Dan O’Meara

Dan O’Meara 00:01

Did you get my email about that?

Doug Miller 00:04

I did. There’s no problem and besides copies hardcopy appear one day.

Dan O’Meara 00:08

Okay.

Doug Miller 00:09

But as long as we hear you say it at the beginning as well, then we’ll pick up the hard copy.

Dan O’Meara 00:14

Okay, great. Are we recording?

Doug Miller 00:16

Yes.

Dan O’Meara 00:17

Okay. Hi, this is Dan Omeara and I formally consent to this interview, and to all the provisions that are included in the form the consent form that Doug Miller sent me by email earlier today.

Doug Miller 00:29

Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much. Well, this is this is really a privilege. Gwen I think you should sort of start and I can follow up if I feel like I should interrupt and Sophie of course, whenever.

Gwen Schulman 00:43

I wasn’t sure if Dan, this spoke to we also have to ask you, Dan, if you agree that the interview be recorded for later use,

Dan O’Meara 00:51

Yes, I agree that the interview be recorded for whatever you see fit. Okay.

Gwen Schulman 00:56

So as we do with all of our interview ease, we add, we just start by asking if you could introduce yourself and give us your name and where you live.

Dan O’Meara 01:05

Okay, hi my name is Dan O’Meara. I teach at the University of Quebec in Montreal and I live in Frelighsburg.

Gwen Schulman 01:13

Okay, so you’re the first person we’re interviewing who was not kind of Canadian in the anti-apartheid movement. So we’ve had to kind of rescript quite a bit of our quite a number of our questions. But there’s one that we decided to stick with nonetheless, even though you’re coming from a very different context, and it would be do you remote remember a particular moment or incident where you first became aware of apartheid?

Dan O’Meara 01:44

It’s a long story. I was seven years old. I was living in Cape Town in my parents’ lovely home in New Orleans. And because of the school I went to, I was required to play rugby in winter, and it’s very wet in winter in Cape Town. And I was given a pair of rugby boots, and I was immensely proud of these rugby boots. I wanted to play soccer, I was much more interested in soccer than rugby.

And my mother employed what was then called a colored woman in South Africa who would come once a week to wash and iron our clothes. She wasn’t the domestic servant, because in Cape Town, there was this particular little wrinkle to racism, which said that while black people could do all sorts of menial labor, they couldn’t do the intimate labor of washing people’s clothes, and particularly their underwear. So my mother, like all white middle class woman employed a calling woman to do this, I’m ashamed to say that I’ve forgotten her name. We’ll call her Mrs. Delano, which I have done in something I’ve written about this. And she had two sons, roughly my age one was a year older, and you know, they’re a year younger. And because there was no compulsory schooling for colored children in South Africa, when she couldn’t find anybody to look after her boys. She brought them to work with her at our house once a week. And this didn’t happen very often, but it happened. And I would then play with them, you know, I mean, I had no understanding that this meant my mother was particularly liberal. She allowed me to play with these kids.

But anyhow, they arrived a couple of days after and got these rugby boots. And they I knew they that they liked soccer because we had played soccer together. So I put on my rugby boots, and I suggested we have a game of soccer. And because I had this kind of innate white superiority, I didn’t realize it at the time. I said, “well, I’m playing against you guys”. And I quickly scored three goals and I was very chuffed. And the eldest of them came to me and he said they would not go on playing. And I sort of determined what little boys did. I said, “Are you chicken, blah, blah”. And he pointed to his feet, which were bleeding and cut up because of the studs on my football boots. And he pointed to his brother’s feet.

And I can still remember this was in 1956, we are talking about 60-some years ago, I can remember the rash of shame and guilt that came over me and I went into the hall, my home, I took them into the bathroom, I washed their feet. And I took them into my room and I took out some plastic bags from my toy cupboard and I jam the plastic bags of toys and handed them over in some kind of gesture of I don’t know what you know, hopefully they make it better. And they didn’t say a word. They just looked at me weirdly, they took plastic bags and they went away.

And the mother came back a few minutes later with a plastic bag. She put them down on the floor of my room didn’t say a word and went out and she left the house with the boys and I burst out crying. And my mother who is, was she’s dead now, an incredibly warm and compassionate woman came in and you know, she said “What’s the matter?”. And I expected that she would say “oh don’t worry, dear. I’ll buy them a pair of rugby boots”. And she said to me suddenly with a tone of voice that I had never heard in my life before, “I don’t want you playing with those boys”. And I said, absolutely flabbergasted. “What do you mean?”. And she’s done a bizarre complaint. I don’t know the words exactly. But I was totally. And she just said to me again, with a tone of voice that I had never heard. She said, “Dan, it’s not me who’s being a bad guy here. It’s this bloody country. And I’m afraid one day you will understand”.

And that was my first encounter with my own complicity with apartheid. And it took me years to really understand the multi-level of learning that I went through in that instant. I learned I assimilated without yet having the words to come to articulate it to myself, that somehow I knew in the core of my being although I didn’t have the intellect word, that I was complicit in inflicting pain and suffering on these boys. And that as a result, their mother never came back to her house, she lost her job.

And that this wasn’t the first and certainly wasn’t going be the last time that a white person had done this to them. And it had happened to me, although my parents were violently anti-apartheid. They loaded apartheid. They regarded it as Nazism, and they always told my sister and I, that it was an abomination. But willy nilly, you know, as I said, you can vote banca de quoi vivre. I was complicit in this very, by the very fact of being a white person or doing an entirely innocent thing that seven year old boys did all over the world.

So that was the first thing that I kind of instinctively grew to. And you know, very soon, by the time I got to high school, I knew that I wasn’t innocent. And as much as I loathed apartheid I shared in its complicity, and I benefited from it, I had rugby boots, I had a nice home. I had wealthy parents, relatively wealthy parents, whereas those boys had nothing. They were constantly subjected to the slings and arrows of what white people did to them. But then I also began to learn assimilate lesson that my mother’s response was not enough. It’s not enough just to say ‘it’s this bloody country”, because we were this quote, bloody country. We were willy nilly involved in it. And if we didn’t like it, we have to do something about not being involved in it. And then, when I was in my second year at university at the University of Witwatersrand the age of 19, I was a delegate to the annual conference of the National Union of South African students, which was a multiracial student body. And to one of these very fortunate incidents in my life, I happen to meet Steve Biko.

And it was an, and I think I’ve recounted this today to Doug in an interview about how I just told him I was tear overwhelmed with guilt of being a white person. And he said to me, “I don’t want to hear about guilt. It’s bullshit. You like every person white or black in this country have to decide, are you part of the problem or part of the solution?”.

And that was it for me, and suddenly that, into my mind rushed this incident. And that was it. So I mean, from, you know, every I think every white person in South Africa I know every white person in South African youth to the core of their being, that this was a profound crime, and an abomination and that one day there would be a reckoning. We always joked about it, there were constant jokes about after the revolution, we will do this or that. But I also believe that we, most white people found mechanisms to push it away from themselves. And they could convince themselves that they were decent people and they could love their children and treat animals kindly and even sometimes treat their servants kindly their black servants kindly, so long as they did not forget, quote, forget their place, and the horrible language racist language of the time.

