Becca Whitla

Doug Miller 00:06

There we go, so I'm Doug Miller in Montreal with Amy Kaler from in Scotland, and today we're with Becca WHitla in Toronto, and we are going to talk to her about her experience with the anti-apartheid movement, but before we do, I'd like you to identify again yourself as who you are, where you are, and then maybe give us a small background about how you, your own background, and how you came to be aware of apartheid and that kind of stuff,

Becca Whitla 00:41

So I'm –

Doug Miller 00:44

Sorry, Becca, I am very step, I'm supposed to be the curator here. I have to ask you to orally send to the letter the consent form that we asked you to sign, so that we have an oral record of you consenting to do this interview and agreeing to the principal or the conditions of that agreement.

Becca Whitla 01:08

I agree with the letter. I did send you a copy to Doug. I agree.

Doug Miller 01:19

Now we can start. Okay,

Becca Whitla 01:22

Okay, um so I like, I don't know where to start. I guess I was born in 1966 and I now work in Saskatoon at the Saskatoon Theological Union at St. Andrews College, where I teach theology. I teach practical theology, so worship, preaching, etc. And I live half the time in Saskatoon and half the time in Toronto. And I came at that work. I also am more recently ordained as an Anglican priest. I went about it backwards and started taught theology for seven years, and then decided to get ordained, but my trajectory to that was through music. I worked for 20 years as the music director at an Anglican church in downtown Toronto, and I also worked in choirs in the union movement, using music to develop leadership skills, and also just, and I led, co-led, a big community women's choir in Toronto, for which I co-founded, and it's still going. That was, you know, more than 30 years ago. So, so I, all that music stuff, particularly in the church, made me want to go back to school.

So I did that, and then, and then had this career shift into teaching theology, kind of, I would say, teaching theology on the left, so it's a drawing on liberation theology, and inspired particularly by Latin American liberation theology, but so thinking about music and liturgy, it, and also decolonizing those sort of this big package, and I could spend the whole hour talking about all that.

But I'll stop there and say that what happened to me that connected me to the anti-apartheid movement was, but I grew up in a family that was very justice-oriented, and my mom ran for the NDP as a school trustee and was the treasurer of the local NDP, and my parents were my dad's also an Anglican priest, and they were involved in the student Christian movement, as Amy knows, because our moms were friends.

My mom was the daughter of missionaries to Japan, so, so there's kind of a long commitment to living out a Christian life, like living out Christian principles in the rest of your life. So that was kind of the family I grew up in, and so I was interested in, in justice issues, and I don't remember which came first, but I do remember seeing Bishop Desmond Tutu on TV and being really inspired by him and thinking maybe I was home sick or something, but I just was, like it was the middle of the day and I was watching him and I was captivated by his rhetoric and by his, the clarity of his call.

And then there was a group called Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa in Toronto who organized a conference at a high school conference on apartheid and I went to it and was completely blown away by it and went up to them and said “I want to get involved”. So that was kind of how I get got involved.

I got involved with them and I got involved with a group that formed around the conference, like, or after the conference, which ended up calling itself Youth Against Apartheid, and we, so we were sort of senior high school students who decided that we wanted to keep doing work in high schools, and we wanted to organize, like we wanted to do education, sort of peer education, so we would do talks and protests and boycott events and stuff like that, so we got involved, and, and I was involved in Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa.

And there was a lot of kind of educational events and speaker events, because this, what would have been in the mid-80s, or just before the, so, so the global anti-apartheid movement had really was full steam ahead, and so there was a lot of interest, and we organized a lot of public speaking events with visitors from South Africa, and then there was sort of an exiled ANC group of younger activists here, and also the Black Conscious… the… I forget what it was called.. the Black Consciousness Party is terrible, I can't remember… BCP…

Doug Miller 07:18

The Black Consciousness Movement of South Africa.

Becca Whitla 07:19

Yeah, so there were both groups here and I ended up dating a Black South African refugee for a year or two and so got involved with the exiled South African community in Toronto as well and then the, that group, all of that work led me to, and I, I intentionally took a year off, like after high school, I come, I did my ARCT in the piano, and worked in the anti-apartheid movement, like it was an intentional, “this is what I'm going to use my time for”, and yeah, so I should.. I just keep talking, I mean, I'm just.. yeah,

Doug Miller 08:12

This is wonderful. It's… it certainly opens the door to all sorts of things. Amy, what would you like to say?

