Ken Luckhardt

Doug Miller 00:03

Doug, I’m got my fluids here. I’m having a smoothie along with my tea. Good morning. Ken Luckhardt in Toronto, Gwen Schulman in Montreal. I’m Doug Miller. Also in Montreal, trying to pull together some interviews for the Canadian Anti-Apartheid Activist History Project, and on that score, Ken has agreed to be an interview subject. So can you understand the conditions? You understand that we are going to ask you for your history, and you’re going to tell us all about it and that you don’t and that you don’t mind that it be recorded, or that you understand that it’s being recorded for future use as educational purposes and research, etc. No problem. Could you, could you just give us a little background Ken as an opener, about like, where you’re from and sort of what kind of upbringing might have led you to get into anti apartheid activism in the first place.

Ken Luckhardt 01:02

Okay, grew up in Urbana, Illinois, East Central, Illinois, University of Illinois, city school, university, Lawrence, university in Wisconsin. My BA anthropology and it’s not going to participate in a little war they had going on in Vietnam. So I decided to come to Canada 1968 August, 22 I believe it was, and took up a MA degree program in University of Alberta, anthropology again, and was got my MA in 1971 then plan.

The plan was always to go to Japan to do PhD research. I had studied Japanese language at the University of Alberta, but then I had renounced my citizenship for the United States because of the war, so I couldn’t travel. Even though I had a grant to go to Japan, I had, I had no ability to go there, passports, no passport.

So I gave that up, went to British Columbia to do research on interlantic capitalism in in the northwest part of the province. Came back to Edmonton to write up my thesis. I was teaching a course that summer, which is where I met Brenda Wall. And so then I was staying with three friends from Guyana, who played cricket every weekend with the black community in Edmonton, and they came back one Sunday and said, I could see on their face they’re upset about something. “What’s going on, guys?” They said, “well, we just found out today that the all white executive of the Edmonton district cricket league got invited, has invited a touring South African cricket team to Edmonton as part of the advance months before the Montreal Olympics”. And so, they asked me, after we had a few bottles of scotch, as we always did, whether I would help organize the opposition to this cricket match which they wanted to develop. I said I would. And so that’s how I first got involved in anti-apartheid activity in Edmonton, a cricket match. And I couldn’t tell you the first thing about a cricket game.

Doug Miller

What date would that have been?

Ken Luckhardt

76, 76 okay. Good, summer of 76

Doug Miller 03:24

Was there, was there, was there a formal structure in Edmonton that you could, you could involve people in.

Ken Luckhardt 03:30

There had been a small group called Free Southern African Committee, which then had a chapter in Calgary as well, but it was very inactive. So this spurred the activity that became much more FSAC as other people came to know it.

Gwen Schulman 03:48

Do you remember how aware you were of apartheid when this particular incident was brought to your attention?

Ken Luckhardt 03:55

I anticipated that question, Gwen, and the answer was pretty limited. I mean, I taught anthropology courses. I knew South Africans were racist. I knew I’d heard about apartheid, but at that time, the mid 70s, prior to Soweto, there really wasn’t much political discussion about South Africa, where I was, at least where I was. I mean, the course I taught brought it out a little bit, but pretty quiet days recent Waco.

Speaker 1 04:24

To put things in context, would you remember what would have been maybe a bigger issue at that point in terms of international solidarity, and were you more directed towards Central and South America?

Ken Luckhardt 04:37

Or yeah, I mean, the war in Vietnam hadn’t totally been finished that point in time, and it was still, a peace treaty may have been signed in 75 but still it was big issue, I think, with the war in Vietnam. So Central America was becoming important, uh Nicaragua was especially. Like everyone else, I guess I followed the string of events that were happening internationally.

Doug Miller 05:10

Could, could you describe, then, what, what you did do, for the picket, for the for the cricket match, or to prevent the cricket match?

Ken Luckhardt 05:18

Yeah, we, we mobilised in the labour movement and in the progressive church community and students, of course, on campus, and we put together a pretty effective organization of maybe up to 100 people who decided they would participate in actions to stop the cricket match and because the Commonwealth Games were coming up in Edmonton. The Yeah, the police in Edmonton decided that they did not want us to occupy the pitch. So we were very determined to occupy the pitch.