And I think everybody has a kind of story about that encounter. And, you know, I don’t know what it was probably something my parents instilled in me earlier on that allowed me to see rather than just retreat into some kind of outlet, it’s not my fault and just too bad. Which is what most people said, you know, that was the defining moment in my life. Really. Thank you.

Doug Miller 09:38

Can I just ask, Dan, your microphone is on your chest.

Dan O’Meara 09:42

Now it’s not. Are you’re not hearing me well?

Doug Miller 09:47

So, somewhere I’m getting a little scratch sound.

Dan O’Meara 09:50

I can take off the earphones. That’s probably the earphones bumping. Is that better?

Gwen Schulman 09:55

No, there’s kind of a wind sound.

Dan O’Meara 09:59

I got to unplug so I can hear you.

Gwen Schulman 10:01

There’s kind of a wind tunnel sound going on?

Sophie

Maybe, maybe it’s me because I’m close to the window. So let me just close the window.

Doug Miller

Okay, perfect.

Sophie

That should be better.

Gwen Schulman

Okay, so that’s what it was. It’s okay. I mean, the sound quality was still fine, but there was, so Dan, you can go back to whatever you’re comfortable doing. It wasn’t on your end.

Dan O’Meara 10:20

Okay. Yeah, I will put on because she can get on her own stuff.

Doug Miller

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, yeah.

Gwen Schulman 10:30

All right. So because this really is a oral history of the Canadian anti-apartheid movement, we’re going to have to now kind of really fast forward and move our next question to Canada. So we wanted to start with once you got here to Canada, you move quickly into the anti-apartheid movement. And we’d like to ask you to talk about how you got involved. What was your door into the movement here in Canada?

Dan O’Meara 10:56

The door’s name was Pierre Beaudet. I was in Mozambique in would have been June or July 1984, in a catastrophe. And was Mozambique and I was scheduled to leave. And I didn’t, I had nowhere else in the world to go out of than Britain and Ireland because I had an Irish passport taking my South African citizenship away from me. But my ex-wife, Lindsay Manicom, had gone to Toronto with our then three year old daughter. And she’d left seven months before and I was kind of desperate. And you know, I wanted to live in the same place as my daughter. But I had no right to be in Canada. And one day this perfect stranger called Pierre Beaudet, I walked into my office and Maputo and he said, “I’m busy translating one of your articles. And would you like to come and work with the anti-apartheid movement in Montreal?”.

And I didn’t have to hesitate for a second because I would have been unemployed in Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain and was not looking forward to it. I’d already shipped my stuff back to Britain. And said, “yeah, absolutely, you know, Montreal is much closer to Toronto than London”. And he said, “well, it’s going take a while to get all the legal stuff through”. And it took basically a year and a half. But that’s how I came in. I mean, I had no idea of coming to Canada and had joked with South African friends earlier and gone to Canada, you know that why the hell would you go to such a cool country. But I came here because Pierre offered me a job, and I wanted to be near my doctor.

Gwen Schulman 12:37

All right, and then from there to actually actively engaging with the movement, can you tell us a little bit about how you initially got involved, what your work was. And from there.

Dan O’Meara 12:48

Well, my connection was a twofold connection in primary entry and constant connection was Pierre. And then CIDMAA, because he was the head honcho of CIDMAA.

Gwen Schulman

And CIDMAA was

Dan O’Meara

[Sigma in French translation] Centre d’information et de documentation sur Mozambique et l’Afrique australe.

Gwen Schulman 13:08

Because you could say CIDMAA afterwards.

Dan O’Meara 13:14

Yeah, that’s right. You can say CIDMAA. And everybody said, what the hell is CIDMAA? But so you know, I left Mozambique in early September 84. And arrived, I spent two weeks in Denmark with friends and then arrived in Toronto in September 84 expecting that, you know, Pierre would say, well, soon we’ll have a job for you. And he said, “well, it’s going take again, a long time”. So I spent literally 16 months traveling backwards and forwards between the US and Canada, on a tourist visa to both countries trying to waiting for this permission to come through. And my other connection was through Margie Brown Maya, who was a South African friend in Toronto, who was working for TCLSAC.

Gwen Schulman

Toronto committee for the liberation –

Dan O’Meara

The liberation of southern Africa. Yeah, and I had known a lot of the TCLSAC people, including John Saul, and in fact spent three months living in Toronto in Margie and her husband sternness house. So also did some stuff with TCLSAC and then Pierre managed to set up, because I was unemployed and you know, having to pay child support, and I had no savings. So Pierre managed to get me a number of short-term contracts with CUSO, or with Oxfam, or with Defense and Aid Canada and then I’ve got a few from the, from the Center for apartheid center, against apartheid at the UN.

But Pierre managed to set up this speaking tour for me in late, would it be now early November, early October, right through October and November 19, 1985, 1984. Rather, I went literally from, from Halifax, to Victoria, speaking in church halls and union basements and universities in schools, about Namibia of all things because Pierre had managed to get money for discussion on Namibia.

But it was a perfect introduction to the incredible array and disparity of the anti-apartheid movements, plural in Canada and a recognition that, you know, there was not like Britain, there was one anti-apartheid movement in Britain. There was not one there was probably there were many in each city. And some of them were a daggers drawn with each other, I very quickly found out. So, you know, that was an interesting introduction, I had some kind of sense of who was whom, which helped me later on. But it wasn’t until January 86, that I started formally working with CIDMAA, because it was only in late December 85, that I got my landed immigrant status.

Gwen Schulman 16:00

Well, it sort of begs a question that was further down, but I’ll ask it now, because you’ve brought it up. So tell us a little bit more about this, this perception, this is this tremendous opportunity to travel across the country and get this broad landscape of the movement or as you said, the movements? So what was your, your initial, like trying to think back then, as opposed to now with hindsight, what was your feeling about how Canadians understood apartheid? Their perspectives on how to address and fight it?

Dan O’Meara 16:36

Oh, you know, I could write a book about that. First of all, I wouldn’t use the term Canadians. And because the, my connection with CIDMAA and particularly Pierre, who was a left wing, Quebec nationalist, was made very clear to me that I was in Quebec, not in Canada. And, you know, I was agnostic, and to still, to a large extent, still am, on that whole issue. But it was very, very evident that I would have to learn French rapidly. And, you know, literally, within four weeks of me arriving in Montreal, he had me on the radio in Quebec City, in French, which was a trial by fire, I must say. But he also had a fine understanding. I mean, he has, he has an incredible political mind. He had a very fine understanding of the divisions. And although he had a particular place, and was quite, you know, how can, how can I put it, he was quite strong in defending his own perspective. He understood the other perspectives.

So I was sent on this tour where there’s a briefing, but I was struck by a number of things. The first was something I knew about intellectually, because this was a confederation. The political conditions in one province bore no relation to the political conditions in another province that I knew that he was a shock to discover, coming from South Africa, through Britain, Tanzania, Mozambique, just how desperate this country is Canada now that people in Prince Edward Island and British Columbia have virtually nothing in common except they belong. They are citizens of the same country. And they roughly speak the same language, although they don’t, many of them don’t, to come back.

