Gwendolyn Schulman

Doug Miller 00:02

There we go. So we are now doing it. Okay, welcome. Gwen Schulman, the subject of this interview today, living in Montreal, Sophie Toupin, also in Montreal, is going to be the lead interviewer. I’m Doug Miller. We’re here with the intent of interviewing Gwen for her experience with the Canadian anti apartheid movement as part of the Canadian anti apartheid History Project. Gwen, Good morning.

Gwen Schulman 00:35

Hi. After doing so many of these interviews, it’s very strange being on the receiving end, but I’ll try to behave.

Doug Miller 00:44

No problem. Well, you’ve read and assigned the consent form, but I do need a verbal recognition that you’ve read it, that you understand that this is being collected for educational purposes and will be archived and accessible to the public for other uses, research and etc. So if you just acknowledge that you’ve read the consent form and you agree to its conditions, please, yes, I have, okay, good enough. Sylvia, I’m it’s, it’s today, Thursday, 30th of November, I passed the interview over to you.

Gwen Schulman 01:19

Yes, thank you. Doug. Sophie,

Sophie Toupin

Yeah. No, no worries. Thank you. So I guess my first question, Gwen is, I would like you to introduce yourself and tell us what you’re doing now.

Gwen Schulman 01:37

Okay, so I live in Montreal. I’m a translator by profession, and last week, no two weeks ago, retired my hosting of the long running Amandla radio show, which we will talk about, I guess, over the course of this interview. But it’s a show that ran for 36 years and was born out of the struggle. Worked very closely with you sometimes, Sophie, and for a very long time with Doug on the radio show. So that’s, you know, up until two weeks ago, that was something that was keeping me very busy, too, but we plan to roll it into a podcast. So Amandla lives on.

Sophie Toupin 02:16

Wonderful, wonderful, amazing. So let’s go back in time, and can you tell us how you first got involved in the anti-apartheid movement?

Gwen Schulman 02:29

Okay, I was, of course, trying to think about this so long ago. So I mean, I became aware of apartheid as a young child. I remember we were in the car driving somewhere with my parents. I was probably around 11 or 12, and it was either Alan Boesak or Desmond Tutu was being interviewed on CBC radio, or maybe was the guest on cross country checkup, possibly, and it was my first sort of real exposure to the information about apartheid, and I remember sitting in the back seat of the car, kind of riveted and horrified as this system was being laid out for Canadians. So I don’t know that would have been in the early 80s, I guess so.

Then fast forward, my political leanings, really, at the time, right before the apart getting involved. I was much more involved in Central America solidarity work, so around Nicaragua and El Salvador in particular. That was the summer before I started university, and then with the intention of doing Central American Studies at McGill. And when I went, the teacher who would normally be giving those courses was on sabbatical, and I was just crushed. And my advisor said, “Well, I would really recommend that you go into African history instead”. And I mean, I was just kind of like blindsided. I never had really thought about Africa. Didn’t know anything about it. And said, “okay”, so I started a degree in African history at McGill. And I mean, honestly, within two months, my eyes and brain had just been blown open by this whole other world. I had a great professor, Myron Echenberg, who his approach was very well, first of all, very kind of left leaning. He was using Marxist sources, and it was deeply analytical and extremely respectful and a lot of African voices.

He used a lot of African Literature at the time, novels and stuff to tell the story of the colonial experience. It was great anyway. Point being, it really opened my eyes. And so then, you know, I wanted to get involved somehow in the natural stepping off point was there was a South Africa committee at McGill SAC and so I just jumped right into that right away.

And it was a really vibrant little committee. There was a lot going on campus at that point. We’re talking about the, so there was a lot of fervour and, you know, I just was in hook, line and sinker, like that was it. I was just completely enrolled. And then I guess what really sealed the deal was that I was invited to be part of a youth tour of southern Africa. This was organized by CIDMAA in Montreal. This centre, deformation documentation, sur le Mozambique and they were a documentation Centre in Montreal, and they wanted to try to foster youth solidarity. So they had invited a group of us, Martha Gordon, who’s been interviewed for this series. It was being coordinated by Marie-Helene Bonin, who’s also been interviewed for this series, and Aziz Fall, who was at UQAM, who will be interviewed for this series, and a couple of other people.