And so we got arrested, dragged off the cricket pitch, and thrown in jail overnight. And so that created a trial, and we charged two, crown sent two charges under criminal code, trespass and refusing to obey enough officer orders, I think so we went to trial, and the Crown decided to take one. There’s 61 of us arrested. Crown decided to take small group of us, a sample group, and run us through the trial. Whatever happened to us would happen to the rest of the, I was in the first group, and we were acquitted.

We were acquitted primarily because the police had violated their own procedures. They wanted to get us off the pitch so quickly and so badly that they wouldn’t do what they were supposed to term do both of you, in terms of telling us to do this and that something else. So we were acquitted.

But in the process of that particular case, South Africa became much more a focal point on campus and in those communities of labour and progressive church. So that gave this impetus to do more research on the connections between South Africa and Canada. So Brenda and myself were part of this. Now ESAC became more of a vibrant organization at that point in time. So we began to do research on this connection, and what helped us most along the way was

George Poonen, he and his wife Vera, both who had both been exiled out of South Africa because of political activities with the Communist Party. They were had taken up residence in Edmonton with where one of their daughters lived. So George was an incredible inspiration to all of us to know more about the history in which I said earlier we didn’t really know that much about but George was a great inspiration to all of us. So we would take him out to meetings. He would come to our meetings. We would take him out to public meetings to talk about.

Doug Miller 08:06

And I understand from my long knowledge of history with you that George Poonen really was an influence in many, many ways in your formation.

Ken Luckhardt 08:17

Absolutely, he and Vera, were the first couple.,I think I’m correct in this to be charged under the Marriage Act in South Africa, which I could not marry over the colour line, George and Vera were the first people to be prosecuted for that.

Doug Miller 08:34

And she was white.

Ken Luckhardt 08:37

Yes, she was white. And they were from the, Durban.

Doug Miller 08:41

And, what else did they do to as an influence with you? Pardon me, how else were they an influence with you and your, your, your evolution in this field?

Ken Luckhardt 08:53

Well, you know, George had been a quite active trade unionist in South African mural, actually in the Communist Party. So they had ample information to share with us about this person, that person, and people would come through Edmonton to meet, to see them as they came to see George and Vera. We would meet other people. So the network kind of gradually grew in the late 76 into 77 by that time, I’m kind of jumping ahead now.

By that time, Brenda and I had put a lot of effort into this. We dropped their current master degree, master’s thesis, I dropped my PhD, and we decided we would want to work for the movement if we could, if we had something useful to offer. So George wrote a letter to London, where the SACTU Executive General Secretary was based in exile, and told him about us. That was Shanghai at segway in London. Told John about a friend, friend and I our desire to help the movement. So with that letter, SACTU responded to George saying that we Brenda and I, should come to London and meet up with the executive members there of sock to and see if there was something we could do to be useful.

Doug Miller 10:18

So this is the South African Congress of –

Ken Luckhardt 10:21

Trade unions. From that point, Doug, would I let you steer me where you want to go?

Doug Miller 10:27

Well, there’s so South Africa, South African Congress of Trade unions, SACTU was contacted you or put in contact with him on the basis of your activities. Yes, and, how did it evolve from there?

Ken Luckhardt 10:41

Well, we went to London in September of 78 I believe it was. And we met with John sayway and Zola Zemba, two members of the executive of SAC two in exile. And they said, “Well, you know, look, we’ve we left the country quickly. Our papers are scattered all over the world. You know, our newsletters, our history is scattered all over the world”. So we’re first to collect as much material as you can. So we started going to the British Museum every single day of the week, finding documents that had been sent, wisely, sent by Phyllis Altman and General, Assistant General Secretary back in South Africa. She and others sent intentionally materials to places like the British Museum, where they would hopefully be kept, keeping in good stead for the future.