But then I came to understand the ideological and organizational cleavages, I mean, well, it seemed to me that the anti-apartheid movement was fractured, and at least three, if not more ways. First of all, it was fractured by type of organization. So the church organization spoke to the church organizations that they were further fractured in according to dominant denominations, you know, the Anglicans, and the United Church, people who were very strong. And then there was a Canadian Catholic organization for development and peace, which also had its French. So you could talk about their churches and there was a church network, that it was a fragmented church network and you had to know who you were speaking to, and not whether it was only one denomination, but in which province because there was also this kind of reaction against what was we all know is called the Golden Triangle, and the attempts from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to impose a kind of national line on the on the other provinces.

There were the unions, which is Doug will know, were profoundly fractured between at least two tendencies of the SACTU, pro-SACTU, and the tendency that was being developed by the CLC Southern Africa desk around poor period. And the conflicts were really vicious.

You know, I found myself in the middle of all of this because I was a member of the ANC. I had worked for a long time for SACTU, I regarded myself as a digital twin member of the ANC. But I also knew that SACTU was on paper, and it was, it had no union organization inside South Africa. The real unions were the unions that were emerging. So while SACTU solidarity committee people, Ken and Brenda Lockhart, Brenda Wall and Ken Luckhardt and Ken Traynor, close friends of mine and Ken and Brenda had stayed with my then wife, Lindsay and I and Mozambique and Tanzania, I didn’t agree with them on their trade union, the notion on the trade union thing, but I also didn’t agree with, you know, the kind of extreme CLC line that actually was a bunch of nonsense and should just be written out of the equation, because that seemed to me to be redolent with all kinds of Cold War issues, which I thought had no place in the anti-apartheid movement, that you have to tread very lightly.

And depending where you were, you know, you were in deep trouble. I mean, I remember arriving in Saskatoon. And as group of people presented me with a manifesto, which was a kind of denunciation, it’s actually, and they wanted to know what I thought about this. And it was written in very, very rigid Marxist Leninist language. And here I was, I was staying with one of them. You know, I didn’t want to alienate my hosts. So I have to be diplomatic. So there was the discovery of that. Then there was the NGO network, which was different, you know, there were the big national NGOs, like Oxfam and CUSO, SUCO, but there were also regional ones. And there was the coordinating committee or the Canadian what was it the Canadian the CIC?

Doug Miller 21:31

CIC Canadian Council for international cooperation.

Dan O’Meara 21:34

Yeah. You know, and a lot of that was Toronto, and Ontario, and Ottawa focused. But they had their own dynamic. And because of the times the particular conjunction in early 1986, when I arrived in the opening up of the Mulroney government, there was a whole new funding basis going on. And then there were other organizations, you know, apart from the ones that I’ve mentioned, there were the local consumer boycotts.

I mean, in Montreal, when, you know, there was the McGill Southern Africa committee, but that was specific to McGill. Never did I find anything like that at UQAM. I’ve been at UQAM for 32 years now. And it’s, you can students are very proud of how left wing they are. And there was never a southern Africa solidarity movement at UQAM and why the hell not? I mean, there were people like, you know, Marie-Helene Bonin and Stephane Corriveau. But there was never, there was never the equivalent of the, of the Southern Africa students committee at McGill. And partly, I suppose, because UQAM didn’t have the financial investment through it through pension funds in South Africa that McGill did. So that it was, it was a truly astonishing and building her array.

And then into this mix, comes to the ANC in Toronto, which was, you know, was a deep shock to me. I had been prepared by people like John Saul. I had been told about what the ANC was like in Toronto by people like John Saul, and I took it with a grain of salt. And I arrived and I was really blown away by Yusuf Saloojee who, you know, we have now discovered as being was just before he died, he was accused of all kinds of corruption. And I was told all sorts of tales about the things he did. Along running out of his, his organization, he’s traveled Europe while he was the chief representative of the ANC that basically what use of wanted Baba solutions, we call them, not Baba synergy. I forget. Georgia, Georgia, Georgia. Thank you that Yeah. Everybody had to toe his line. You know, everybody, they this Canadian Solidarity Movement was just to say yobbos to the, to what the ANC is said in Toronto, said and do what, what JoJo Saloojee did. Joe Saloojee was remarkably out of touch with Canadian politics. And he was remarkably out of touch with anything that was going on outside of terms.

So although he’d been here for a long time, and I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was absolutely useless in his job, and in fact, he was counterproductive. I mean, he spent a long time trying to undermine CIDMAA. And his actions actually held back the ANC gave it a terrible reputation amongst journalists who were basically anti-apartheid themselves.

And here I was, I had a letter of introduction to the ANC, which I presented a joke to Jojo. And you know, he said to me, “well, you will basically said to me, you will do what you’re told, you’re an ANC member and you will follow my directions”. And I said to him, well, you know, “I will remain an, a loyal ANC member and I will publicly always defend the ANC line. But when I am representing CIDMAA, I’m representing CIDMAA and not the ANC. And I will make that distinction”.

So it was an excruciatingly difficult minefield to navigate in at the time. And there were great egos involved in it, when it just wasn’t political people felt slighted. People felt that their terrain was being undermined, there was a kind of territorial imperative linked to a lot of, and there was a huge amount of bad blood. I mean, great work was done. And I don’t want to take it away from anybody, but it needs to be recognized that this is why I use the word movements.

And there were surreal moments, if I can share one with you. I was sent, one of the places I was sent to Charlottetown on a speaking tour. And the anti-apartheid movement in Charlottetown, was run by Sister Mary. And I’m afraid I forgotten a surname. I haven’t seen it for 35 years or so. And I was in regular contact with her because of something I’ll tell you about later. But she was at the anti-apartheid movement in Charlottetown. And I get to Charlottetown. And they put me up in a seminary for retired priests. And I go down to dinner in the seminary for retired priests. And you have to know that although I have an Irish surname, my uncles and my father walked up, walked out of the Catholic Church when my father was six years old, and never had anything to do with it from that moment on, so I was not raised as a Catholic. But all of these retired priests heard my name, and they assumed that I was a good Catholic. And, you know, they required me to cross myself at dinner. And unbeknownst to myself, I crossed myself the wrong way, in the orthodox way, rather than Catholic way, and there was the shock around the table. And then, I was taken to meet the archbishop. And the archbishop ranted at me for 40 minutes about abortion, about what a crime this was. And I thought to myself, I cannot believe here, I got to listen to this rubbish. You know, this archaic medieval notion that I can’t say anything I can’t, I felt like I was back in South Africa together with a racist who was going on about black people. But because I didn’t want to alienate anybody, I couldn’t alienate the bishop, the Archbishop of the Catholic Archbishop of Prince Edward Island, because I needed Sister Mary to work with me. So, there were all kinds of moments that was the most extreme. But it was a it was a bizarre experience, I must admit.

Sophie 27:51

Quick, quick question. I’m wondering, where was the Communist Party of Canada and all of this?

