Amy Kaler

Doug Miller 0:00

Pewter. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Amy, that’s really a bunch of amateurs. I’m Doug Miller. I’m here in Montreal with Gwen Schulman in Montreal, where we’ve put together what we call the Canadian Anti Apartheid Activist History Project, and we’re interviewing Amy Kaler, or Kaler Taylor, yeah, Taylor. Amy Kaler, in Calgary, I believe

Amy Kaler 0:24

Edmonton actually.

Doug Miller 0:30

Welcome to the summer doldrums. So it’s a real pleasure to meet you. Amy and I sent you a consent form. You’ve read the terms and conditions. Would you just please verbally consent?

Amy Kaler 0:46

Yeah, I consent to the terms and conditions and I understand everything in the form.

Doug Miller 0:52

Okay, good. So we’ll, if we could get that hard copy from you, eventually, I’ll put it in the, well and Amy. We usually like to start these by doing a little bit of just, would you tell us who you are and where you come from, and a little bit of background that would have eventually led you to become interested in issues around apartheid and those struggles of that time?

Amy Kaler 1:15

Sure. Okay, I’m Amy Kaler. At the moment, I’m here in Edmonton. I’m a writer and I’m a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta. I’ve been here since 2000 I’m sort of doing the reverse chronological thing. I guess before I was here in an academic job. I was on a post doctoral fellowship in Philadelphia, which involved a lot of travel back and forth to the Southern African region. Before that was graduate school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Before that was three years working in Zimbabwe. And before that is that the time period that I think is of interest to you, you know, the mid 80s and the anti apartheid movement jumping sort of to the to the other end of my life.

Then, I was born in Massachusetts. I’m a dual citizen, American and Canadian. Grew up kind of little bit all over the place in the United States, but my parents finally, kind of landed in Toronto, went to high school in Toronto, graduated in 1983.

Yes, and then went to McGill To do a bachelor’s degree in English literature and as soon as I got to McGill, I was sort of swept into much that was going on at the time, mainly the school newspaper, the McGill daily. And I think that was how I first became I don’t know if active at that point is the right word, but more than passingly interested in what was going on in southern Africa. Is there anything about, like, family, background or education?

Gwen Schulman 3:12

Like just anything that you just tell us, a little, flesh yourself out a little bit more.

Amy Kaler

Sure. Sure. Okay. Maybe I think –

Gwen Schulman 3:25

Did your parents have an influence on your politics? I mean, not everybody went to McGill and joined the anti apartheid movement. So were you coming to it already with a certain kind of worldview and mindset, either from your family or elsewhere, that kind of made you more sensitive to these issues?

Amy Kaler 3:43

Yeah, my parents were that they were not very I was about to say they’re not very political, but that sounds like a like a dis. They were kind of thoughtful liberal people who were interested in what was going on in the world and had a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong. Always voted, voted liberal or NDP in Canada. But weren’t, you know, some people’s parents were big figures in some I don’t know big fish and ponds of varying sizes, either academically or in the activist world or something, and my parents definitely weren’t.

But they had good sort of values, I guess, ethical, moral values. And one was anti-bigotry, anti-racism. You know, it’s terrible that people are treated badly because of a characteristic that they possess.

My one thing that is more relevant than I thought it would be at the time, I think, and when I may have mentioned is that my mother’s parents were missionaries. So my mother was born in China, as were her siblings. Grew up there, and while I didn’t inherit the interest in evangelizing the world by a long shot through her parents, I did get a sense of, like, look around outside, you know, your own chunk of the world, understand what’s going on. I mean, they were missionaries in the 20s and 30s who were motivated by, I mean, I can only speak for my grandparents and many, many others, but they weren’t necessarily motivated by huge religious convictions at all. It was more like, you know, we want to make things right. We want to make the world a better place. And you know, this is our vehicle that we’re in with which we’re doing it.

So I think through them, I acquired not necessarily the missionary compulsion, but the internationalism, the interest in what’s happening somewhere else. And is that right, or is it wrong? If it’s, you know, there’s a really wrong thing happening somewhere that is not here, then, like, what is the thing that I should be doing now that I have that knowledge? So I was sort of primed for it in high school. I mean, those were, you know, Reagan, Mulroney Thatcher days, yeah.

Nonetheless, in high school, I had friends that were interested in more sort of left wing stuff. So we did things like we started a chapter of Amnesty International at our school, we went to marches and rallies protesting the use of Canadian territory to test cruise missiles on and that sort of thing. So that was actually the first, like march or protest I ever went on was, you know, grade 12.

So I had a peer group that was small, but that was different from the prevalent ethos of the time, you know, make a lot of money and own a lot of things, so I was sort of primed, I think, for when I got to McGill. I was quite young because I skipped a couple of grades. So you have this young, sort of mid teenage person, very idealistic and also with a background that said, if you see something that needs doing, you need to try to do it and step forward. And that, I think, is what kind of set me up to be really drawn into this movement.

Gwen Schulman 8:02

Can you, so here you are at McGill and the South Africa committee, I believe already existed. Yeah. So what did you see? When you do you remember, like actively joining it, and what you saw and felt on the ground, what that committee was like at that time?