So we tracked this stuff down. It was all over the world. We got stuff in University of Indiana, in the States, all over the world. So we gathered all the stuff. And by December of that year, we said, this SACTU, okay, this is what we’ve collected. And of course, as we collected it, we studied it, studied it as well. You know, took notes, researched it, and began to have a sense of SACTUs history as the first non-racial Federation of South Africa formed in 1955 we came to know that material fairly well, and then here it is. We gave it over to them, literally. And they said, “Well, you’re not finished yet”.

Gwen Schulman 12:20

I have a quick, can I interrupt for a second? Because just thinking forward, people who will be using this archival material, a lot of them will have been born, you know, well after the internet was created, an email and all the rest of it. So just maybe to draw us a bit of a picture, when you talk about gathering information from these various institutions around the world. Were you travelling there to get it? Were you writing letters and things were being received by mail? How did it actually work?

Ken Luckhardt 12:51

Yes, anything that wasn’t in the British Museum, which would have been solicited by us through letters sent the University of Indiana, etc, etc, and you know you’re never going to get it all, and you don’t always know you’re getting what you really want. But in British Museum, they had all the regular newsletters of SACTU that have been produced above ground in South Africa. So it gave a really good history and names that were arrested, what they dis to get arrested. So we had a good, good sense of the organization from those newsletters.

So then we gave them over information, over to SACTU, and they said, “Well, you’re not going home yet. We have more work for you. Do we want you to go to Southern Africa, East and Southern Africa, and do interviews with comrades who were forced out of the country quickly, and who’s, you know, they’re not always in good health, they will die, and we won’t have their history?”.

So with the old tape recorder, our on our backs and a couple backpacks, we got on a plane and included our song where we met members of SACTU executive who were in exile in Dar in Tanzania, Steven Dlamini, the president of SACTU, and was, in fact, based in Dar es Salaam at that time. So we got, we took a bunch of empty cassettes like you would in those days, modern technology, as you said before, but you just start interviewing people. Two, three hours, each person their history. Where did they come? How they get involved in SACTU, what happened in that strike? What? Because we had read that material in the newsletters, but we knew what to ask them, and we would occasionally remind people of things that they completely forgotten about, the strike at that textile factory, or such and such a protest about this and that they had forgotten about it. They’d forgotten people who had died or they didn’t know what happened to them.

So it was quite an exciting process, maybe 10, 15 13, 20, people in Dar es Salaam. Then we were sent to Lusaka, where, of course, SACTU had much greater presence along with the ANC. So we carried on that process for another two or three months.

So by the fall of 79 we had tapes, and like, 100 tapes full of personal information through any life, life history interviews. Then we go back to London with all the tapes. Backpacks are much heavier than they were when we went and we said, here, “okay, there’s tapes. This is the histories you’re wanting us to collect, we did”. Then they said, “well, that’s still you’re not going back to Canada yet We have another task for you. We want you to write the official history of SACTU”.

So quite an honour for a white male Canadian, white female Australian to be asked to write an official history of a predominantly black African trade union organization in South Africa. Where do you do it? We didn’t, we didn’t have any place to work. So, because we had been living with various South African families who would put us up, you know, at their goodwill. And so we had no place to write a book.

And the thought came to me that my parents back in Illinois had inherited farmhouse through family history, and it was not being lived in. It was in good shape. They’d renovated it. So I called my parents from London. I said, “Here’s the situation. We’ve been asked to write a book. We got no place to write it. Could we come to the farmhouse for the summer and write, you know, spend three or four months writing the book?” And they said, “Sure”. Remember, I had left the country quickly in 68 so they were happy to have their son come back and live in their farmhouse.

That worked well. So for three or four months, Brenda and I in separate bedrooms in the farmhouse, would each write on old typewriters. You know, no electronic typewriters. Based on materials we had trend first, we had to transcribe the interviews and then piece it together slowly with the documentation we had collected initially, and we went to London in the fall of 79 with fairly large manuscript ready to turn over to they, in turn, had created an editorial committee out of the London based people to work with us. And we gave them the manuscript, which was, you know, fibre, 400 pages for sure. And they looked at it, and they were very pleased with what we had done.