Dan O’Meara 27:59

I don’t know. You know, I wasn’t a member of the South African Communist Party, and deliberately not I had turned down two invitations to join. People spoke to me about the Canadian Communist Party, Ken Traynor spoke to me about it. I don’t know. I believe that the ANC from what I was told, and this is all third hand now, and very strong connections, you know, with a party, but it never manifested itself quite as party. And this was always one of my problems with these groups. I mean, the Trotskyists were the same. They all would infiltrate an organization and then push that line that never let you know, formally that they were pushing their particular line. And I didn’t have any problem with that pushing their line, as long as they had the political honesty to do so. You know, when I was being an ANC person, I would say “this is the ANC position and I’m defending the ANC position”. So I didn’t like the kind of manipulation that went on, but I can answer your question. So I don’t know. I presume they were somewhere if they had any, any weight at all. Normally, they did the same thing in Britain, they worked through the anti-apartheid movement in Britain, they controlled the anti-apartheid movement. Because of the fractured nature of the anti-apartheid movements in Canada, don’t they couldn’t do so. They certainly didn’t. They were nowhere in Quebec.

Gwen Schulman 29:31

I have a question. It’s sort of about the grant.

Dan O’Meara 29:33

I can’t hear you Gwen.

Gwen Schulman 29:37

Oh, can you hear me now?

Gwen Schulman 29:38

Now is it okay?

Dan O’Meara

Yes.

Gwen Schulman 29:42

Okay. Sorry about that. Okay. So my question is a little bit about as you’re going across the country, and then in your subsequent work, it’s more about the sort of mystery Madame Timon, so not so much the people who are necessarily running the NGOs and organizing the people who are actually showing up in the church basements and learning about it. The language now is so hard to imagine talking about national liberation and revolution like today, when you look at solidarity with organizations around the world, it’s not really the language that’s used anymore now, but at the time, this was certainly as I grew into the movement, you know, this was very special language for, you know, from my perspective, not politicized. But of course, you know, offended by apartheid, but just the beginning of my politicization. So I guess my question is, how did people, just the kind of the average people showing up to learn from you, how did they respond to language like that revolution liberation, that this kind of an end armed struggle to overthrow the system?

Dan O’Meara 30:55

Hard question to answer, Gwen, because, you know, I’m not sure that it was Madden Timon, the moment you showed up, that each of the constituent groups that I spoke about had their own membership. So for example, when I was speaking at a Development and Peace meeting, which a lot of what I did in Quebec, particularly was that I knew that I was speaking to a Catholic audience. And because I come from a Catholic culture, although, as I said, my parents had broken the links with it, I’d have some sensitivity about what kinds of language you couldn’t, couldn’t use. And, you know, I knew what I couldn’t talk about socialism and all of that kind of thing. So to the best of my ability, I would try to adjust my discourse to the audience.

If I was speaking to a trade union organization, I would speak about workers in the working class, I wouldn’t use that language. If I was speaking to an NGO audience, or a school class, which I sometimes did. I have no idea whether I was successful in that. But I made a conscious effort to try and, you know, adjust my language. I also knew that what I assumed that if you were going to talk about armed struggle, you couldn’t use that term. So I did, I confronted that question, and he would come up. And because the South African diplomatic representatives of apartheid here, were constantly accusing the ANC of being a terrorist organization. So you know, I had some facts and figures at my disposal, the fact that according to the police, the South African Police, 25 people had died in South Africa, the armed struggle, the date that I arrived in the country, from 1960, to 1986 25 people, which I would then say, that’s more than the body count, in the police cells over a good weekend in South Africa. You know, so where’s the terrorism and the violence coming from, I would turn it around like that. And I would also use the color of my skin. And I would say, you know, “I am the victim of apartheid. But I support the armed struggle to get rid of it”. And why and, you know, would say my father was a soldier in the Second World War, and betrays that connection, that Apartheid was not the Nazis, but that you could go on oppressing people for a certain amount of time. And I would speak about the very long and proud history of nonviolent resistance in South Africa, and how the Sharpeville massacre or schoffel, and then see where to put an end to that.

And I would say things like, imagine, you know, and this hadn’t happened yet to my knowledge in Montreal, but imagine that suddenly all the students in Montreal go on a demonstration. And the police open fire and 800 of them are killed in one day. What how would we react to that, and this is done to the children of your own children, it’s done to the people who are the, you know, the nationals of your own country, it’s not a foreign invasion.

So we’re in a situation that you have to, you cannot use a Canadian parallel, you’re living in one of the most peaceful countries on earth. And South Africa is one of if not the most violent on Earth. And if you want to think about how you change this totally morally, unacceptable, unacceptable situation, you have to try and put yourself in those people’s position. And I understand why as a white South African. I would that’s how I would do it. I don’t know if that answers your question.

But I would not talk about, you know, and they would say, well, why, what about the link with the Soviet Union that would always come up? And I would say, well, again, you know, the ANC in the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s. It turned to Britain, and it turned to the USA and it turned to France, and it begged for The Help. And all it got was a slap in the face and the arming of apartheid, including the development of an atomic bomb. And the children had been shot down in the streets of being shot down with the same rifles as NATO uses, supplied by Belgium and manufactured under contract by South Africa. So how are we supposed to see this? If you’re a black person, and the friends of your enemy, that friends who are arming your enemy and killing you? Or the West, what conclusions are you going to draw, and I would talk about my encounter with black South Africans who had gone to Moscow gone to the Soviet Union, been educated. And, you know, I know that they all encountered racism in the Soviet Union, everybody would talk to me about it, that it was of a very different order. And the incredible psychological impact of seeing white people in a country in a white country who prepared to help you and prepare to help you fight against your enemy. Obviously, they were going to be pro-Soviet. So those were the kinds of things that I talked about.

Gwen Schulman 36:08

Doug, or Sophie, do you want to jump in?

Doug Miller 36:12

Well, within the critique you made in the of the anti-apartheid movement in Canada, what about other struggles that some of these organizations weren’t necessarily dedicated to anti-apartheid? The union movement, for instance? And was there an environmental movement or an angle was how was gender dealt with? In these movements that you saw? You, you saw, you have quite a particular perspective because of where you come from in terms of your relationship to them all. Well, was there an effort in these groups, in addition to apartheid to do with Indigenous Affairs to deal with gender issues to deal with environmental issues, etc.?

Dan O’Meara 37:00

Oh, you know, briefly, I don’t know. I mean, there’s nothing like today, the political context was very different. I mean, I just want to pick on one thing you said, I hope what I presented was not a critique of the anti-apartheid movement. It was a sober assessment of where everybody?

Doug Miller 37:21

It’s a wonderful overview.

Dan O’Meara 37:22

Yeah. You know, I still think I’m very proud to have participated in that. And I think that all of those people who did so whatever their orientation and wherever they situated in, in that in those movements, you know, more power to them, and I would thank them as a South African constantly do so. It was different times. Feminism appeared in the West before, as you know, there were beginnings to be beginning to be, glimmerings of it in the South African anti-apartheid in the ANC, nothing like what subsequently developed afterwards.

But I came from Mozambique, where the feminist critique had gone quite far. I mean, I came into the movement from Mozambique, where, you know, the most among the most powerful feminist texts I’ve ever read, were the speeches of Samora Machel. And the British work was the group it was called Magic, which was the equivalent for the Portuguese colonies of the anti-apartheid movement, had put out a collection of these of these speeches. We think those speeches were in fact, written by Graca Michel, not by Samora Machel, but you know, they were absolutely dead on about. I mean, there was one particular phrase I had a poster that I had on my wall, about the liberation of women is not, women, is not an act of kindness, or generosity, i’s a precondition for the success of the liberation of humanity. So anybody that had been in Mozambique in the late 70s, and early 1980s, had seen a kind of flowering of an of the most far reaching attempt in Africa to the to date to then not don’t know about now, to actually incorporate the liberation of women into formal government policy.