Amy Kaler 08:18

I would say, yeah, just keep, keep talking. Tell us about, you know, this year, the way you decided you're just going to dedicate yourself to the anti-apartheid movement. Like, what was that like? You know, what did you do? Like, tell us about it.

Becca Whitla 08:35

Well, so, so it was that it was organizing events, and I was involved with both Youth Against Apartheid and Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa, and we, like, we organized an event for South Africa Women's Day, and we organized, there was a speaker I remember, we organized. there was a speaker from South Africa, who came from the ANC, and there was a public event at Trinity St. Paul's in downtown Toronto, and we were the hosts for that, and we, so we, because of the growing global anti-apartheid movement. There was a lot of opportunity for having guest speakers from South Africa and doing events, and there was a lot of interest so we became sort of this group that would go and speak, and so I would sometimes speak.

One of the funniest, so that event at Trinity St. Paul's was interesting, because there were police there, and they were, they were worried about violence, actually, so they trained our little group of, you know, raggle tagle volunteers in what to do about a bomb threat. It was just kind of crazy, right? Like, it was, yeah. So, there was that.

Doug Miller 10:13

I mean, this is the first time I've heard such a situation as vivid as that. What was the underlying cause? Do you think?

Becca Whitla 10:24

I don't know, and it was, I mean, it never obviously never amounted to anything, and I don't know if they had received a threat or if they were just being overly cautious, and I don't really remember the training per se, like, so I don't, I don't, it was, I don't know how serious it was, but we were being asked to be watchful at the event, and the stakes were high.

Like I also remember there was the South African government was sending their ambassador to speak at the law school at U of T, and we had a massive protest, and we were met with police on horses who kind of moved into the crowd, so there was this real, and the whole, it was like the freedom of speech thing, and you know, the Toronto District School Board was trying to close down the conference that had been organized, because it was too political, and it was one-sided, and we, you know, I went and spoke at the, you know, and got quoted, misquoted in the paper, and you know, like, so there was just all this kind of activism.

The weirdest little speaking gig I did was to a group of Black gay men, and Nayo, who I was dating, was supposed to be there, and he was late, so I was there. I remember one of the, and another member of the group was there, who was in Youth Against Apartheid, but they had invited kind of the speaker, so it was going to be me and Nayo, who were speaking, and, and here I was, this, you know, young white woman with these Black gay men, and, and who were wanting to learn about apartheid, and one of them leaned over to another and said, “Well, she's cute”. It was like, what the hell am I, ten years old, you know? So, so there was so that was the, you know.

It's funny because now I don't remember a lot of the details, but I recently came across when I was tidying up my parents' house. All of my, I had I clipped newspaper clippings and had all this whole file on South Africa. We went to, there were fundraisers. We went to a fundraiser that was for who I don't know if it was for the ANC, or but Nancy Jackman paid for tickets for us to go, and so we had a table, and Harry Belafonte was one of the speakers, and like it was this fancy dinner, and there were us, these kind of, you know, 18,19 year old 17 year old activists at one of the tables, so, so that was that was what it was.

And then eventually I did go to, there was, it was in my first year of university, so this would have been maybe 87 There was a UN conference in Argentina, for, aimed really at countries from the global south in solidarity with Namibia, and they asked, there was one person from Canada, one from the US, and one from the UK, kind of, who were there from non-governmental organizations that were working on anti-apartheid issues, and so the three of us were there, and the rest of the folks were kind of human rights people and stuff from the global south, and it was a UN event, and so I went on behalf of Canadians concerned about Southern Africa.

Doug Miller 14:40

Fascinating, I'm still, I'm still fascinated about the kind of opposition that seemed to be present around Toronto. There was also very active white nationals, white racist grouping go out, several of them, actually, not just one, and I was. Wondering if they might be the kind of forces that were standing that were speaking out against you or threatening, even –

Becca Whitla 15:07

I don't know. I think that the South African government itself was mobilizing allies to, and I don't know if they were White nationalist Canadians, or if they were just right wing, or if, yeah, I'm not sure, for sure, the government was like the South African government was trying to, was fighting like crazy to be respectable.