Amy Kaler 8:22

Yeah, my first connection to the South Africa committee was through a friend who was a couple years older than me, who I met through the daily this was Moira Ambrose, who you might have, might or might not have heard of. She’s living in Tennessee, now teaches English in a state university. Anyway, Moira was a couple of years older than me, and through the daily I became friends with her and her roommate, Jennifer Beeman, who’s still, you know, my closest friend, and Moira was, I want to say, she the coordinator of the South Africa Committee. She was something in the South Africa committee. There was another guy who I knew only slightly, Toby Mendel, who, again, I don’t know if that’s a name that’s come up, who I think might have actually been the coordinator either that year or the previous year when I met, trying to remember. I know Toby went to, I think Botswana with WUSC, as I went with WUSC to Zimbabwe a few years later. And I can’t recall if he was coordinating the South Africa committee before after that. But there were definitely some older students that I knew that that I, you know, kind of friendship circles got me involved.

Gwen Schulman 9:50

And what did you was it? Did it seem like it was an active committee at that point? And what was it working on?

Amy Kaler 9:59

I would call it. It wasn’t, wasn’t active. It was doing a lot of work on divestment, and, you know, in the olden days with no internet, that meant, like going to libraries and looking through all of these companies annual reports and then looking through McGill’s annual reports and trying to match, you know, what they own, that was also Rio Tinto or something like that, and that they did a lot of work like that, but, and I believe they also sold, I’m trying to remember, I could be wrong here, because all the groups sold stuff to sort of keep afloat, but that they sold books and posters related to apartheid. I definitely remember visiting people’s apartments, and there would be posters that you know were from the ANC from the late 70s or SWAPO, so that they were doing lots of things, but the institutional climate was not yet there for them to be able to push what they’d been pushing since I understand the mid 70s, which was institutional divestment.

Gwen Schulman 11:19

And so that, did that become, do I remember correctly that that was really the primary campaign that you worked on when you were with the South Africa committee? Yes, that’s that. That’s it. Yeah. So can you talk to us about the nuts and bolts of that? This is where you’re plugging in stuff that me and I don’t know, because we were kind of just slightly the next generation getting to McGill,

Amy Kaler 11:42

Okay, the South Africa committee, let me think. I think I’ve gone to a few meetings, and I was sort of developing a little bit of an understanding of what was happening in South Africa beyond just the headlines. My real learning and so forth came through being friends with Nigel Crawhall, who is, that’s the name I’m sure has come up. His family was, you know, he had South African family origins. He was just like a charismatic fountain of ideas and “did you know that” and energy and “we should do this”, and you know, not that, but that, and so forth. So I learned a lot from being friends with Nigel and I think have a divestment, have been there in the background, kind of simmering forever.

I think what moved it kind of to the front burner of the stove, at least in my recall, was this, and I was talking about this with May the progressive clubs and groups on campus that were all in the, you know, fourth floor of the Student Union Building. I don’t know whose idea this was, but we decided, hey, let’s take over student council. So let’s run a slate of our, you know, us for all the positions that come up for election, and then we can do all these things that we just sort of yammering on about all the time. So we met at the yellow I remember the, you know, let’s organize this thing was at the Yellow Door, which I understand still exists. And it was, yeah, I remember Nigel and somebody else.

I think it was Daron Westman, who was part of the disarmament group, had, like, big sheet, big sheets of whiteboard, as I recall. And they were, you know, with the positions written on President. Vice President Finance, Arts Senator, whatever. And we’re just saying, “Okay, call out names”. And so we came up with, with it, well, with a whole slate of candidates and Nigel said, “For student representative to the Board of Governors, how about Amy?”. And there were a few people who said, “Yeah, Amy, Sure, great, Amy”. So that was how I got nominated as part of that slate of candidates.

So we ran the slate, we campaigned, we ran around and knocked on doors in the McGill ghetto and the residences, the slate did not do well. I was the only person who actually got elected. My you know, my line is that for the student representative to the Board of Governors position, there were three other people running, and they were all these white guys named Dave. So there was Dave, Dave, and Dave, if you didn’t want to vote for Dave, the only possibility, yes, yeah.

So then I was a member of the Board of Governors. Part of our platform was this progressive student thing, but we referred to ourselves, and it makes us sound like super villains as the Alliance. So the Alliance, had many things in its platform. One of them was divestment, and that was sort of understood that if we get somebody on the Board of Governors, that is what they’re going to do, so that, you know, I only had one job.

So, yeah, I was elected to the Board of Governors. Board of governors had a Committee to Advise on Matters of Social responsibility, which had been kicking this around for years, coming up with statements like, you know, McGill abhors apartheid. And, you know, we believe apartheid is terrible and so forth, but no like, therefore we should sell what we have in these companies, that sort of action steps had never been forthcoming. I’m a little blurry on what was going on that spring and summer. We’re getting into the fall of 85 now, I do know that in early fall 85 there was a rally to call for divestment in the news, the McGill Daily, people were very involved in this that sort of marched around campus and then semi spontaneously decided to go into the James building and just kind of stand around there, the administration.

Gwen Schulman 16:56

James building being the administration Building at McGill.

Amy Kaler 17:01

Yes, the F Cyril James administration building, which at that time was where the Board of Governors offices were housed. Yeah, so we went in and kind of stood around for a little while saying, you know, “we want divestment”. Now. I think the Secretary for the Board of Governors, who was quite a nice guy came down and talked to us and said, “Well, you know, you have a means to do it through a resolution to the board. Can you all please go away now?”. So we went away.