We were invited to go down and meet the youth wing of the African National Congress, the youth wing of SWAPO, the Southwest African people’s organization. So that all took place in Zambia, and then we spent some time in Zimbabwe looking at the effects of South Africa’s war of destabilization against the frontline states, the countries bordering South Africa. And then as part of that, we also went to Mozambique and met with members of the revolutionary FRELIMO government that was bearing much of the brunt of South Africa’s war of aggression against its neighbours. So it was an incredible eye opener and political education. You know, I was 19 at the time, I guess 19 or 20. And it was just incredible, like there was no turning back after that. It was so just in my veins. And so came back. And so this would have been in the mid, I think the mid 80s, late 80s. Late 80s, 86, 87 86 or 87.

Sophie Toupin 07:00

You were still a student at McGill during that?

Gwen Schulman 07:02

I was in my first, no, I was in my second year at McGill. I think so when I came back. I mean, the fervour and commitment was just intense. I mean, I essentially stopped going to classes and just devoted my life to the struggle, but had very supportive professors, thankfully, who were completely wrapped up in this and really had my back. And in fact, when I failed an anthropology course, one of my professors went on bended knee to the professor of the anthropology course and said, “she’s doing really important work right now. Give her another chance”. So I was very lucky. But again, it was in that moment of McGill was very wrapped up in the middle of the divestment campaign. And it was really, you know, it was the hot topic. So there was a lot of awareness not to say that all the professors at McGill were on board. Certainly many were not. Some actively fought us. The administration was not on board. But there was an acceptance among some people this was very important work.

Sophie Toupin 08:06

Do you remember some of the actions that you took part in at McGill or outside of McGill?

Gwen Schulman 08:14

So certainly, organizing a lot of demonstrations, a lot of blocking of Montreal streets. We were, you know, at the time, we were demanding that Canada cut all ties with South Africa and divest so there was a lot of organizing around that, and then also divestment at McGill. So there was, we set up a kind of like a faux shanty town right outside the administration building, and it was really kind of a guerrilla theatre thing to raise student awareness around what was going on. So that was quite effective. And then there were students that occupied the administration building. I did not myself physically occupy, but supported.

That was very early on in my days, so I wasn’t involved at that level, but we were out there, supporting them, trying to generate media interest, because McGill was very media shy, always wanted a very polished reputation, and couldn’t stand having negative media attention. So we really worked hard on exposing McGill’s complicity with apartheid through very active in that lot of just popular education, leafleting, sitting at tables at McGill, lots of demonstrations outside the South African consulate, which was at Place Ville Marie, way, way up in the sky. So we did a lot of work around that.

After the youth tour, part of the youth tour was then youth came. Southern African youth came to Canada, and so we organized tours and conferences and talks with them. So a young fellow from SWAPO came that was an opportunity to talk about the horrendous situation in Namibia. Involved going to Ottawa and talking to politicians there and trying to generate greater awareness and support. For the fact that South Africa was very actively destroying its neighbours and or attempting to and newly independent countries, many of them. So we did, we did a lot of work like that.

Sophie Toupin 10:14

And so when did you? When did you start the radio program, Amandla right, later on? Or was it still when you were a student at McGill?

Gwen Schulman 10:27

I was still a student at McGill, and I think it was, it was definitely still in my undergrad. I went on to do a Master’s at McGill, but this was all in the first three years of McGill. So I was still an undergraduate student and another member of the Southern Africa committee, Suzanne Smythe and I decided to approach the campus community radio, CKUT, because we were very alarmed by the shift in the discourse around South Africa. So what? Where? Where’s the media? Was never the mainstream media, was never particularly great on the issue of South Africa.

There was a discernible shift in the 80s towards this discourse of black on black violence, which was a discourse that the apartheid regime was really pumping out to the world and trying to propagandize the world that, in fact, the bigger issue wasn’t white supremacy. The issue was that, you know, should the racists leave black people would never be able to rule themselves. That was always the South, that that was always the apartheid discourse. And so this is something that they really stepped up in the 80s and managed to get that message to infiltrate mainstream Canadian media.

So Suzanne and I, and I mean, all the rest of us, were just horrified by this shift in the discourse, and said, we have to do something to try to bring it back to the roots of the problem, white supremacy, the apartheid system. So we approached CKUT radio and asked for a half hour slot. And the initial answer was no, that they didn’t have they didn’t have time for another spoken word program. But then, just amazingly enough, there was a fellow running an environmental show, I think it was called earth tremors, Jed Kahane, and he was on this committee, and he put up his hand and he said, “This is really important. I will give them half an hour off of my radio show”. So we walked away with half an hour on South Africa.