And that was partially recognized because amongst the groups, and I use the plural here, throughout, across scattered across Canada, there were many people who had been cooperates in Mozambique. You know, and met in SAS, Saskatoon, and Regina and BC and all over people who had come back from Mozambique and had been influenced by this so they were trying to put this into the liberation movement. But here’s the, here’s the paradox. The ANC at that time and particularly Jojo Saloojee, you wouldn’t, you know, they weren’t very open to this and you have to speak to Lindsay mannequin about that because she probably, I mean, she had been in Mozambique and Tanzania and tried to introduce feminism into discussions in the Women’s Caucus in Tanzania and got slammed down for doing so you know about Western feminism.

But there was there was an awareness of the need for gender equality and the need to undo these millennia of gender oppression. How it translated into practice was not easy. And it wasn’t clear. And I remember one moment, particularly tense moment around the organization of this big conference, and I’m suppose we’ll talk about this that Tara and I organized in Montreal in February 1987, the Taking Sides in Southern Africa conference where there were 700 people. And Pierre and I presented to there was this big coordinating committee made up of various organizations, we presented a plan for the panels because we had something like 40 panels. And in each panel, there was a person who was going to animate the discussion. And we were roundly criticized for not having enough women. And not having enough native speakers. There were no native speakers.

And you know, I remember saying, well, you’re absolutely right. But what do you want to do? We’re talking about apartheid here. Do we want to have a woman who knows nothing about South Africa or a man who knows something about South Africa? And you know, this is intense discussion going on about, about how to deal with it. And I wasn’t correct about any of this. And nobody really knew how to adjust it. The environmental issues far less evident in the anti-apartheid movement. You know, it would be raised by individual people. Like, yeah, I remember when I was in Saskatoon, I think, or no, it was it was a, Fort Qu’Appelle, l being taken to this vegetarian restaurant in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, and being given this vegetarian meal by the post whose name I can’t remember and being told that we had as a species to stop eating meat if we wanted to save the planet. And you know, okay, the first time I came across this idea in the anti-apartheid movement, but so it was a different time, and when we’re talking about almost 40 years ago, so we cannot really see it through the lenses of today.

Doug Miller 42:19

Then going back to looking at the time, and there are so many other forces that work beside the anti-apartheid movement. We understand that. But do you think the anti-apartheid movement had an impact in policy change, for instance, and the direction Canada eventually took?

Dan O’Meara 42:38

About South Africa? Oh, yes, absolutely.

Doug Miller 42:42

In what, where? Where would we see that linkage? Because sometimes it’s kind of hard to see in the opaque fashion government works, you know?

Dan O’Meara 42:52

Well, you know, I would think that I’m not an expert on Canadian politics never pretended to be particularly Canadian federal politics. And I think Linda Freeman would be better able to answer that question than me. And my take on it is because of when I came, arrived again, I repeat in January 86, which is six months before Joe Clark announces the first real measures against apartheid, to be taken undertaken by the Canadian government. And so there’s a Tory party in power. It’s been in power for less than two years. And a lot of what Brian Mulroney did was political expediency. I have no doubt about that.

But he was the only quote Conservative Party politician across the span of conservative politicians in the West to do that. He was, he the politics the, you know how we, however you wish to characterize it, the very limited anti-apartheid action announced by the Canadian government under Brian Mulroney went far further than anything any other Western government apart from the Scandinavian countries was doing, and it ran against what all elements of his political base were telling him to do.

It wasn’t popular with the Conservative Party wasn’t popular with business because he was telling some businesses you have to get up. It wasn’t popular with people who were conservatives and racists because this was the whole kith and kin thing. And why did he do it? You know, there’s long debate about that. And I don’t know enough about Brian Mulroney. But there was a lot of pressure. And it seemed to me, you know, to the extent that I understand Linda Freeman’s argument was that the pressure coming from the anti apartheid movement, and it was building.

This is the time when, you know, we tend to forget but daily on Canadian television screens. We saw white policeman beating up black kids and the shock of that, which you know, had started in 1984 and went right on until the government banned TV crews from going into the townships. South African government did so that had a dynamiting effect on the Canadian population and the anti-apartheid movement was able to build on that.

So it gave Mulroney an opportunity to carve out for himself an international status, which would be independent of Britain and he essentially did not get on. And although he was great buddies with Ronald Reagan, ran 180 degrees counter to what Reagan was doing in the US at exactly the same time, where he was vetoing the anti-apartheid deal. And it seems to me that what the anti-apartheid movement did was to give him the impetus to doing so now we would all saying to him, “you must go much further and you can go further and Canadian, Canada can play a much more important role”.

But you know, a few people remember today at the 1987 Commonwealth conference in Kuala Lumpur in 1988, sorry, in Kuala Lumpur, Brian Mulroney called for total financial sanctions, again, against South Africa. And had those been imposed, that would have been, I would have been the kiss of death or the regime. And I don’t have the proof because this is sort of state secret. But I am absolutely sure that that’s when Margaret Thatcher said to FW de Klerk, “if you don’t unban the ANC and free Mandela, soon we are going not going to roll over your debt”, because of the rolling over the South African debt by the British banks was what kept the regime apart afloat. Already, the international bankers had imposed far greater sanctions against them. So that the pressure coming from Mulroney ironically, I believe, allowed Thatcher to present an ultimatum to the South African government water was the president at that time that De Klerk would come in, would come in.

So I think that they, you know, I can’t give you, I can’t put a finger on it. It was how much percentage it contributed to Mulroney’s decisions. I think it played a role. It gave him the cover. And I know we gave him the analysis, you know, they suddenly developed this very sophisticated analysis of how the South African economy worked. And where were the pressure points, and they weren’t doing this for themselves. And here another little incident is very revealing. When I first came to Canada, I mean, after leaving Mozambique, I visited Pierre in Montreal in October 1984. And he immediately took me to Ottawa, which and I met the head of what was then the southern Africa task force at the Department of External Affairs. And this person said to me that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. And there will never be any contact between the ANC and the Canadian government. And in February 1987, at this taking sides meeting in South Africa, in Montreal that I mentioned, Thabo Mbeki, and Joe Clark had the first meeting between the Canadian government and leading representatives of the ANC. And that would not have happened without the anti-apartheid, so I think the anti apartheid movement played an important role. You know, hats off to everybody involved. Wow.

Gwen Schulman 48:20

Can I want to go back to is I want to go backwards for a minute before we go forwards? Is that okay, Doug?

Dan O’Meara 48:27

You can see thunder in the background.

Doug Miller 48:30

We’ve got torrential rain, this is pretty tropical, actually,

Gwen Schulman 48:32

Oh, not here yet. I want it down, you’re coming out of your sensitivity and awareness of racism as a white person was probably far more astute than a lot of white Canadians, by virtue of you coming out of the, the whole apartheid system. So I guess my question is around racism within the movement in Canada, did you sort of was that an obstacle to unity in the movement? Did you detect that not only visa vie, perhaps a kind of a paternalistic attitude towards black South Africans, and that, you know, that kind of impulsive, helping, but also just on the ground in Quebec and elsewhere, that that the movement was divided by race?