Doug Miller 15:40

Yes.

Becca Whitla 15:41

And so that, that for sure was happening, and that was the speaker who spoke at the law building at U of T, was that was all about that, it was all about, and, and this thing about, well, you have to have balance, you know, you have to have the white racists, if you're going to have the Black nationalists.

And the, and the anti-apartheid movement, it's like, okay, no, you don't actually, but, but that, so it was, I mean, I, it was a really, it was a time, like, it had a big impact on me then when I went my first year of university was at the at U of T at the Scarborough campus in a newly minted program on international development and I thought I was going to, that's what I was going to do, and I, you know, I really wanted to go somewhere in the world and be of help.

It was, it to me in hindsight, I, and at the time, eventually I sort of saw it, realized that it was kind of the missionary work of my grandparents, that it was like this, that it was coming from that kind of, you know, well-intentioned place, but the but I was dating Nayo at the time, and he was pretty critical of the program, because he felt like it was patronizing, and he felt like we weren't learning anything about culture, so we were learning about soil management and, and politics, but not anything about the local culture and what Africa as a continent might have to offer North America, so there was, so he conscientized me, I guess I would say, and I, I was also always very interested in, in the cultural, so I kind of didn't become uncomfortable with the program myself, and switched, so I switched over to York University, where I studied music and humanities, and kept up with, you know, kind of a commitment to activism, but didn't study abandon that path.

Doug Miller 18:14

Wow, Amy, please.

Amy Kaler 18:16

Yeah, yeah, I really appreciated what you were saying about being involved in youth movements, as you know, quite young, 17, 18, and that's, yeah, that's a perspective that we need more of, I guess. We've talked to a lot of people who were sort of university aged activists and a lot of people who were union guys in their 40s or whatever, but the youth, the younger people are really interesting.

And I'm wondering, do you have any thoughts or any reflections about what it was like being you being young, being a, you know, teenager, very young adult, and, like, you say, this dinner that Nancy Jackman paid for, or whatever, you're kind of thrown into a world of really important, yet serious stuff going on, and big ideas, and so forth. That's I'm guessing, probably more impactful than what you're learning in school. I wondered if you could just talk about being quite young and very active, and so being in all these spaces that might have been very new,

Becca Whitla 19:49

There's is, I mean, I could, I remember the names of some of the people, so like if you were actually interested in trying to find some of them, I might know. I did get interviewed by somebody about specifically about Youth Against Apartheid, like with while I was at Saskatoon, so within the last five years or seven years, and I don't know what his project was, but he was a bit like you, he was interested in what they, what happened to those people, like the impact that it had on their lives.

And so there was a, there was a group of us, and some of us were actors, like there was one guy who Greg Heptonstall, something like that, anyhow. His, he was an actor, he might have been a little bit older, like a year or two, and so I would need to look, look that up and try to find some of those people.

But the, the people who worked in Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa were teachers. Okay, they, they were one of them was at York, like, so a university teacher, but, but a couple of them were heavily involved in the Toronto District School Board, and the, the school board was an activist school board, like, it's interesting that my mom was running for the NDP to be on the school board. It was, I mean, it's still an activist, well, it's been completely disabled by Doug Ford, but, but there was this sense of education, the possibility of education being liberative, right?

So there, so in a way, the work with, through the conference, and which was very big, like I don't know how you got to go to it, I don't remember, but somehow I went, or you were interested, maybe, and then you got to go, and so the people who were organizing it were really Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa, and so it was just incredibly exciting to have this opportunity to learn about something, and they had somebody from the ANC youth, speaking at it, and you know there was this.

I still associate a strong rhetorical gift with people from Southern Africa, so there's this incredible speech, and so compelling, and so it was a bit like a conversion experience, you know, you're just, you're just kind of captivated by the clear injustice of the situation. I mean, it was so clear, you know, and, and I think I was looking for something like that. I was looking for something really clear that I could…

I had been involved in peace things, and you know, NDP things a little bit, but you know, and so, so this was just super clear to me, and that's what I felt when I saw Bishop Tutu as well. So it was, it, I really experienced it kind of like a, almost like a religious cloud.