Suzanne, who we’ll be interviewing for this project tomorrow, actually found our original written script, which was just so it was all handwritten on full scat paper, and we were so nervous. And the first half the first couple of shows, we just kind of giggled out of nervousness because we had no training, but we were very committed anyway. We hung in there, and gradually, kind of pulled ourselves together, and, you know, covered various topics.

And eventually, as there was a growing awareness that this wasn’t just South Africa, it was Southern Africa, we expanded the scope to Southern Africa. And then through time, the show expanded its scope to the entire continent, became bilingual, English, French, and went on to be on the air for, you know, over 35 over three decades. Oh, sorry, I beg your pardon.

Sophie Toupin 13:17

You wanted to ask a question earlier.

Doug Miller 13:23

Oh, no, I’m well, the show started in 86 if I’m not mistaken. So you must have been just back from Africa.

Gwen Schulman 13:28

Unbelievable. Yes, it was, actually, that is exactly right. It was when I just got back from Southern Africa, because I remember kind of stumbling around the campus, kind of shell shocked by what we witnessed in southern Africa. I mean, this was really the height of the destabilization of the frontline states. And there were shootings and bombings that like, it didn’t, every step of the way where we were about to go got attacked, or a place we’d been to got attacked after we left. It was very intense. And the people we met and the stories they told and was just so profound and enraging and inspiring.

And so when I came back, for sure, I was also just fueled by this desire to talk about all this. So that’s right, the mandate right from the start, was to talk about all of Southern Africa, not just South Africa, because I was particularly affected by Mozambique stories. So, a lot of those early days of Amandla were very focused on Mozambique that was just being absolutely brutalized by South Africa at that point. So, um, so yeah, that’s right, Duncan would have been right after we got back from that tour.

Doug Miller 14:37

How did things change around about 1990 when Mandela walked free?

Gwen Schulman

Sorry, say that again.

Doug Miller

How did things change around 1990 when Nelson Mandela walked free?

Gwen Schulman 14:49

Yeah, so well, I mean, there was definitely a sense of euphoria, and you don’t really put a bounce in our steps, even though we were still facing some very very vicious years before, the period before the regime fell, and those were terrible times where we were seeing a lot of the more progressive activists in South Africa being assassinated like it was clear at that point that the South African regime saw the handwriting on the wall and was systematically picking off the people who it knew could really bring profound change and revolution to South Africa.

And, you know, let’s face, they did a fairly effective job. So it, you know, this was also the rise in the intense time of the Inkatha, the so called Inkatha Freedom Party of Butulezi and so that was that whole discourse of black-on-black violence. What the South African regime was doing in its desperate final years was trying to turn black South Africans against each other and encouraging and financing and arming these very retrograde conservative forces within the country.

So there’s so much of that going on, but when Mandela walked free, for sure, it put a new, like it put a new bounce in our steps. We were so euphoric and excited. And you know, Mandela came to Montreal in the lead up to the first non-racial elections in South Africa, and so we were out there with our table and our pamphlets while he was speaking in Montreal. And, you know, I have pictures from that time, like we had such huge smiles on our faces because we knew it was the end, like this struggle was going to be successful on some level.

And so it was very exciting time, and we shifted our focus very much to voter education, because we were very concerned about massive disenfranchisement, so we wanted to raise money to make sure that the forces on the ground in South Africa can get the word out on how to vote, where to vote, you know, get the voters, get the electorate educated and organized. Remember, this was a population that, by legal constant, legally, had not ever been allowed to vote. So there was a lot of work to be done. So we really got busy doing busy doing that.

Doug Miller 17:11

I remember one event at the plus days arc, yes.

Gwen Schulman 17:16

So there was an event at Plas du Sal where Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela were invited to give a concert, and Aziz from the group for research and initiative for the liberation of Africa. By then, I’d left the committee at McGill, and I was a member of GRILA, Aziz and I were like, my god, they’re going to be hundreds of people in that room, this is our opportunity to raise money for voter education. So I called plastics out. I mean, you know, it was just like and explained, and I said, please, can you Well, no, we didn’t want we wanted Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela to say, to push our campaign. That’s what it was. So the woman there said, “Look, let me talk to them and find out”. And she comes back and says, “Well, good news and bad news. The bad news is, no, they’re not going to push your campaign, but the good news is, they’ve invited you into –“.