So then, we then had to find a publisher and went through Lawrence and Wishart, the prominent left publisher in London, and worked out an arrangement whereby they would publish the book. The goal was always to have it ready by May of 1980 which was the 25th anniversary of SACTU. That was the goal all along, and we missed it by two or three weeks. From having started less than two years before with nothing we everyone was pretty happy with what had been accomplished in those almost two years. The book was published in 1988, immediately banned in South Africa, of course, which made us banned people as well.

So it’s, actually the movement generally is very clever. Some of some of the books that were printed were had false covers. They looked like a Bible. So people could pass Bible around the workplace. Say, “here you should read this”. And they got away with it. The book was banned, but it’s still circulated, of course, through the underground networks.

Gwen Schulman

19:06

The title of the book, the title of the book?

Ken Luckhardt 19:09

“Organise or Starve, the history of the South African Congress of Trade Unions”. Hey, where’s ,where do we go?

Gwen Schulman

19:19

Doug, your mic is off.

Doug Miller 19:23

I say that’s very special. That’s truly amazing and as you say, for people who aren’t members of the struggle by virtue of citizenship, to have that kind of trust placed in you is was a great honour indeed. And the book, of course, made them very, very happy, very proud. I know what, what they had accomplished.

Ken Luckhardt 19:46

Side story quickly. Last week, I was involved in action here in Toronto, where we’re publicizing the Palestinian question, and we had an exhibit put up, put out by the Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, which is a fairly well established organization. In Canada, they have an exhibit which is called Dispossessed But Defiant is the name of the exhibit, and it features photographs, big panels, and photographs of South Africa, Palestine and indigenous Canada. So people came to this church where we had put it up. And then we had certain evenings, public meetings to have focus on Palestine, indigenous Canada on the Day of Reconciliation, the 30th of September. And then the final evening was to talk about where we go forward.

And so I insisted that we have South African representation, representation talk about the importance of sanctions and that kind of work we did. So I went to the council. I called the High Commissioner in Ottawa and told him what we wanted. He said, well, our consular office in Toronto will be the people come. So when I talked with the High Commissioner, he said, I know you. I’ve read your book.

Gwen Schulman

21:06

Great.

Doug Miller

21:08

Tremendous.

Ken Luckhardt

I think that quite honestly,

Gwen Schulman 21:10

Okay, well, maybe we can circle this back to Canada. So you know, there’s the consular official South African who had read your book. What role, if any, did the book play in helping to galvanize or mobilize Canadians into the movement?

Ken Luckhardt 21:28

Well, that’s that. It’s a good question. Gwen, take me back where I stopped after we finished the publishing the book in London. We then said, we’re going back to Canada. For sure. You can’t give us anything else to do right now.

So we came back and I had a teaching position at Ryerson in Toronto had been promised me before I left for London three years earlier. So I started teaching sociology, but with our return came a mandate from SACTU executive that we were to set up a committee in Canada that would officially, officially, I use that word because we were just people who decided to set up a SACTU Office. We were given the mandate to set up a committee that would work in labour movement and in the anti-apartheid movement general, more generally, to mobilize support from Canadian labour in solidarity with SACTU, the South African labour movement.

So that was an incredible, to follow your point Doug, it was incredible honour to come back to your architect with a mandate do something for South Africa. Now, you know that’s problematic as well, because you know who’s going to think we’re legitimate, a white we don’t like white force, having a mandate with South African organization. So there’s a lot of politics here. Anyway, we set the committee up.

We first made contact with the United Auto Workers of Canada, which that was met before CAW, before they had broken away from the American parents. So we started with this UAW candidate, and then postal workers. Gradually, we built a really strong base of leadership in Canadian Labour movement that would endorse our work, tell us how to get to their local unions all across the country, to the point 85 by the time this work had evolved, we were speaking to 10,000 workers every year, Canadian workers conventions, local union meetings, wherever we could go. Travel to British Columbia regularly. So with that mandate, we had a had our work cut out, put out for us for the next many years, of interviews we’ve done with Doug on other projects,

Gwen Schulman 23:45

Speaking of the work being cut out for you, can you describe? Can you remember what it was like as you started out with this work? How did you have to work hard to educate and convince the people you were talking to? Were they already somewhat aware, like, what? What was that work like?