And the work that I so primarily, it must have been right at the so there was still grade 13 in Ontario. It must have been right in my last year that I went to that conference, and then like right near the end, and so I became active immediately after high school, so probably I was more like 18, 19, something like that, and my fellow Youth Against Apartheid people were a similar age, and we were, you know, kind of from all over the city, but we were all radical and finding our voices with the passion that youth have.

So, there were tensions between us, and you know, we were a group of mixed ethno-cultural groups, so we had people who were Asian, and people who were black, and people who are white and sort of all together working together and arguing, but you know, doing it in, in that, you know, kind of really almost anarchist way, right?

Amy Kaler 24:57

Right, yeah.

Becca Whitla 24:58

So it was it. You know, I was… I'm a little like that, probably. That was exciting, and it probably made me a bit uncomfortable too, because I'm shy, and especially then I was really shy. So here I was in this group of, like, you know… so I don't know, I mean, the youthness… it was just… I don't know how different it would have been from being at university, because it was almost that time, right?

Amy Kaler 25:39

Right.

Becca Whitla 25:40

But it was, but there was this clarity and sense of call that was really strong.

Amy Kaler 25:50

Wow, yeah.

Doug Miller 25:53

I'm quite impressed that the group was so diverse. The comment from other activists on different eras was that the anti-apartheid movement was very much a white-led and a white run movement, but you, as a youth movement, managed to have a larger, more multi-ethnic community.

Becca Whitla 26:14

Well, and interestingly, the there, so Canadians Concerned About Southern Africa had people in it, they were led by white people, Jewish white people, and there, but there were people who were involved, like there was a woman named Yola, who's who I ran into in the subway in the last, like, and she, she was, she's a lawyer, and she was then, too, but she, and she, I think she ended up being on the, what do you call it? Oh, the name escapes me. This starts to happen when you get older, terrible. I'm like, I just turned 60 this weekend.

Doug Miller 27:05

Why do you think I wear a hat at these interviews? Yeah, well, you know, Amy.

Becca Whitla 27:08

I read your book about going west, and I, and I kind of resisted it, because you're my age, you know, and I was like, no, I'm not getting old like this, but, but I am like –

Doug Miller 27:24

It’s natural that if we don't use these names and these ideas and talk about them often, then they do get faded.

Becca Whitla 27:31

Okay, yeah, but this is like a like total thing I should know. It's like it's the, it's the organization that oversees, anyhow, it doesn't matter, so Yola was worked as a lawyer and she was a black woman, and then we were also connected to because I think we were involved with the exiled Black South African community and we were also, because it was the Toronto District School Board, anybody could go, so, and Toronto is diverse, so the, so some of the people that got interested were from different ethno-cultural backgrounds, and then we were also involved in with some well-known people in Toronto who were Black activists, particularly around police violence, so there was some crossover, and some of those folks would show up for the same events.

Doug Miller 28:46

Okay.

Becca Whitla 28:48

So it was, I mean, that is interesting, because it's, it's true that, that there, you know, there was a lot of white, strong white solidarity and allyship in the anti-apartheid movement, and certainly a lot of things that we would speak at, and stuff, were predominantly attended by white folks, but it's true that that that was very diverse, and that also had an impact on me positively, like I, and it was not always easy either.

Doug Miller 29:24

Wow, what the speaking of diversity and so on, would there have been any awareness of Indigenous issues in Canada with relation to this?

Becca Whitla 29:34

So I remember there was kind of a peripheral awareness, but I remember somebody criticizing us at a protest outside a supermarket. We were encouraging boycotting South African products, and somebody said, “well, what are you doing about Indigenous Issues in Canada, like, why are you focused on South Africa?”. And my response was, “what are you doing?”. Because I said, “well, we're doing this, and it's not that that shouldn't be done, but this is what we're doing”.

So, and I do remember a party at my parents' house where Nayo was there, and, like, the exiled Black South African community, and I think that community was, was kind of connected to Indigenous activists, so there were people at the party who were, you know, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was not.