Sophie Toupin

I’ve never heard that over there.

Gwen Schulman

So we go over there, and there’s Aziz, and I, I mean, you know, standing on the stage at Place de Sal, just like, oh, anyway, we, you know, set our bid, and we set up boxes at the exit to place these, and, you know, people stuffed those boxes. And we even got to very briefly meet Miriam Makeba and Hugh, no, I don’t, we didn’t meet Hugh Masekela. We met Miriam Makeba, and she just kind of gave us a big smile and a big, you know, “Amandla!”, and it was really very sweet. And we raised a lot of money and, but I was working at the time for a community centre, and I tended to kind of keep my political activities on the low down at work because there were, you know, conservative forces there, and I wasn’t really wild about being too public about what I was doing anyway. Of course, half of them were at Place des Arts. So that was the end of my secret, my secrecy at work.

Sophie Toupin 19:15

Tell me when was there any time that the show Amandla was, let’s say, targeted by the apartheid propaganda, or were you? Were you not intimidated and silenced?

Gwen Schulman 19:37

I don’t, I don’t really recall that ever happening. That happened later when I started doing a lot of stuff around Canadian mining in Africa in general, where there was some stuff, weird kind of stuff, coming from somewhere within the Canadian government. I forget where, but the station shielded me from it. They said, “Gwen, you keep getting some calls, calls from somebody in, I think, foreign trade or something, who’d like to talk to you”, and they just kind of cut it off and it kind of frittered away. Was the show ever infiltrated? Were there, that’s entirely possible.

We do know that after the end of apartheid, the new consul, a South African consul in Montreal, opened up his files to Aziz, and it became very clear that we had been spied on and infiltrated. So, you know, I don’t have more details. It’s kind of something I would like to follow up for historical reasons at some point. But no, I don’t have any specific memory of this show being targeted at that time. CKUT was still campus community. It hadn’t become, you know, it has a much more powerful reach now, with its broader antenna audience, but also with the Internet. At the time, it was a pretty limited listenership.

Doug Miller 20:55

Wow, I’m, well, the forces of apartheid might not have been at it internally at McGill, there’s been debates about not just the show, but the whole of CKUT and those, I think, are reflective.

Sophie Toupin 21:09

A little bit of what you’re talking about with what’s going on with Palestine right now?

Doug Miller 21:13

Well, often it’s been around Palestine and more than, more than South Africa, but –

Gwen Schulman 21:18

Oh yes, I mean, listen the station in general, as a whole, definitely has often been threatened and very vulnerable to forces powerful financial forces at McGill University. CKUT is a little bit more autonomous from McGill now than it was at the time, but there is no question that at the time, CKUT was under pressure to get us to tone down our demands for divestment, because McGill didn’t want to divest. So, you know, McGill would occasionally try to muzzle the free press at CK UT, but CKUT was always a champion in terms of defending us. And you know, over the years, has had to go to referendum because there have been attempts to withdraw student money from CKUT. So there have been a number of referendums where students have had to vote on if they want to continue to give a portion of their student fees to CK UT. And every time, CK UT has come out victorious. So McGill’s attempts to muzzle people at CKUT have never been successful, but they certainly have tried.

Sophie Toupin 22:24

So I’m shifting a little bit the conversation, but I’m wondering if you could tell us in hindsight what were, or what, yeah, what were some of your concerns, or maybe criticism in hindsight, of the anti movement in Canada?

Gwen Schulman 22:45

Well, some of them weren’t hindsight. Some of them were very much in the moment. I had criticisms and frustrations with it. Certainly it was a sexist movement. There’s no question that very often as women activists, we were, you know, kept behind the leadership. It was a very male, male dominated leadership movement in Canada. I certainly experienced that viscerally myself. And I know a lot of my women co-activists felt that way too, and that we felt often that we were shut down, and, you know, kept back, and that the men tended to be the ones who would speak at events, and, you know, all of that. So there is no question that that played itself out within the anti-apartheid movement. I remember that very well, and I don’t expect that that was unique to my experience in the southern Africa committee, or at GRILA, or at various conferences and things I went to. I think it was part and parcel of the movement, not being particularly self-critical and reflective on that issue.