Dan O’Meara 49:25

Very good question. You know, and again, I’m not the right person to really answer that question. You need to ask somebody like this. Personally, I was very sensitive, because of my contact with Steve Biko. And having gone through the critique that the black consciousness movement in South Africa, very powerful critique that they levied against people like me, you know, white activists. It seemed to me that the role of white activists was never to speak for black people. We were there, to use our privileges to do things that black people could not do in South Africa, and to speak to other white people outside of South Africa in a language that they could those white people outside of South Africa didn’t understand, to help change their own attitudes.

You know, I think it would have been much harder for a black South African, first of all, a black South African would have not had the education, the education that I had, and would have not been given the employment opportunities to learn as I did, over a period of time, how to analyze South African society. So very few of them would have been able to play the kind of role that I did. And they would not have been employed to do so they would not have been given wouldn’t have been given landed immigrant status. Let’s be clear. A black South African member of the ANC would not have been admitted into Canada the way I was. And when I went through the process, I you know, didn’t hide that I was a member of the ANC. You had to declare what were your political affiliations. And I made this clear, and I have no doubt that had there been, called a black Dan O’Meara, they would not have been admitted into Canada, same that way that I was, and they wouldn’t have got the same kind of welcome in white homes and everywhere, they, you know, there would have been all of that.

I know from a brief contact that I had with museums, among who is a long standing ANC member who was involved in the Wankie campaign and is now one of the elders leading a critique against the state capture, he and I went on a delegation to Mozambique for three weeks in 1987. And, you know, he shared with me a lot of his history, and I mean, one of the most remarkable men that I’ve ever met, but he grappled daily, in, in Ottawa, where he was representing World University Services, with racism. And his daughter says something, someone has just published a book called “Always Another Country”, which is the most amazing political memoir I’ve ever read in my entire life, one of the great books, and she tells about her experience of racism as a as a child, in Ottawa, in Ottawa schools.

So I, because of the privilege of my white skin didn’t have to go through all of this. And I’m sure that all of the black comrades did. You know, and that, again, I think, partly explains the added issue of the ANC. Because most there were very few white ANC people. In Toronto, most of them were Indian, or African. So their reception would have been different. And the fact that I had a PhD also meant that I was received differently, you know, I was an expert, I could go and give testimony to the house of, committee, House of Commons committee on sanctions against South Africa, whereas somebody who didn’t have, quote, the university background, would not have been given the same kind of status. So that all of these kinds of things that came into it, yeah.

Gwen Schulman 53:09

But did you detect it within the movement itself rate racial divisions within the movement? It’s often been said that the anti-apartheid movement in Canada was very white, I would argue it was very segregated. It wasn’t that it was white, it was that a lot of black anti-apartheid activists did not feel that they were, you know, equal members and would stay in their communities and do their work. But were not part of the broader, quote unquote, white movement because of racism inherent within the movement itself. Did you ever feel that or detect that?

Dan O’Meara 53:44

I heard people talk about, I never saw direct evidence of it, but it didn’t surprise me. And, you know, again, that Biko thing for me, you know, I was never convinced by quote, black separatism. But I always understood that people felt that they wanted to work in their own communities, rather than work with people who were involved consciously or not, in forms of oppression against them. So I try not to take a position on that.

I know that CIDMAA was often criticized, because it didn’t involve black people enough. And, you know, I would say in his defense, that he was constantly reaching out to the Asian committee to other groups. And the composition of the black community in Quebec is different from composition of the black community, say in Toronto. So, you know, it would again, depend on the community in question. And then some of the small towns for example in Saskatoon. The person I stayed with what a colored South African who was I forget what domination he was denomination was. He was a church leader. And yes, he was very much within a blackest, very small black community. Same thing in Nova Scotia, you know, the traditional black community in Nova Scotia again, all of that was evident that the purpose, it seemed to me that because of the tradition that I came from in South African politics, which is congress nonracial tradition, and because of what seemed to me to be the requirements of the anti apartheid movement here,

I was more interested in building connections in downplaying the kinds of conflicts that I spoke about earlier on and trying to get the Kens and Brenda to actually talk to poor period and to get to poor period to stop bad mouthing them and saying, “Look, you might not agree with him. But the publications of the SACTU solidarity committee on producing about Canada’s links with South Africa is nothing nearly as good as that, and we will use them and we want to apologize”.

So, you know, it comes back to this this thing that how can I put it? The, one of the issues that I didn’t talk about underlying anti apartheid work was the philosophical one about is the aim of anti-apartheid work to support just to support the ANC? In other words, is this a transmission belt in Canada, for the ANC, or is anti-apartheid work what was then called critical solidarity, you support the ANC, you support this popular struggles against apartheid. But it’s also part of the purpose of this work is to develop progressive politics within Canada. And my own tendency was I was far more aligned with the latter than the former, you know, as it had been in Britain. So that it, it wasn’t just for me that I was doing this because I wanted everybody to say “Viva the ANC”, which is what Yusuf was about.

And so that made the whole issue of racism in communities, complicated to navigate around, I remember when CIDMAA bought Bishop Tutu to Montreal, very shortly after I arrived, I think it was in early 86. And I went with him. And there was a young comrade, ANC comrades sent from Toronto to accompany him as well, and was outraged that he didn’t have privileged connection with Tutu. And that it was Pierre who was shown to turn around. And but particularly when he went to speak in Black communities, that the ANC wasn’t put on the same platform, as Bishop Tutu. So there was a minefield around all of this, you know, and I very rambling and not very coherent reply to your question. Interesting.

Doug Miller 57:46

No, very interesting, very interesting. You know, maybe we could turn it on you in a very personal I mean, how do you feel the whole experience affected you or changed you or help you evolved your own politics and insights?

58:08

In all sorts of ways, Doug, I mean, it was the most intense politics, now what I was going to say, was the most political, intense political activity I’ve ever been involved in. It’s not true. I mean, Mozambique was far more intense. Because of the personal threat that was involved. It was exhausting. Because it was full on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. And huge amount of traveling involved. And when I had arrived, although it was a year after I’d left Mozambique, was an unspeakably traumatic experience and everybody I know who was in Mozambique in those years, whatever, whatever position they live, they, they whatever position they had in Mozambican society will say the same. I mean, I have this memory of being curiously being going down to give evidence in a murder trial in Tucson, Arizona, I was summoned as an expert witness on the suit to politics because some mistletoe guy had been accused of murder and was defense or something and happened in a suit of politics. And I was to give evidence about what whether or not this had happened.

And I flew down on the plane with a psychologist who was going to appear for this accused and the psychologist psychiatrists. So he was an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. And he started to, speaking to me about post-traumatic stress disorder. And I never heard that term before and I realized I was archetypal, you know, patient zero. I was suffering from this. And because of everything that I experienced in Mozambique, and coming into Tanzania, even afterwards, coming to this extremely charged, wasn’t dangerous, but exhausting. atmosphere, it left a mark on me so but by the time after two and a half years of full time we’re proceeding where I was never really off, the telephone would ring. Journalists would call at all times, and I wouldn’t be on a plane everywhere, I made over 200 flights, I counted them once when I was stuck in an airport on some runway once. I was exhausted. And I was burned out as everybody was burned out, and we were earning, you know, basically nothing.