At the next meeting of the board, we, and by we, I guess I mean the sort of progressive student groups had decided, okay, you know, we’ve got momentum. Now is the time to move this ahead. So I put forward a resolution. You had to give notice of motion to say this motion will be coming up. So I gave notice of motion for the October meeting. I think it was that in November, I would be bringing a resolution that called for McGill to divest. So everybody knew it was coming, and then we scrambled around frantically trying to basically line up votes like each of the individual governors.

Who are they? A lot of them sat on the boards of the big five banks. That was our big problem, that so many of the governors were also highly placed in big Canadian banks. And the big Canadian banks own chunks of – I’m going to keep using Rio Tinto because it’s convenient – Rio Tinto and other mining entities. It was mainly about mining, and who owns big chunks of the mining companies anyway.

So we ran around and tried to line up votes and meet with people the university based members of the Board of Governors. So the faculty and staff representatives were, were on our side. They were on board, particularly the non-academic staff association. I remember those guys as being particularly, yes, go for it. They at least the ones that we knew, were very connected. I don’t think they were, I’m not sure if they were formally unionized or not, but they were very connected to the labor movement, which was, you know, pioneering divestment in all sorts of settings, from pension funds and all sorts of things and industrial actions to prevent economic interchanges with South Africa and so forth.

So they were, I remember them as being super on board. And then on the November meeting you. Uh, there was, there was a big rally, something like 1000 people, which, for McGill at the time, that was the biggest gathering of students there had been since the 1960s um, who, you know, kind of marched around campus, were all around the James building, police were present, but, well, police weren’t present. That’s the point. They were off campus, you know. So they were nearby. But it was understood that police don’t come on campus unless there is an actual big crime happening right then, which there wasn’t. So, you know the most, and I’m obviously thinking of the university’s response to the Palestinian Palestine encampments. The most confrontational they got with us was by shutting off the outside power to the James building.

So another, well, actually, you know, Peter Nixon, Gwen, so Peter the sound guy, yeah, Peter couldn’t find anywhere to plug in his, you know, his big sound thing that was going to play like the Clash and Grateful Dead that, being Peter, that had to be. So he’s running around with an extension cord and a couple of secretaries in, I think it was one of the engineering buildings sort of beckoned him and opened the window and grabbed the, you know, got their extension cord, plugged them together, and plugged it into something in the engineering building. And, you know, we got our sound system. But that, you know, that was the extent of the pushback. So, yeah, lots of people. There lots of noise.

Somebody – why was there a cement pipe lying around? I do not know, but someone decided to roll it up in front of the James building, and then people were like, whacking it was sticks and things like that, which was good. I was in the Board of Governors, you know, the room The meeting began, the resolution comes forward. The debate was really not that interesting. It was more we statement of things that we’d heard over and over again about constructive engagement, and who is this really harming if we divest from South Africa and the universities, you know, we all sympathize, but the university’s primary duty is to be financially responsible And fiduciary responsibilities, and then that means, you know, letting our investments be guided by, you know, what’s the best return, and I and the other people who were in favor of the resolution, gave our standard, you know, responses to those, and then we voted, and it was a narrow majority. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it was a majority. So, you know, boom, there we go. And that, yeah, the meeting ended, and yeah, and then we, we all went home. We all had, really, I went home with a couple of my roommates and Nigel, and we had the biggest headaches we’ve, any of us have ever had, from just trying to keep all the balls in the air.

Doug Miller 23:31

That is, it sounds like quite a process of organization as well. You your team work seems to have brought together quite a you mentioned the Union, but we’re nearing the profs on board with you other groups.

Amy Kaler 23:51

Yeah, there were profs in the political science and anthropology departments in particular, trying to think Sam Noumoff,

Doug Miller 24:03

Oh Sam would be there. Yeah, he comes up a lot.

Amy Kaler 24:07

Myron Echenberg, trying to think who else I know. There were others. Sorry.

Doug Miller 24:19

Well, so there was a support that gave you more credits than if it was just students involved.

Amy Kaler 24:28

Yeah, definitely, definitely the yeah, there were faculty, like I said, the non-academic staff were very, very supportive. We had a really important person that, again, I’m sure you’ve heard of many times, was Chengiah Ragavan. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. Who was? He was like, Concordia was his institutional base. But he was, like, hanging out with us and trying to kind of shepherd these, you know, unruly young people in a constructive direction. So yeah, he was, and he was also really important as a sort of conduit to the bigger anti-apartheid movement, the African National Congress abroad or the or in exile, as well as other anti apartheid groups. So we definitely had mentors, especially Chengiah.

By that point, by like 1985 certainly, the ball was starting to roll. Churches were divesting. Unions I’ve mentioned were divesting in the United States and in the UK, there was a lot of student activism around divestment, so we kind of had some of that momentum.

Doug Miller 25:53

How about, how about relations with with the black community as well? Was there any participation and coordination with their their site,

Amy Kaler 26:03

Yeah, there was, was a group called the the black students network, which was formed, formed in 83, 84. The President was a guy named Mark Warner, a student named Mark Warner and one of the executive members from the black students network became a coordinator of the South Africa committee the year following divestments, it was a guy named Steve Miller who now goes by Steve Appea. So there was that link, you know, again, it was like people belonging to several different things.