It's funny, because for me that's something that has emerged through my life, like even in my scholarship, like when I first did my doctoral work, really, at that time, which would have been 10 years ago, when I was doing the work, a bit, a bit more than 10 years ago, when I started. There's been a proliferation of indigenous scholarship in the last 10 years in Canada, and some of it had started prior to 10 years ago, but not a huge amount, and it was just really emerging simultaneously with my work, so my work ended up using Latin American decolonial thinking, and which is a bit more systematized than some Indigenous thinking in Canada, but there's much, there's now there's conversations between those ideas and my scholarship now, so my the Indigenous wisdom that I drew on was more based on relationships and encounters rather than scholarship.

And that is something that has evolved in my life, when I met people, which is in a way what happened with the anti-apartheid movement, too. It was very relationship-based, and, and you know, circumstantial in some ways. I was looking for something, and I found that, and yeah. I mean, so I could criticize myself and the movement now, I think, for finding it easier to focus on an injustice that was not at home.

Doug Miller 32:42

Well, this is, and right, you know, this is why we asked the question. It's exactly the kind of commentary we're getting, you know. Yeah, Amy, do you have anything to go?

Amy Kaler 32:57

Yeah, couple of questions that just sort of come out of me being interested in this anti-apartheid sort of youth, almost sounds like a scene in Toronto, in the, you know, the mid 80s, you mentioned that you and some of the other people who created Youth against apartheid were young and radical, and I'm wondering, what does radical kind of mean in this, this context, this scene?

Becca Whitla 33:44

Hmm, good question. I think that the personal, like the personal, really was political, so like I remember there was a woman named Simone, a Black woman who, who was a lesbian, so that, like, there was a lot of kind of gender fluidity, and there were relationships that sprung up, and there were, and so that I remember her saying to me, she was dating a white woman, and she said “she's too white for me”, right, like so that kind of thing, and there was kind of a hippie vibe, a little bit, you know, and but there was, they were they went I think like I think one of the people has become a filmmaker and I don't know what happened to Greg if he went on and had an acting career but he definitely was actually acting at that at, right around that time.

And so there was the, so it was creative too, like it wasn't, it was also artsy, and we did things like, so one thing we did was for South Africa Women's Day, we learned a couple of songs, South African women's day songs, and sang them, which was something that the women, the South African women, who were the guest speakers at the event, really appreciated. So that was the kind of thing that that we did. I don't, I mean, I, it's like, I don't, it's funny how you know I have this impression, but it's really hard to be detailed about the description of it, so I mean, those, that's very impressionistic, and I almost feel hesitant because I'm like, is that accurate?

Amy Kaler 36:00

Yeah, no, that's fine, and sometimes it is just kind of a vibe or an openness that you can't put your finger on and say, okay, this is the thing that we did that was radical, it's more like this is a mood or you know way of being, or yeah, I don't know what I mean, I, similar things. I was in Montreal at McGill, and there was the anti-apartheid work was kind of knit into a whole slew of, you know, various other left-wing progressive anarchist radical sort of punk stuff that was happening, and like you say, the creative and the political mesh together, so yeah, it's very much a scene.

Becca Whitla 36:57

It was a scene, and like I remember walking around Toronto with this group of people, you know, and I've the church that I'm helping out at right now is right beside it's with Maggie Helwig.

So you would know Maggie because you're a writer and she's like famous, and so I'm her curate during this time of her notoriety, which is kind of interesting. She just came, she just produced, just produced, just released a book of sermons called “Instructions for the End of the World”.

Amy Kaler 37:38

Okay, anyhow, her earlier book, but anyway, yeah.

Becca Whitla 37:43

Encampment.

Amy Kaler 37:44

Encampment, yeah, yeah.

Becca Whitla 37:46

Well, the, so the church is right at the edge of Kensington Market, and I would say, and there's a still, and Maggie was also an activist and is an anarchist, and at U of T, and in Toronto, and she was a writer, and the sort of Kensington Market scene, also a punk scene, but is, is still has that vibe, so it kind of had that sort of vibe. I don't, and I think we, I think I remember being in Kensington Market with that group of people, but I remember, you know, we would… it was like a group that would go out and do stuff, so like protests, and we didn't do anything illegal that I remember, we might have, but maybe the protest at the law building was illegal, since there were police on horses there, but like that was just such an overkill response, you know.