And so when I was offered a job at UQAM, I jumped at it. But it gave me an extraordinary, man, it was an extraordinary privileged time in my life, because no immigrant to a country has ever been given an in depth introduction to that country and to its diversity in the way that it was, and the, you know, the only places I didn’t go in Canada were up north. And I think two, I’ve never been to Newfoundland. And that’s it. And I’ve been to the tiniest villages all over, and I met all of these people, it was a phenomenal experience. So it’s given me an appreciation of the range of difference and the value in this country.

You know, I mean, I came to appreciate Canada and partly over appreciated because I had come from this unspeakable situation, where I was effectively stateless. Although I had a South African passport to a country that gave me a home and a profession and, and welcomed me. And so yes, it gave me a great sense of the value of this place, and of Quebec, as well, I mean, kinds of contacts and kindness that I meant, and that I met in Quebec, and particularly as an Anglophone, I had been warned when I was living in Toronto, you’re going to find it very difficult in Quebec, you know, they are all like this. And the fact that I was learning French and speaking French, I mean, never was there any kind of suggestion, you know, you’re just one of those horrible Anglos. And I have this amazing memory of being settled of all places. Almost a year after I had arrived, and was being driven from the airport, by this Catholic couple who were putting me up and commented on my French, and saying, you know, “how long have you been here”, and I said, “Today, a year”, I meant roughly a year, but I didn’t know how to say then roughly. So I said today, a year. And when I got back from my speaking engagement at a local CEGEP, there was a heart shaped cake with a candle.

So there was all of this kind of stuff, it was just amazing. And to meet people at this level, and to see the immense diversity of this country. But in the end, there was this common humanity, that there was this vile thing called a party, that outraged people of different classes and different racism, different languages in different ethnic backgrounds. And it had to stop. And it managed to bring in right wing politicians and left wing politicians. So it was a great privilege. Wow.

Gwen Schulman

1:03:13

Well, I have a question. Unless, Dan, do you want to take a break? This is starting to get long. No, I’m okay. Okay. So I want to ask about organized opposition to the anti-apartheid movement in Canada. So whether that’s the presence of the party, you know, the consulate in the embassy in the work that they did against the movement, or perhaps other forces? Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dan O’Meara 1:03:40

Yeah, I didn’t have much to do with that. I mean, it was omnipresent everywhere, particularly in the form of Glenn Babb, who was a South African ambassador, and, you know, was particularly, was not unskillful at what he did. But it was, you know, it was an unequal battle, in the sense that it was doubly unequal. They had far more resources than we did. But they were defending an indefensible position. And it really was indefensible, and it was very easy to undermine all of their nonsense and all of the twisting and turns and publicity and just point out, you know, what was going on? I remember, for example, there was this incident in which a doctor, a Canadian doctor who had been mounting a campaign in the press, to allow terminally ill cancer patients access to heroin as an analgesic. And it got to be quite developed some time. I don’t remember his name. Glenn Babb got ahold of this guy and took him to South Africa. And he came back and he published this long article in The Globe and Mail about how well the conditions in Baragwanath Hospital, which is the big black Hospital in South Africa million times better than the conditions in was Canadian hospitals. And they had him on As It Happens. And I phoned up As It Happens and managed to get on and just point by point, point out that this was an absolute lie, and had figures about how much was spent per capita on white health care as opposed to black health care.

So when I say that Glenn Babb was promoting the indefensible, the actual quote, facts on the ground about education, police torture, the effects of apartheid, displaced people. I mean, we, one of the advantages in my position was because I’d spent 20 years studying the country in depth, I had access to all these resources, and CIDMAA and an amazing library, a really amazing library. So if I didn’t know where the stuff was, I could get it almost instantly. So that made it much easier.

And then I remember in 19, after Babb left in, was it 1989, I think the CCIC organized the debate between myself and the South African ambassador in in Ottawa. And, you know, I mean, it was, it was easy to debate, easiest debate I’ve ever had in my life. They could not, and they knew it. I mean, that you anybody who was keeping up with a South African press, and anybody who was sensitive to what was going on in our politics, and I had written my PhD in Africana politics, knew that the very most fervent ideological defense defenders of apartheid, were giving up. They were beginning to see that they could not defend this, defend this. And in fact, the title of my later book on the national party “Forty Lost Years”, was taken from the mouthpiece of one of the was taken with an exception added by one of these people said, “we have been defending the indefensible for 40 last years, and we’ve wasted 40 lost years with, 40 years in this country’s history”.

So yes, there was a lot of opposition and a lot of it came from, you know, the kind of the knee jerk racist, I remember once being on CJFM talk show and some guy with an Irish surname called up and said, you know, use this terrible racist term that I won’t use, you know, they’re killing each other in Madagascar. And I was able to say to him, “Well, where you’re getting this information, and he had no defense, and I said to him, you know, I have an Irish Sunday, might you do so and they used, the Brits used to say that this. And that was the end of that, that discussion. So there was some of it, but it was nothing. In South Africa, I had been used, in South Africa, in the 60s and 70s, were to take a public anti-apartheid position as a white person was dangerous, you know, you would get attacked. And if you weren’t, in a mass meeting of students, and even those would get attacked, and not necessarily by the police, by the police, yes, but also by other white people. And, you know, my father’s first reaction was to say, “shut your mouth for God’s sake, you’ll get into trouble”. So the anti-apartheid, I’m going to call it a movement tendencies that were that existed, if not like now, it’s not like the reemergence of fascism in the United States. And these awful militias, or Q Anon, and all these absurd things that are coming out of the woodwork. Now, that didn’t exist in those days. I wasn’t aware of it. If it existed, it wasn’t a factor.

Doug Miller 1:08:36

Wow, what an overview. I don’t know. Sophie, Gwen, but

Doug Miller 1:08:41

Well Dan is there anything you’d like to add? Yeah,

Dan O’Meara 1:08:49

Well, you know, I think I’d like to talk about CIDMAA. And what I think CIDMAA is particular, contribution was because it was an unusual organization. It was unusual in a number of senses that, as I said, Pierre Beaudet was a particularly politicized person and few other groups had somebody who combined his political sensitivity with an ability to finance the organization, what sets CIDMAA apart from say, a group like TCLSAC was that care, managed to get funding to do things that other groups could have done but never got funding for. And he did so without being part of one of the great constitutional forces, like the churches, or the NGOs or the trade unions that I’ve spoken about.

So he was able to work with people who really didn’t like his politics, whether it was his take on place of Quebec and Canada or whether was his you know, he was a Marxist, nothing slaves, nothing, no, hidden, nothing about that. But he had this incredible ability to work with a broad array, just people and also to piss a broad range of people off, let it be said that CIDMAA got to do a range of things that I don’t think other groups got to do. I mean, some of them did some of them, but very few of them did all of them. And, you know, I just went preparing for this, I just tried to spit out a list of some of the tasks that I was required to, to perform. And I had been hired, quote, as an expert. So as this expert who could talk about South and Southern Africa, I mean, and that’s the other thing about CIDMAA.