Through, through Steve, there was a, if I remember, right? There was a larger black student group at Concordia. I can’t remember what they were called, but they were very like that. They when they showed up, they brought a lot of people with them. Oh, good, yeah, yeah. And because most, if I’m remembering right, the Concordia group were, they were Montrealers for the most part. So they had connections, networks, what have you into the sort of black Montreal community, whereas most of the Black Student Network at McGill, or at least, you know, the ones that I knew, which may not, may not be representative, were people from other places. So they, they didn’t necessarily have those developed links with Montreal itself, but the Concordia people definitely did.

I’m trying to remember names here, Nigel Thomas was one and there was there were two guys named Nigel, the three, if you count our, our Nigel was like white Nigel, and there were two Black Nigels from Concordia that were really active. And I can’t I remember one is Nigel Thomas, who’s now a quite well known poet and author. I believe he still lives in Montreal, and I’m blanking on who the other Nigel was, but anyway,

Gwen Schulman 28:28

Was Nigel involved in liberation books?

Amy Kaler 28:31

He might have been, he might have been. Nigel Thomas was a bit older. And Nigel, whose name I can’t remember, was about our age. Yeah, and then yeah, and then there was Nigel Crawhall.

So yeah, the South Africa Committee was pretty not black. And I think if, if we had been picked up and dumped in 2024 we would have had to do a fair bit of soul searching about why that was the case. In 1985 I know for myself, my own understanding of race and racism and exclusion and so on was pretty rudimentary. So for me, it would have been, you know, we like, how can we work with the black students, rather than, I don’t think I had a moment of thinking, “gosh, is this just some sort of white liberal project to liberate, you know, the oppressed masses who need to be liberated?”. It was more like, “who are our allies? Can we ally with Black student organizations, black community organizations?”. There was a newspaper. AfriCan, I think it was that was published out of.Montreal West that, if I remember right, carried news for them, the Montreal Anglophone black community, and it carried quite a bit of news about South Africa, as I recall. So lots of people in Montreal were, were following this fairly closely.

Gwen Schulman 30:20

I’m sorry, I lost power there for a while, so I missed a whole chunk. If you’ve already answered this, we can move on. But in the as things are culminating at McGill and they’re, you know, moving towards a divestment resolution, did you have a moment to talk about any kind of, was there any kind of coordinated pushback, or any effort to try to intimidate you or other students into dropping it so never threatening or intimidating in any way?

Amy Kaler 30:55

I didn’t perceive intimidation. I was pretty convinced, you know, that this is right. You just plow ahead with what’s right. I certainly there were no, I think there were mutterings about how you know if you violated the academic code of conduct, or whatever it’s called, you could be in trouble. You could be suspended, what have you. But at the time, it was pretty clear, we’re not, you know, this is lawful, legitimate protest. We’re not violating anything, so we’re good.

I know, you know he’s here’s an anecdote, the principal of McGill at the time, David Johnson, sometime before the divestment vote, he invited me and Nigel, who was the coordinator of the South Africa committee, to meet him at the Faculty Club for drinks so we could talk this through like gentlemen, or, you know, something like that. And, yeah, Nigel and I got there, we realized that he wasn’t actually buying us a drink. We would have to kind of buy our own. I, you know, I had no money. Nigel had, like, $1 or something. So we bought one glass of ginger ale. It just sort of alternated drinking from it, which must have looked kind of weird. And then it one point in the conversation, I was being very animated about something, and, you know, with my arm, sent the ginger ale flying. And then that was, you know, the end of that, but, but Johnson was, “that’s, that’s fine, Amy, you know, you’re high spirited”, but that was that.

That was pretty typical. There was a, you know, it was condescending, and it was a little obnoxious, but it wasn’t like, you know, get out of here, you’ll be arrested, certainly at the end of that year. Actually, Nigel and I both received Scarlet Keys, which is a Student Leadership Award, and there was a reception at the president’s house and so on. And even though we had been kind of at the center of all this, you know, not so wonderful publicity for McGill and all of this stuff. Nonetheless, we were there getting our ScarletKkey next to, like the guy who ran the Interfraternity Council, so that there was definitely not the same kind of like blunt in your face hostility that you see today.

Gwen Schulman 33:43

Yeah, very distinct from what’s going on right now with the, it’s a, really, quite a distinct, yeah, pretty different.

Amy Kaler 33:52

Yeah, there was the tone, I would say, of what we got from the administration is “We sympathize, we understand it’s terrible what’s going on in South Africa, but the situation is actually rather complex, and we, we don’t have the freedom to just dispose of our investments because we don’t like something”. So, you know, like I said, it was kind of condescending, kind of patronizing, but it wasn’t, yeah. It wasn’t as bad as it gets treated today.

Gwen Schulman 34:26

Yeah. And what about just the general tenor among students? Like, what would you say was the general feeling on campus? Did you feel like there was a lot of student support? Did you feel it growing over time? Like, what was that feel?

Amy Kaler 34:45

Definitely growing over time. When I got to McGill in fall of 83, I think yes, the South Africa committee was sort of a small group of maybe 10 or 15 people who went to meetings once a month or something, and worked on projects and raised funds and so on, and that, within the two years between that and divestment, it grew, not so much the committee itself, but the number of students who were supportive, or who, you know, for the rallies, we could get 1000 people, which, in the context of how big McGill is, is not very many, but still, it was a whole lot more than just 10 or 12, you know, in a Room in the student union building.