Amy Kaler 38:44

Yeah, it was.

Becca Whitla 38:48

Scary, like it was scary.

Doug Miller 38:52

I know that from the West End suburb of Ottawa, where I came from, any of this kind of stuff would have been considered just because you're standing up and speaking out makes you radical, you know.

Becca Whitla 39:04

Even though that… oh, sorry. Go ahead, Doug.

Doug Miller 39:09

No. Please, please, Amy.

Amy Kaler 39:13

Yeah, having a moment.. where… what was that question? There was a question. Okay, that's another question. This is a sort of hypothetical speculative question, but how do you think your involvement with the anti-apartheid movement, you know, in the way that you did at the age that you were, did that shape or change your life afterwards, or was that just something, okay, that's done, now on to the next thing, or yeah, I don't know? How did that have any bearing on sort of the future that that you had?

Becca Whitla 40:00

I would say yes, like it's hard to make necessarily a causative link, yeah, but I think I actually, it's interesting that Doug, that you raised the diversity of it, because I think that I mean I was inclined that way to be open, but I think it really helped me become better at engagements with people from different backgrounds when I eventually switched to York University, interestingly, the program at in international development was white people, but when I went to study music and humanities in the music program, it was not only white people, so there were, so there was more diversity at York

And I think I, I had, I learned an openness to people from different cultural backgrounds, and I think, now the relationship went south with Nayo, but his challenge to me about the program that I was studying was really important in terms of getting me to think about getting me to question kind of presumptions about how you see the world and just so that really taught me about trying to understand the underside, trying to understand the perspective from the item, just take for granted what we are fed.

So there was like a critical again, I was already kind of brought up that way, but this really solidified it, so there's that piece of it, and then I think I was like I ended up finishing my degree in Music and Humanities, and then going to the starting my women's choir, working at the church and then getting a job working for the NDP in Ontario, and I think. And the NDP in Ontario in the early 90s was like working for them was really exciting, it was like an NDP government in Ontario, and, and so there was a little bit of that radical, some of the people, you know, there was a sort of continuity between the work, anti-apartheid work, and that group, and now looking back, I mean, it seemed like a long time between, but it really wasn't,

And then for me, so then I, the NDP lost and I started decided to try to make a go of it as a musician and I really wanted my musical work to be to have a justice commitment so it did it both in the Echo Women's Choir, and then when I had the opportunity to work with the hotel workers in Toronto, I jumped at it, and it was a way to combine music and justice, which was really what I wanted to do, and it turned out that the choir that I worked with was almost all Jamaican women of Jamaican origin, so I learned a lot about literacy and poverty and displacement, and being separated from your family, and I over two or three or four years we developed, you know, I, they taught me as much as I taught them, and that was like a really interesting, you know, I had a meeting with Lillian Allen, at one point, well, she was doing some work with the union.

The union was very arts oriented, and so it hired a visual artist, and Lillian came and did a workshop with us, and then I decided I should quit, because I thought, what am I doing? Like, I am white, why am I leading this group of, you know, Jamaican Canadian hotel workers, and she said, "Don't quit, it's working, and I've seen this happen before, where a White person will quit”, and it's, "You shouldn't quit, because the work is happening”, and so it was really. A interesting, yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm still kind of connected on Facebook and stuff to Lillian.

And so they're so, so it's not like a direct connection, but it, it's, it sort of influenced my way of seeing the world, I think, and my, my scholarship.

And you know, when I did go to South Africa, I was, it was for the International Academy of Practical Theology, and it was a very powerful experience. And we went to the Voortrekker Monument, which is the big Boer, yeah, monument. And then we went to the Anti-Apartheid Museum, and then we went to Soweto, and in Soweto the South Africans were… it really became a… there was a, Bishop Tutu, was still alive, and it was supposed to be him, but it wasn't him, so it was the Bishop of Johannesburg or something, and the people, the South Africans in the group were really pressing the bishop about what the church was doing about corruption.