I think it was a very white movement, and I knew it at the time that it was quite a, you know, ironically, a segregated movement. You know, there were Black activists, anti-apartheid activists working away, but they, a lot of them, tended to be separated out and do their own thing. And I don’t doubt for a minute that that’s because one of the other weaknesses of the movement is that often we weren’t addressing issues of racism here at home. And so there was a hypocrisy. I’m sure a lot of the black anti-apartheid activists in Montreal anyway, were feeling like, “wow, you know, we have young men getting shot on the streets. Where are you at the demos?”. Some of us did go to those demos, but a lot of us didn’t.

And so that was, you know, they, I think a lot of black activists decided to just, you know, go on, go on their own and set up their own structures and take on apartheid in their own ways, informed by their own experiences of racism, and not have to contend with white activists who only had their gaze in South Africa and didn’t have their gaze here at home. So there’s no question that that was a division and something to look at, to reflect on in.

In terms of solidarity with Indigenous struggles in Canada, I only recall one, one instance where we worked in solidarity, and it was very, very brief and short lived, and I was thinking about it today. Was interesting, because the South Africa, the apartheid regime was very quick to point out the Canadian anti-apartheid activists were hypocrites, because we had our own form of apartheid here. And they said it. They said, you know, “your Indigenous people live on reservations”, and it was true, but they were saying it for all the wrong reasons, you know. So while they were correct in their criticism, it was to divide and try to weaken the movement here. It certainly wasn’t out of any concern for our own apartheid system here in Canada.

But the fact remains that we too were living in a segregated society, and, you know, a colonial society, and we did not really reflect, I think there were individuals within the movement that did, but as a solidarity movement, we did not make those connections. We did not build those bridges, and we did not move forward on all fronts, on in an anti-colonial, you know, a globally anti colonial movement, we were not that. I don’t think, there were whispers of it and elements of it. I’m not, you know, there were people who certainly were more open eyed and aware and critical.

But overall, as a movement, no, I do not think that the Canadian anti-apartheid movement, and certainly not the Quebec anti-apartheid movement, do very much around that.

Doug Miller 26:40

Who would have been your allies in the movement? Were you in touch with other student movements across Canada, other universities, etc.? Were you? Were you in touch?

Gwen Schulman 26:51

So absolutely, yeah. So we worked a lot with well within Quebec in particular, UQAM, the students at UCAM. We were very tied with them, them, and did a lot of work with them. We did a lot at UQAM. We worked very hard to try to build a coalition in Quebec that was beyond the students. And so we, I think, fairly successfully, but fairly late in the game, managed to create a network that included churches, unions, women’s groups, various NGOs, lots of meetings, lots of efforts at trying to build a coalition that I mean, actually by the time we hit the voter education campaign, it quite successfully kicked in like It helped that coalition allowed us to raise a lot more money than if we had remained kind of sequestered off as student just student activists cross Canada. It was much more for us, student to student So, and that was really forged through that youth tour in southern Africa.

So we worked a lot with Carleton, with Queen’s, we would do a lot of travelling to demonstrations at other universities. So I distinctly remember going to Queen’s a couple of times to help the anti-apartheid committee there get galvanized. McGill was seen as a bit of a leader, because we there was a lot going on at McGill, so we were often invited to go, you know, show our support and galvanize at other places. So I remember going to Queens a couple of times Carleton, and then we were often in Ottawa demonstrating at the South African Embassy.

Sophie Toupin 28:33

And I just want to go back to something that you said, which I thought was thought provoking, that the anti-apartheid movement was not an anti-colonial kind of movement,

Gwen Schulman 28:47

Yeah, and, I mean, I want to be careful not to generalize, because the movement in Canada was not one thing. It was not a monolith. It was, you know, a collection of very diverse voices and perspectives. So within the movement, there’s no question that there were people who were anti colonial. There were indigenous people involved in the movement. There were, so it’s not so, but a movement in terms of its demands and orientations, like the sort of the strongest voices that came out of the movement and typified the movement. I would not say that the first message was anti colonial. It was anti-apartheid. It was against colonialism in South Africa.

Sophie Toupin 29:33

Like a single issue type activism.

Gwen Schulman 29:38

Right again, you know, I don’t want to, you know there were a lot of within the movement who were very, very involved in the Palestine issue. Lots of people in the movement very involved in what was going on in Nicaragua and El Salvador and but in terms of our key messages, we were very focused on overthrowing apartheid. And I would not say that the dominant theme that came out of it was. A an anti colonial an anti colonial message, no.