So I think I saw it grow very rapidly, very fast. I remember noticing, you know, one day in 1984 early 1985 that I was seeing people wearing, like, South Africa related buttons that I didn’t know who they were. You know, it’s like some random person in class, and, yeah, and that registering with me is, oh, I haven’t seen that before. So it did percolate out. I think it percolated among the arts students. It didn’t percolate too far in engineering. Didn’t percolate too far in the professional faculties, or st Anne, but it did move pretty quickly, I think within kind of Arts and Science students.

Gwen Schulman 36:33

Doug, did you want to jump in there? One more question about the Southern Africa Committee. South Africa Committee.

Doug Miller 36:39

Well, one I’ve noticed what, when you talk about the committee, the numbers of women involved are, is quite significant, and this was a time of rising feminist consciousness and so on. What kind of feeling did you have vis a vis the treatment of women as participants and leaders and so on? In this grouping?

Amy Kaler 37:01

I had, well, you’re right, it was, it was the leadership.

Amy Kaler 37:07

Sometimes the person at the top was male, sometimes they were female. But a lot of the leadership, the organizing work, was indeed done by women. There was a strong feminist group at McGill at the time the Women’s Union, and there was a fair bit of crossover there. All of these groups were on the fourth floor of the Student Union Building, which meant that people were kind of in and out of each other’s spaces and offices all the time.

So there was definitely a strong feminist, I don’t know, energy, vibe, what have you, which for the early, mid 1980s a time of conservative retrenchment after the 70s, is quite remarkable that that you know, that survived at McGill. You know, at the risk of getting into generalizations, women tend to be, in these sorts of groups, better at just organizing, just like, “Okay, we have tables in these four buildings, who needs to go, where, when this needs to happen, that needs to happen, that needs to happen? Okay? We’ll, yeah, we’ll make sure all of this gets done”.

I think, excuse me, a lot of us who were involved in South Africa Committee now that I think about it had, we had been people who were running things in high school, like, even if it’s, you know, the debating society or the school newspaper or church youth group or something like that. So you got an influx of people coming in who had, you know, as much as you can have experience when you’re 18 years old, some experience with just these are the tasks that need to happen. Let’s do them. And that tended to be of girls, young women. A lot of I remember being surprised by how many people who are really active, not only in divestment, but fourth floor stuff in general, were as I was, summer camp counselors, where it’s all about coordinating bodies and excuse me, and resources and kids going there and dealing with this problem as it comes up.

Gwen Schulman 39:26

So yeah, what about relationships off campus? The South Africa Committee’s relationships are yours as an anti-apartheid activist with other organizations in Quebec, and specifically crossing linguistic lines, was there alliance building with some of the French universities or unions, or

Amy Kaler 39:46

Not a whole lot, to be honest, because most of us were pretty unilingual, My French was adequate, but barely. I try to think –

Gwen Schulman 40:03

So was the fight dominated by non Quebec students at McGill?

Amy Kaler 40:07

Absolutely. Yeah, it was until, until people like you and May came along, and then it shifted. I think there was a big change for the better that way. But yeah, it definitely was people from somewhere else, very few of whom spoke French well enough, you know, we could go to a meeting and sort of understand what’s going on, you know, but not be able to participate in a meaningful way.

The big student unions, there were two at the time, student federations in Quebec that were always sort of tussling and changing their names constantly. But anyway, so ANEQ, Association National des Etudiants de Quebec, was the kind of left wing one. And then there was RAEU, which was Rassemblement des something or other des etudiants universitaire, which was the more conservative one, and I know ANEQ was the, ANEQ was like, right in there with the trade union movements. It was a pipeline, and they were strongly anti-apartheid. When Montreal wide events were held, and ANEQ was there, along with, you know, the major Quebec unions. And I remember going to a couple of meetings with people from ANEQ but they didn’t work that well because, you know, the McGill people, our French was pathetic.

Gwen Schulman 41:41

Nobody was going to translate for you into English.

Amy Kaler 41:44

It was like you were on your own, in those days. No, you don’t speak French. That is your problem. Exactly. I empathize with it was our problem. We should have spoken we should have figured out how to speak better French.

Gwen Schulman 41:57

Any maybe just on this, maybe we’ll move on after this. But any ideological rifts within SAC? Was there ever any discussion on that level of, sort of a revolutionary vision versus a more, sort of, like, human rights, social justice?

Amy Kaler 42:18

Yeah, there were a few, I’m not sure if rift would be the word, but distinction maybe I know the external face of SAC like you know, those leaflets that we printed up constantly and posters that we made and so forth were very much of the sort of human rights and, you know, and peace and suffering in South Africa.

Within the group, I think you know, Chengiah Ragavan definitely had a hand here. there was a much more, it was very close to the ANC and exiles line about the need for, at the time they were talking about the need for a working class revolution, the need to that, you know, capitalism and racism feed off each other. They both need to go in the interests of the impoverished people of South Africa, you know, of whatever our racial origin or category. Yeah, there was an understanding that the that Apartheid was necessary to extract tons and tons of labor for mining, agriculture, what have you that benefited, you know, the white minority, so that’s these things are bound up together. The idea of a sort of capitalist, non racist South Africa was like, how would that even be possible? But that was certainly something that was within the group. The outside face was very much amnesty, international human rights and peace.