And I think only TCLSAC did this, that they constantly insisted that anti-apartheid work was not just about South Africa, it was also about Mozambique and Angola, in Zimbabwe and the other country, because the whole of the region was oppressed by apartheid. And that the wall that South Africa, launched against the countries of the region was, you know, one of the great crimes of the 20th century, and CIDMAA with TCLSAC , and with CUSO and SUCO and with Development and Peace, and then with a range of right wing church groups, managed to set up an aid program with Mozambique, which got massive funding from the Canadian government. And it’s called Camel, camel, yeah, Caccamo we got I forget how many, it was something like $7 million. Or maybe it was in seven, maybe it’s five, I can’t remember the exact figures. But it was, it was a fairly well thought out. attempt to get a market, the market flowing in Nampula province in ways that would then allow education schemes to be funded, etc. I mean, I won’t go into the details, that this was partly because the attitude that Pierre brought with us and his understanding that the struggle against apartheid was a regional struggle. It wasn’t, it wasn’t just a South, an African one.

But you know, so I was expected to write and analyze constantly. I mean, every day there was a text, something I was expected to write for the newspapers to write for all the local journals that producing South Africa, stuff on Southern Africa to write for Academic Press. I was also expected and did contribute to popular education materials that were produced by CIDMAA and TCLSAC together. There was an education guide, I think it was called the Southern Africa Toolkit, which had little pamphlets on the churches, on the unions, on the youth, on what is apartheid, all of that same thing for, for Mozambique, same thing for Namibia. You know, we also worked with SWAPO, which was a whole story in itself much more difficult than working with the ANC, if that’s possible, I had to go and give all these speaking engagements. All over the country, as I’ve said, we piano and I organized the Taking Sides Conference, which meant mobilizing the money for the conference, it cost you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. We had to get financing for it. And then we had to set up an organizing, keep going. A representative steering group that brought in all the stakeholders, which was another defying thing to do. I was involved in lobbying, I was involved in organizing, there was Caccamo. We were involved in setting up the parallel of Commonwealth conference that helped lay, that took place in BC. In, in Vancouver in 1987.

There was a tab the concept as to which was a local groups that tried to bring some kind of consultation coordination in Montreal based groups. I was a member of the mayor’s, Jean who was then the mayor of Montreal, set up this anti-apartheid committee for the builder, Quebec, which was instrumental in getting Benson and Hedges defunded from the fireworks program. You know, it was just, it was endless.

I mean, it wasn’t always something new coming on, and we had to constantly raise money. So I was apart from my speaking engagements. I was constantly in Ottawa with SUCO, with CUSO, with Oxfam, with Defense and Aid. With CIDA, I mean, we would be giving briefings to CIDA all the time, literally on a monthly basis to foreign affairs. I mean, it was, it was this opening in Canadian politics was suddenly, it seemed to me coming from Britain where the anti-apartheid movement had no input into the British government at all, was seen as you know, the lefty opposition. People like me and John Saul and Pierre and all of those, we were being invited to speak to foreign affairs and they were saying to us, “well, what do you think about this and what do you think about that?”.

So yes, there was a right wing conservative government in power, but it was a very unusual, Conservative government and that period came to an end I mean it all toes down later on. So, you know, I think that for whatever reason, CIDMAA played an unusual role in the anti-apartheid movement. And because it was one of the few bilingual groups I know of nobody. Zilch. No Anglophone from the so-called rest of Canada who came to Quebec and spoke French. We all did so, I mean, they would speak in French, it was just in English, it was assumed you would do so. And that was a great strength. And it was the only I think NGO, that on a, you know, when compared with all the other equivalent groups TCLSAC, that could have been the same particular, SAC was a, was stuck in his own little left wing prism and couldn’t get out of it and so busy denouncing the Canadian government, that it couldn’t raise the money needed to work with, and totally unable to speak to people in Quebec in their own language, you know, which seems to me is politics 101, you can’t go into a country and speak to people in a foreign language, particularly when that language is seen as the formal language of the oppressor. So it was an unusual group in all of those ways. And I was very privileged. You know, the only reason I speak French is not because I’m a good person is best because I was told “if you want to be employed here, that’s it, you have to do it”. I came in knowing I’d have to do it. So it was an unusual and very rich and very exhausting experience.

Gwen Schulman 1:16:34

Well Dan, I just want to add to it because I was kind of on the other side of this whole thing. First of all, just to flesh it out a little bit. CIDMAA was in this tiny, ramshackle building on sitting. anymore. So you know, you’re packed into this tiny apartment, it was basically an apartment. And I remember as a anti-poverty activist at McGill. I mean, I was popping in and out, seeing you guys all the time, as you said, the documentation center was outstanding, the material you guys were preparing was fueled the work that we did at McGill. I mean, it was just incredible. You guys were educating us, you were holding workshops for us, when we had questions you taught us all about the frontline states. I mean, it was really, just as the recipient of a lot of what CIDMAA did, it was just unbelievably essential. And you know, you’d even hire us every once in a while as students who were like, never in class, always out on the streets in the movement, didn’t have time to make money. I mean, you would hire us, you would bring us in for good wages to you know, edit stuff, or photocopy or translate or, you know, whatever. But there was always like a little bit of money that you would send our way to try to help us out with the work that we were doing, and just to kind of survive through the whole period. So it was, yeah, it was a very intense organization in all kinds of ways.

Dan O’Meara 1:17:57

It was and you know, I hate to go on with this, but that was Pierre. Pierre understood that if cinema was to leave any lasting, have any lasting effect, it couldn’t just be reliant on one or two great people, so called, or people who could analyze and if they left as I was going to leave, or he could, he was exhausted and went off to South Africa. It had to be able to continue. And he managed to find all sorts of ways to bring people in. I mean, the way Stephane Corriveau and Marie-Helene and Ben Bernanke were brought in, he organized an essay competition in, in, I don’t know if you did, in Anglophone universities and Francophone universities, and the two people who wrote the best essay on South Africa, were given a page stash in Sydney, you know. nd so he was constantly figuring out ways of doing this thing. That kind of it wasn’t. It wasn’t, unlike TCLSAC, which was remarkable in its own ways, but was a kind of closed community and you were in or you weren’t, and you were part of the group and you know, the acolytes of its main analyst, John Saul or you weren’t. There was little of that said in CIDMAA. And that’s what really stuck out and it met, he managed to have these connections, as I said, with all kinds of groups who were represented a different life force to him. I mean, the Catholic Church, Pierre was about as anti-Catholic churches it’s possible to get but he worked very well development piece. So kudos to him.

Doug Miller 1:19:38

Thank you so much, Dan. What an amazing interview by Ben, I’m at a loss for words, quite frankly. Thank you.

Dan O’Meara 1:19:46

You’re very welcome. I was great to talk about it. As I said in my email, I do have a lot of I have fewer than I did because I gave a lot of this stuff away to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, but it’s something, when this awful pandemic is over, I still have some of the documentation from that time, particularly these two little guides that I spoke about, if you ever need to have a look at them so well.

Doug Miller 1:20:12

What perhaps you said you had a collection perhaps in your office. So perhaps another session could be held when, when that office becomes available, and you could sit there and walk us through what this document represented, what kind of struggle was going on what issues were here that that too is very informative. We did that with Grant, please turn the recording off because it just makes the file heavy.

Gwen Schulman 1:20:37

Okay. Just want to make sure we don’t end up covering something that we’re going to want to use.

Doug Miller 1:20:41

We’ll come back we’ll think.