Sophie Toupin 30:06

Okay, and so, what about the movement, the anti, the Canadian anti apartheid movement, encouraging change in the Canadian government policy? How, how did you How were you involved in that? Were you involved in that? What’s your assessment of discussion?

Gwen Schulman 30:2

Well, I do think, you know, there’s always this debate about what brought about change, and I think that there’s no question that the Canadian anti-apartheid movement mobilized Canadians to put pressure on the Canadian government to reduce its ties with South Africa. We never got where we wanted to get to. There were sanctions, but they were busted, and there were ways around them.

But definitely, I do think what we succeeded in doing in the psyche of Canadians was that we were against apartheid and that Canadians were prepared to participate in boycotts, write letters to the Canadian government, sign petitions, and this did ultimately shift the Canadian government’s policy vis a vis a vis South Africa. And, you know, South Africa was thrown out of the Commonwealth, was isolated, like all of these actions did ultimately help and contribute to isolating South Africa.

But we can never forget that the movement within South Africa, and the images and the headlines that were coming out of South Africa, in terms of those front-line activists and warriors also played a huge contributing role to the shift in Canadian and international perspective on what was going on in South Africa. So, you know, I will always honour and tip my hat to this, it was being very much driven by forces inside the country and their representatives. So, you know, we had ANC representatives here in Canada who were also encouraging and fighting for a shift in perspectives on the country.

32:13

So, and what was the impact on you?

Gwen Schulman 32:20

Oh, well, I mean, it was huge in a lot of ways. I, on a very sort of kind of mundane and material answer to this was that I was one of the few Anglophones who was really building bridges with the Francophone anti-apartheid movement in Quebec. So we were really trying to bridge the Anglophones and the francophones. And again, because there was so much further coming out of McGill, other people were get, you know, interested in, wanting to, you know, get on board. And so I kind of ended up being a little bit of the envoy that did a lot of the work at UQAM and so, and then, you know, there, and then there was a lot.

So as the movement grew within the Francophone sector, we also wanted to join. So they became, you know, a lot of fervour developed, and they became very mobilized, and they started writing a lot of stuff. And so I was called on constantly to translate their material into English, even though I wasn’t a translator, but I was one of the only Anglos that had kind of infiltrated the, you know, the Francophone canvases. And so I was happy to do that. I was a terrible translator, but I, you know, spent hours and hours and hours translating all of their material and bringing it back to McGill and Concordia and distributing it on the streets. You know, all our pamphlets we decided had to be in English and French.

And the long and the short of that is that I got trained as a translator, and that’s what ended up that’s what I ended up doing for a living, and I am convinced that that was born out of those early years. So that’s a very mundane answer.

I think the more interesting answer is that I was very, very privileged to cut my teeth politically at a time when there were organized liberation movements, and that I had the opportunity to work with those movements. And I think that that was transformative.

And, you know, I see a lot of people today who especially around, well, I’ll speak specifically to Africa, who they cut their teeth by going and doing so called development work, which is completely apolitical most of it reinforces precisely what the problem is, none of it looks at the source of Africa’s, you know, marginalization and oppression. There’s nothing political about it. It really just is a kind of a fundamentally racist and, you know, kind of charitable charity we need. Save these poor people perspective, and I just had this amazing opportunity to land on the continent and be living with young ANC and SWAPO people, who are revolutionaries, who, you know, were extremely clear on what the roots of the problem were.

And there was none of this business of development. It was about revolution. And that is a very different way to learn and provides a very, very different lens and perspective on, you know, on the sources of, you know, the scourges of today and the ongoing, you know, the on the persistence of those structures in terms of, you know, Canada’s role in draining wealth and resources from Africa and these very neocolonial structures that are perpetuating the problem.

So it was just an incredible opportunity, and I wish young people today, more young people today, had that, that opportunity to be educated in that way. And I know that Amandla, a lot of our young recruits to Amandla through the years were young people who’d come back from Africa having worked for these NGOs, wanting to wanting to do something, coming back to Montreal, and wanting to maintain their connection with the continent. They find out about the radio station, they join the show, and then their world is kind of blown apart because we don’t have a development discourse. You know, we’re talking about things like neocolonialism and imperialism and false boundaries and pan-Africanism and a lot of them, it really, really shifted their perspective, and it gave them a chance to reconsider. And a lot of them came home from their experience a little disturbed about the development discourse, but couldn’t quite put their finger on it. And Amandla really helped them get the history and the roots, and once they had that and, you know, listening to interviews and then participating into in interviews with anti-imperialist and anti-colonialists, and it just completely shifted their perspective. So I would say that that’s how the movement, that was, the movement’s impact on me, and I’ll be forever grateful.