So, yeah, and then Sam Noumoff was in there as well his comparative revolution class that everybody took. I still have Nigel Crawhall’s copy of Challengers to Capitalism with like marginal notes in it and whatnot. It’s on my bookshelf somewhere. There was also, there was also the tension between this very kind of Marxist class politics view of what was going on in South Africa, and the more Black Power centered view of what was going on. So the I’m blanking on them.

Gwen Schulman 45:17

The Azania people, the Azania People’s –

Amy Kaler 45:20

Organization, no, something, yeah? Well, yeah, the Azania something or other, Steve Biko and black consciousness we knew about, even though he’d been kind of taken up as a hero of the whole struggle so and this idea of African, you know, land for Africans, that and the that was the central issue. And excuse me, I think there was again, this is just my impression. I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I think there was a fair bit of sympathy for that within the South Africa Committee. I know I was certainly sympathetic to it. Excuse me. Excuse me. I was talking a lot yesterday, and it’s catching up with me. To the idea that that, that it was about the land, that the land of South Africa belonged.

It was a vision that was maybe the first encounter I had with the concept of land back, you know, the if you set the class struggle aside for a moment, like the land belongs to the people who were there first, although, you know, anthropologists would say first, depending on what you’re talking about, is a bit of a slippery concept, and they should, they should have it back. So and I know that there were students in the Black Student network at McGill and some of the ones at Concordia who were black themselves, who were very sympathetic to that. Yeah, but it was I would say it was a minority view. And the main line we had within the group was the ANC line, which was class based, non racialist, and Freedom Charter, the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter. Yeah, exactly, exactly. There was more sort of diversity of views or understanding, the more we learned about the situation. But I don’t think it was these. I’m not aware of rifts or fissures, or this becoming a point where people can’t deal with each other/,

Gwen Schulman 48:01

Going back to your land, back reference, do you recall any kind of awareness, or even Alliance building with indigenous groups in Canada and drawing those parallels?

Amy Kaler 48:14

I’m not aware of alliance building work. It might have been happening, and I just didn’t know about it. But I, yeah, I am not aware.

Gwen Schulman 48:25

So SAC never, was never involved in joining forces with Indigenous organizations here in Canada and making that connection?

Amy Kaler 48:35

Um, we made the connection sort of conceptually, um, especially around the activities of mining companies in the north. You know, it’s like this is happening in Namibia. You know, water is being poisoned. People are not able to live there anymore. And it’s happening in, you know, Nunavut and northern Labrador. So it’s the same like displacement and bad treatment of people in order to mine. So we sort of understood that these were all tentacles of kind of the same thing.

But I don’t think, I’m pretty sure that didn’t push us to act, to do a lot of work with the people who were in Canada working on Canadian issues. I remember one time, one man, he was from the Lubicon Lake. Cree in, I want to say northern Manitoba. I think I could be wrong, whose land was [inaudible]? It was a mining issue. And he came, he was talk, speaking on Canadian campuses and and SAC, you know, we, like, sponsored his talk at McGill and, you know, picked him up the airport and did all of that stuff. It might have been a land claims issue that the Lubicon Lake were trying to assert their claim to their land, and so that’s why he was going across the country, um, sort of drumming up support, um, but that stands out as kind of an exception. So yeah, we That’s another way in which we weren’t really as clued in as we probably should have been. Our focus was very much out there.

Doug Miller 50:44

I mean, this is a wonderful insight for me. I didn’t realize all this was going on. McGill, all this time. How did you feel? Gwen, I’m going to move it to another level now. How do you feel it affected you? All of this work. How did it influence you? How did you evolve as a result of it?

Amy Kaler 51:08

Oh, yeah, tremendously. It was well, it after I couple of years after I finished my BA I stayed at McGill and did a diploma in education, and actually a master’s in education as well. And my former husband and I, you know, we went to Zimbabwe for little over about three and a half years with the Canadian NGO WUSC, which has probably come up in your talks before, a lot of, lot of anti apartheid people ended up in WUSC and CUSO. And that was, you know, that was a direct follow on. We wanted to kind of see what was, we wanted to see, you know, Zimbabwe in particular, because they’d, they’d gone through their democratic transition in 1980 so we’re coming up on 10 years from that. We wanted to see what does a, you know, a society that’s gone through this move from white minority rule to a more democratic rule is like, you know what? What is it like? What’s going on?

And yeah, stayed in rural Zimbabwe for a few years, and then that, my former husband was always very interested in academics. He was a much better student than I was, but from that experience of being in Zimbabwe, my first experience of being just sort of dropped into a completely different culture and okay, figure it out. Everything’s completely different, and you don’t understand what’s going on around you. It is what, like living through that and just seeing so much is what moved me into graduate school in in social sciences and sociology, thinking when our contract in Zimbabwe came up, I was thinking like, I want to understand more about what I’m seeing is huge, you know, social change and that people’s lives are completely different, and they you know, this big thing has happened, but some other things are unchanged. And I think I wanted to learn how to think about that. And so that got me with my undergrad degree was in literature, English, literature. And you know, that’s why I ended up going into a PhD program in sociology, which, thank God, would take somebody who had no prior social science background and but really good GRE. GRE scores were awesome. So yeah, and here I am today,

Doug Miller 54:08

Tremendous.

Gwen Schulman

That’s the personal legacy for you. What about just in terms of the movement? You know, there are a lot of people who really have a very romanticized view of the anti apartheid movement, but to be fair, there probably were some things that were special about it. What’s your what’s your take on, you know, the nature of the movement, and maybe, is there something that can be drawn from today in in current day struggles?

