racist subjugation of black South Africans, and influential actors in the private sector advocated “constructive engagement” with apartheid rather than divestment. Until the mid-1980s, Canadian MPs went on trips to South Africa sponsored by the South African government, and returned full of praises for its system of rule.
“If Canada cannot support our struggle, will it at least be able to refrain from giving comfort and help to those who would deny freedom and dignity to us?” asked Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, in a speech at the University of Toronto in 1969. But the Canadian government only laxly enforced the military embargo imposed by the UN against South Africa in 1977 and Canadian companies persisted in arming the apartheid regime. The Quebec-based Space Research Corporation, for instance, provided South Africa with an artillery system that could fire tactical nuclear weapons.
And while the Mulroney government did apply economic sanctions in 1986 after many years of protest by South African exiles, churches, unions, and other participants in the Canadian antiapartheid movement, these sanctions were merely voluntary for many sectors — so that Canadian trade with South Africa actually increased from 1987 to 1988.
Groups opposing the terror of apartheid were smeared as terrorists themselves and denied support. When the president of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, visited Ottawa in 1987, prime minister Mulroney confronted him with an advertisement put in the Globe and Mail by the South African embassy denouncing the ANC as a violent Communist organization. (To which Tambo responded: “If you want to talk about violence, what violence exceeds that of apartheid?”)
Canada continued to place visa restrictions on members of the ANC for more than 20 years after Mandela was freed from prison; Kathrada himself was denied visas to Canada in 1996 and 2006.
It is important that we don’t forget the conflicted truth about Canada’s relationship with apartheid South Africa. This history reminds us that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice by itself — and that those responsible for moving it in that direction are usually not treated as heroes at the time, but as terrorists and subversives and criminals.
While figures like Kathrada and Mandela have been valorized after the vindication of their cause, those working to dismantle structures of racial oppression today are stigmatized and surveilled as security threats. For example, indigenous activists, non-violently resisting the legacy of Canada’s own policies of anti-indigenous apartheid, have been investigated and put on watch lists by security agencies under operations like Project SITKA.
Canada’s ambiguous relationship with apartheid reminds us that it is easy to claim a place on the right side of history with the moral clarity of hindsight, but much harder to stand for justice against powerful interests in the present.
In the end, as Ahmed Kathrada knew, “No people have been given their freedom without having to struggle for it.”
While figures like Ahmed Mohamed Kathrada have been valorized, those working to dismantle structures of racial oppression today are stigmatized