Sophie Toupin 37:21

And you had a great impact on many people, including me. Thank you. Do you know? Do you know how many people went through Amanda?

Gwen Schulman 37:34

Help me, I mean, it was we were trying to think about this as we were gradually retiring the show. And I mean, it was dozens, if not, might have been even over 100 150 people who cycled through that show in one way or another every day. I’m thinking, oh right, oh right, you know, like I just some of them. I can’t even remember their names, which is just so terrible. And I feel like we were not very good record keepers, but we have had so many people cycle through that show, and a lot of them, you know, really went on to do some fantastic stuff. Some of them became journalists elsewhere in the world, but it had a big impact

Doug Miller 38:19

There’s close to forty names on the mailing list for the Amanda list, rise up list, and many of them.

Gwen Schulman 38:30

Yep, it was just an incredible team of people who really cycled through there. Some of them stayed for a while. Some of them, you know, in and out very quickly. Some of them just wasn’t their cup of tea. But I would say that most people were very devoted to the show and really, really have a great affection and care for it. And I know we’re sad when it was retired, but you know, we’re looking forward with the podcast, but yeah.

Doug Miller 38:59

Well, I think there’s an interesting now that we’re at the end of the show, a reflection on what’s, what’s the context at the end of the show versus the context when you started it, that would mean that it’s over now.

Gwen Schulman 39:13

Yeah, yeah. Although, you know, I guess one of my regrets, if I yeah, I think one of my regrets is I feel like we and I feel like that’s really most of us, and certainly me abandoned the anti-apartheid movement far too early. The elections were not the end of apartheid by any stretch of the imagination. And so there was a political change. There was a desegregate, desegregation of the politics of South Africa, but there wasn’t a desegregation of the economy and the distribution of wealth, land, access to education, all of this. And I feel like it was premature, and that we, you know, in a way, it’s a real travesty. We should have been more sophisticated, educated we knew at the time. I mean, I remember when we were celebrating the end of apartheid, and we were outside the South African consulate, and we did a whole mock funeral with a, you know, a coffin, and we buried apartheid and all of that. But we also, I remember distinctly, talking about and talking to journalists about, this is not the end of the system. This is the end of one layer of the system that can potentially open the door to ending the whole system.

But then we kind of packed up and moved on, you know, like we did not this really should be an ongoing struggle, and if the if the international movement had remained united and really had an anti-imperial, anti-colonial analysis. We would not have stopped the day after the elections and would not have gotten rolled into a development project where, you know, people are going as teachers and agronomists and all of this. No, we would have been fighting the international financial institutions that were putting enormous pressure on the new South African Government to abandon its revolutionary goals. We would have been fighting all of that and saying, no, that’s not what we all fought for all these years. But we didn’t do it, and here we are. I guess that would be critical.

Doug Miller 41:24

No, it’s, it’s a, you’re looking at the context, and I think that’s a totally legitimate thing to do. It sounds disappointing. And of course, it just shows that there’s still lots of work to do all the time. And yeah, maybe your and my work, had we done what we could, and it’s other people’s turn.

Gwen Schulman 41:45

Well, we’re not dead yet. Doug, Jesus, it’s like, what?

Sophie Toupin 41:56

And so I guess, before we end this conversation, is there something that you would like to add that we didn’t have time to cover?

Gwen Schulman 42:06

Well, you know, I guess I really met a lot of really fantastic and inspiring people in the movement, and I really owe a great debt to them. I mean, I really met some absolutely fabulous activists South African, Mozambican, Zimbabwe, and Canadian, you know, really fantastic minds and creative spirits and very dedicated people with just amazing insights into the world and into the nature of oppression and exploitation. And, you know, I look back at that and I think, wow, like, I really met an amazing cast of characters in my life that live with me, like I feel like they’ve fundamentally changed me. And, you know, are part of me. And I feel very lucky about that. I speak to a lot of contemporaries. They never had that experience, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, I guess I just, in the end, want to express my gratitude and thanks to all of those people, some of who lost their lives in that struggle, others are still with us today. Thankfully. Doug, you were going to say something.