Amy Kaler 54:38

Yeah, um, it’s hard for me, hard to answer because it’s so bound up with a particular time in life of being a very young adult and very idealistic about wanting the world to be a better place. So the anti-apartheid movement, and it fed my sense of idealism, because here’s something we can actually do, and we can get things to happen, and so it may be provided a bit of a, I don’t know, in insulation or not insulation, a counter movement to the kind of cynicism and “it’s all, it’s all going to fall apart no matter what we do”.

So, yeah, I read a quote somewhere. It was on the internet, so it must be true, someone saying cynicism does the work of obedience. So you know, if you believe that nothing can be done, this is all going to end up really badly, and you don’t really trust any way of altering things, it’s effectively, it’s the same as if you had just agreed to go along with whatever bad thing is happening. I think about that a lot, with respect to climate politics in particular.

And I think the South Africa movement was an instance where, you know, you had 1000s, hundreds of 1000s, however, many millions of people who didn’t do the work of obedience and who didn’t allow their actions to be shaped or dictated by cynicism, so a sense that things are possible, change is possible. That’s so, yeah, I have very good feelings about the anti apartheid movement in that respect.

I also, looking back, I can see the ANC was feeding us a line, you know, that they had impressionable young people, which we were, and they had their line on what the struggle was about, and they had really excellent communicators. And so, yeah, so we, it was all plausible. It was all very exciting. And if we had like, we had knowledge that we could not possibly have had at that age, we would have thought, “Okay, well the relationship of the ANC to the student movement is an interesting thing”. I guess we also have, you know, the benefit of hindsight.

Now Zimbabwe is the example I know better than South Africa. But you know, amazing things happen because of the democratic transition in Zimbabwe people’s lives, especially rural, people, just got better, and all the ways that they were supposed to get better, but then, you know, as ZANU became an authoritarian entity, and people’s lives got a whole lot worse.

So I think we may have had perhaps unrealistically high expectations for how everything was going to be better once white racists were not in charge of stuff anymore, and everything was better. You know, white racists should not be in charge of anything. But I look at, you know, in particular, yeah, Zimbabwe, because it’s the example I know, and I think I don’t know. This is really sad. This is really too bad that it went that the same party, an organization that brought Zimbabwe out of white minority control, contributed to all this suffering later on. And I think, yeah, I’m not sure where that’s going. It’s a perspective you have in hindsight that you don’t have at the time. I guess.

Doug Miller 59:33

No, it’s a complicated one, and it is often very disappointing. We understand that too well. Well, my goodness, Gwen, would it? Would anything else? Gwen.

Gwen Schulman 59:49

No, I think, Amy, is there anything you feel that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t sort of steer you towards?

Amy Kaler 59:57

Not? I. Not really, except to, I guess, restate that the I’m worried the last few minutes of me going on about Zimbabwe might have been kind of a downer. The anti apartheid movement was absolutely formative for me. The people I had the opportunity to meet, both in Canada and outside Canada, were inspiring. And it, you know, I guess, speaking only for myself, it was this political moment where it was like, okay, we, you know, I’m not overstating the role of the anti apartheid movement outside South Africa. You know, we didn’t bring apartheid to an end or anything, but we helped to sort of push this thing, you know, like we were a couple of little hands on the giant ball that’s rolling.

And that, I think out here in Edmonton and Alberta, you know, it’s, I mean, it’s Texas, basically, it’s a super conservative kind of awful place. But I think in some ways, when I do my thing here, go to, you know, meetings of our provincial NDP, or go to city council or whatever. I’m still, in some ways, drawing from that well of energy and that well of you know, you don’t know if this is going to succeed, but you know, nothing will succeed if nothing, if you don’t try or get or get involved. I think I’m still drawing from that well, of you know, better things are possible that was filled a lot in in Montreal in the 80s. So, yeah, absolutely formative time, important people, relationships. My little brain was expanding constantly with all of these new ideas that I, you know, I was, like, 18 years old, of course, I never thought of this stuff before, but it was like, Wow. I was I learned so much. So it was not always an easy experience, but it was always a good experience,

Gwen Schulman 1:02:15

I guess. And actually, there is one thing. And again, you may have covered it, what went into my blackout? But you know what? It’s important to point out in this interview that you were part of the group, and you played a really key role in the first Canadian university to divest from South Africa. So you know there, you had a very important role in this movement. And I think, you know, bears pointing out and remembering. And do you remember your expertise being drawn on for subsequent divestment initiatives in universities across Canada? Yes, definitely.

Amy Kaler 1:02:50

I remember after the, you know, the climactic Board of Governors meeting where they voted in favor of divestment, and now the wheels are just turning. I again, need a little vignette moment here. There was me and Nigel and my former husband, Guy Thompson, and my roommate, Carlene Gardner, who may have, may have come up in your, in your interviews before as well. And we all went to this Vietnamese restaurant that, if I remember right, used to be at Park in Sherbrooke, Madame Trang’s. I think that was there. Yeah, I had the biggest headache I had ever had in my life. I think I was massively dehydrated. And we were eating these big bowls of noodles soup from Madame Trang’s. And CBC News was on. And there’s McGill. It was like the first item on the news, we heard various people that we knew yelling about three piece suits and blood stained hands and so on. And first Canadian campus to divest. And I remember Nigel saying to me and Carlene, “You know, we are the experts now. We know more about university divestment in Canada than anybody in the country”. And that just made my headache worse. And I think I kind of put my head down a few moments and then got up and finished eating my soup.