And it was really, really interesting, and I just, I mean, I remember a couple of the people are still friends and colleagues with whom I work, so it was a really great experience for me, but it was very. I don't remember whether sometime right around then I found that out that Nayo had died. He was, he was, yeah, he was like five years older than me, so he would be 65 if he was still alive, but he had a heart attack in Toronto, and died, and I found that out because I either before or after I went to South Africa, I was like, I wonder what happened to him.

Doug Miller 47:15

What year did you go to South Africa?

Becca Whitla 47:18

Okay, now I have to remember, I think it was 2015

Doug Miller 47:22

Oh, okay. That recently, okay,

Becca Whitla 47:24

Yeah, it was recent, and it was right in the middle of some pretty, some very strong protests at universities about around decolonizing. Actually,

Amy Kaler 47:40

Was this Rhodes Must Fall, and getting?

Becca Whitla 47:45

Yeah, all that was happening, and, and it was, you know, kind of, and one of my friend, colleagues in South Africa was leading the office of decolonization at Stellenbosch University, you know, so there, so these, anyhow, I, it was a very moving trip for me to think, and then it was funny because I knew the South African national anthem, but not the white part, so I could sing it along with them, and then I had to stop when it was the Afrikaans bit, you know. know, which amused my South African friends, right, but yeah, so yes, it did. You know, I should, would you like me to try? I think I could probably find the person who contacted me about this.

Amy Kaler 48:42

Yeah, sure. What it, I know that someone I know at U of Calgary, Roberta Lexier, around that time was putting together a book on student activism in Canada, generally, and I'm wondering if it might have been somebody connected to her project, but who knows, but yeah, if you've, you've got the name, that could be useful, the person who interviewed you before.

Becca Whitla 49:12

Yeah. And I'm thinking, I mean, I can also

Doug Miller 49:16

Pardon me, Does the name Chris Webb say anything to you?

Becca Whitla 49:19

Maybe, who's Chris Webb?

Doug Miller 49:21

He's a South African married to Winnipeg lady who was writing this history. We were paralleling for quite a while.

Becca Whitla 49:29

No, it wasn't somebody South African.

Doug Miller 49:32

Okay.

Becca Whitla 49:33

I'll find out. I should. I never delete emails, which is terrible, but it's handy in a moment like this, so yeah.

Doug Miller 49:42

Well, let me just, let me just return us to the interview a bit. I'm sorry, I'm a bit structured in my, sure, sure, this kind of stuff we can carry on after. I'm very, I'm, I'm pretty. Exhausted. I mean, this is great, wonderful, and appreciate your participation. And Amy, do you have anything else you would like to do?

Amy Kaler 50:10

Not anything at the moment. And yeah, you're right, we're coming up right on an hour. I do have a couple of questions that are sort of broad blue sky questions about, you know, bias thing about left wing people and right wing times and the 80s and so forth, but I can actually email those to Becca, and you know, we can chat a bit that way, just, you know, wanting to respect your, your time and energy.

Doug Miller 50:42

Well, it's also a question of the focus of these things, and I'm very much appreciative myself of what you've said, and I, boy, thoughtful. You've covered the ground, you've had a rich experience, and as one of the older generations really appreciate those insights from someone like yourself, so I don't have anything more to say. Would you have any last words you'd like to say yourself?

Becca Whitla 51:19

No, I mean, I'll look up those connections and send them along and see if there's anything. I mean, you're.. I'm not… this project is… is it? It's not the missionary kids project, right? Amy, that's a whole other thing.

Amy Kaler 51:37

That's my one of my other things. Yeah.

Doug Miller 51:41

This is the activist, anti-apartheid activist, where we're focusing, particularly because the dominant paradigm, or the dominant dialog, monologue, at this moment is so biased one way, and so we're so glad to get your kind of vision of it. “The horses are driving us away from the law school” is not exactly the thumping of the chest about how progressive Canada was. So, thank you so much for your contribution. I really appreciate it. And we'll, what I'll do is, I'll turn off the record, and then we can, we can chat a little bit.

Becca Whitla 52:18

Okay. Sure.

Doug Miller 52:20

Okay. So stop.