Doug Miller 43:14

I have one comment, if I could make it, and I think there’s a whole impact that your activities and others, has been neglected, and that is the kind of work that spun out from griller, the group for research and initiatives for liberation of Africa. I mean, from the liberation struggle included the struggle for Polisario to free itself in the Western Sahara, we had the struggles of the students and the young people the Arab spring of 2011 all of this comes –

Gwen Schulman 43:49

Even back it up. I mean, well, the first, really the first campaign we got involved in after the elections in South Africa was the horror story that was unrolling in the Niger Delta in Nigeria with the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine others who were, you know, resisting oil exploitation in the Delta. And you know, we really threw ourselves into that very deeply after, after those elections. And you know, we’re boycotting Shell and thickening gas stations and inviting Nigerians to come speak about what was going on there in the end, to no avail. I mean, Saro-Wiwa and the others were hanged, which was just an absolutely horrible defeat. And you know, companies are still ravaging that part of the world.

But certainly, you know, we took all of those skills that we had picked up in the anti-apartheid movement, and they were real skill, real organizing skills, and we redirected them elsewhere and to these other struggles, as Doug said. And you know, we all knew how to receive dignitaries and Polisario and take them to Ottawa. I mean, you know, not everybody knows how to do that, but we knew how to do that because we had done it so many times during the anti-apartheid struggle. We knew how to put together press kits. We knew how to organize talks at universities. We knew how to organize tours across Quebec and to Ottawa and who to call and who to talk and who to lobby, and that all the that was our, you know, toolkit came out of years of the anti-apartheid struggle. Yeah, thanks, Doug, that’s a very good point.

Doug Miller 45:33

Yes, much, much more positive note, thank you.

Gwen Schulman 45:36

That’s true. What’s getting kind of grim.

Doug Miller 45:40

Thank you. Sophie, would you have anything that you’d like to comment on rather than question?

Sophie Toupin 45:48

Oh, no, no.

Doug Miller 45:51

I mean, you were part of Amandla for a while there.

Sophie Toupin 45:56

So yeah, I was part of Amandla for a while, and it was, I guess for me, it was a transformative experience, because I was one of these people that you describe, Gwen, who went to Africa on development work, but really understood that there was something very problematic with this development, international development work, and I found my community with you in a mantra, and that’s why I, you know, I decided to stick around, and even though I was sometimes coming in and contributing and then out for A few months, for a few years, but then always coming back.

Gwen Schulman 46:45

And I feel like, okay, and it went it also, I mean, you went on to write the most amazing PhD. So in a couple of sentences, I feel like you need to describe what your PhD was on.

Sophie Toupin 46:57

Oh, okay, so in a few sentences, I examined an encrypted communication system that was developed during the South African liberation struggle that enable freedom fighters to communicate secretly and transnationally between South Africa and Zambia via the Netherlands, Great Britain and Canada. And what’s quite fascinating about the Canadian part is that one of the antenna of the communication network was located on an indigenous reserve in the northern part of Alberta, which is, you know, fascinating to see that these connections existed at the communication level, clandestine dimension of the movement.

Gwen Schulman 47:52

That’s so fascinating.

Sophie Toupin 47:56

Absolutely, absolutely yes, which has, which has been documented quite well, but less in terms of the communication aspects of it. But in every movement, there’s always, always an underground, like many underground kind of actions, being existing, because that’s quite often how, how you can how social transformation is also enabled. It’s enabled publicly but also covertly.

Gwen Schulman 48:33

Yeah, absolutely,

Sophie Toupin 48:37

Oh yeah. And you are both essential in helping me understand the anti-apartheid Canadian movement for my dissertation. So you know, having been part of Amandla and knowing you too and your own trajectory in this anti colonial and anti-apartheid movement, or, I mean, were essential for my studies and for my own understanding of the movement, since I wasn’t part of it, yeah, I was too young at the time.

Gwen Schulman 49:15

Very interesting ripple effects, that’s for sure.

Sophie Toupin 49:19

Yes, yeah.

Doug Miller 49:21

Well, the telling of stories can go on and on, I think Gwen wonderful analysis and overview, magisterial, in fact, picture of what it was about. And thank you so much for this, and we appreciate it all. Thanks Sophie for helping.

Gwen Schulman 49:43

Yeah, thanks Sophie for diving in. Really great.

Sophie Toupin 49:46

Yes. Thank you so much.

Doug Miller 49:49

Okay, I’m going to turn recording off.