But then, yeah, we did get calls from people at other schools. I remember York. I remember, think York was one of the next to divest. It would be a that would be in the tradition of York Carlton. Queens, I think, yeah. Queens, yeah. I remember, May remembers this too. So I’m not hallucinating. I am getting a call I think in the South Africa committee office, obviously no internet, no email, no text, no nothing, just phones from one of leaders at Queen’s saying, “hey everybody, how’s it going? We just took over our university administration building, and we’re all in here now, but we’re not sure what our demands should be. So do you have any good ideas? Because we got to write something down”. And, yeah, yeah, that was, that was Martha Gordon, whom, whom I know Gwen knows, who was, yeah, Martha was, yeah. Martha’s Great.

Gwen Schulman 1:05:34

Martha was interviewed for this series also.

Amy Kaler 1:05:37

Well if she remembers the same thing that May and I are then you’ve triangulated May and I are not wrong, but I seem to recall it was, that was Martha Gordon.

Gwen Schulman 1:05:46

I do remember we all jumped in a car and went there. Yes, I remember sleeping on somebody’s floor. Yes,

Amy Kaler 1:05:55

Yeah, yeah. I remembered. I’m not sure about Carlton or Queens, no, she was at Queens. I remember going to Martha.

Gwen Schulman

Martha Was at Carleton.

Amy Kaler

Was at Carleton, okay, I went to some Ontario campus in the back of somebody’s car. Same thing.

A whole van load of us went to, oh, this was actually really a big experience for me. A whole pile of us drove to New York City for there was like a big student anti apartheid. North America wide. Well, I think we were the only Canadians American, United States wide, anti-apartheid committee or not, committee conference at Hunter College in Manhattan. So, you know, we all drove there and showed up and my I met students from there were a lot of students from historically black colleges and state universities who just made my middle class white Canadian brain explode because they were so, they knew this stuff so well, they were really carrying the torch of the Black Power movements of by then, it would have been 15 years prior, very, very strong. They weren’t like “we really think it’s in McGill’s best interest to divest”, they were much more militant, but militant in a very smart way, like and they just basically knew what they were doing much better than we did.

And sitting in like meetings for a couple of days, I don’t know if I said anything. I just listened and absorbed and thought, wow, holy cow that this is, I don’t know that this is sort of left wing politics at its best. These, you know, people who have lived with racism. They understand it better than I ever will, and they’ve used it to sort of forge these tools of, how do you approach institutions? How do you make things happen? that are much I don’t know, sharper or sort of steeped in history than my own sort of assumption that if you just talk to people and tell them why something is a bad thing, they’ll stop doing it. So that, yeah, going to Hunter College, sleeping on somebody’s floor and, you know, like leaving at three in the morning and all that stuff. But I remember my brain just kind of lighting up.

We had a concert. The was it, it was, it was on the program as a cultural event, which, you know, could be wonderful, or it could be godawful. And it was Little Steven Van Zandt from Bruce Springsteen’s band, wow, with, like the pirate head scarf and all the jewellery got up on stage, and there were also some Nigerian drummers and other things. But it was, yeah, it was like a star-spangled moment. So cool. Anyway, yeah, sorry, there.

Doug Miller 1:09:21

No, not at all. I mean very much the history of what was going on, and it is an insight for so many people to hear these things. I with that, I think we can sort of say we’ve really covered the territory quite nicely. And I appreciated your reflective, your insights, your really, really wonderful insights are to how this all worked and what came together there. And as Gwen pointed out, a very remarkable accomplishment that McGill stayed old McGill, they’re certainly not responding at all like that this day.

Amy Kaler 1:09:57

Yeah, it’s really, yeah very, what can I say? Disturbing, wrong, the kind of quick move to criminalization. If criminal activities are going on, that’s one thing. If people are using civil disobedience as a legitimate means of political expression that shouldn’t involve, you know, a violent or a hostile response anyway.

Yeah, it’s happened at my university too. At the University of Alberta, the police came in and destroyed what was a quite a peaceful, self organizing, very intentional camp, and now you know, it’s all gone. Yeah, we didn’t have to deal with that. We were fortunate.

Doug Miller 1:10:58

Thanks so much. Amy. I really do appreciate this.

Gwen Schulman 1:11:01

That was great, yeah, wonderful.

Amy Kaler

It was really, yeah, it was really fun for me. I don’t, you know, walk down memory lane all that often. So this was a great opportunity for me too.

Gwen Schulman 1:11:10

Fantastic. Definitely brings back some amazing memories.

Amy Kaler 1:11:14

I’m sure it does, like you were there for this stuff. Yeah,

Gwen Schulman 1:11:18

That’s super interesting. Anyway, to fill in some holes, I’ll have to go back and listen, because, of course, I missed the key part of your story. My computer went.

Doug Miller 1:11:31

Okay, I’m going to turn –

Amy Kaler 1:11:33

Material culture. I think I might have a couple of T shirts or something.

Doug Miller 1:11:37

If you could take pictures and, you know, let us see them. That would be great. Yeah, I’m going to turn the recording off at this point. Yeah, okay.