Ken Luckhardt 24:06

I’ll be honest when, when I came back, when we came back in 1980 in May, people weren’t talking about South Africa. But by 85 banks and corporations were running away. Didn’t want to have anyone asked what the connection with South Africa was. Between 80 and 86 let’s say, an incredible amount of knowledge about South Africa that was never there before. And we’re not taking credit for that. People were doing that in all anti-apartheid work across the country.

So yes, ignorance was the norm in the labour movement. But when you have a company in Scarborough, Ontario shutting down and starting up again in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, you could show the difference in wage rates making the same product, that catches people’s attention pretty quickly. So based on that kind of knowledge based, we would go out to local unions and say, “hey, did you know?”. And films, you know films have been, were being made at that time. But South Africa –

Doug Miller 25:11

In my experience, Ken, you folks had a very sophisticated setup to work from. You had an office where at least two of you, sometimes three or more, worked more or less full time, and your partners worked in gainfully employed, let’s call it full time, and that allowed you, then the freedom to set up your structures and allow you to travel and do all of that. And then, in addition, you had quite a pedagogy going. Where there was the newsletter, there was a strategic meetings. You got a lot of support from very senior folks in the union movement that opened doors all over the place. Yeah, we had, you just go through some of that, that that I want to call it structural business and the how you functioned.

Ken Luckhardt 26:06

We had a core committee of five people, I think it was to kind of plan the work. Then we had representation from local unions in the Toronto area, where we had been to their local meeting, and they had decided they would put in person on the committee. We would held monthly meetings, and as you said, it’s done all gratis, nobody got paid for this work, lasted for eight years. Ken Traynor and myself were in the office most of the time.

Brenda started off in the office with Ken Traynor. We had met Ken and Jane Armstrong after we came back from London. I had heard of Ken because of the CUSO work people like Doug Miller and Miller had been involved in. So we had never met in southern Africa, but we met and decided to set up this office and have representation from local unions and national offices where possible. Meet once a month. As you said, pedagogy was developed. We had speakers. I was, I was in charge of education, and Traynor was in charge of research. So, carry on with that work. Probably 20 people at maximum in the Toronto group, the union representation.

Doug Miller 27:29

Can you talk about first, the core group? A little bit, you were, you were, you were you were five, I think five.

Ken Luckhardt 27:35

Yeah. Vince Greason, who came to help us, and myself, Brenda and Jane, five people were, we kind of organized what we what do we do next? Who’s going to do it? How do we, how do we finance it, you know. And then you, as I said, we got

Doug Miller 27:56

Then you had the larger monthly committee meetings,

Ken Luckhardt

Yeah.

Doug Miller

Could you tell us, what kind of representation would you have there? Can you name a few names?

Ken Luckhardt 28:06

Yeah, two people, two or three people from the auto workers who had, by that time, broken away from the American parent with Canadian Auto Workers Union under the leadership of Bob White. He was great. We met with him. We took George Poonen, who had subsequent come back to Toronto area, be with his other daughter. We took Poonen out to the CAW office. That was Sam Gund, who was a research director and fairly well-known guy in Canada. Now, he introduced the issue to Bob white. Bob White’s agreed to write a letter to every local union in Canada to encourage them to invite us to speak at the local meetings.

So that opened a big door. Postal worker John claro did the same. So between those two unions, they kind of just opened so from there, you go to labour councils, you go to overarching structures within the Canadian Labour movement. You get access.

Now it’s important for me to mention we didn’t have an easy go of this in the labour movement, this whole work. So the CLC was bound by policies of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to be anti-SACTU. SACTU was seen to be a communist union because of civilian ANC, we had great difficulty with the International Department of the CLC, and that’s been documented in the other interviews we’ve done with other people. So it wasn’t an easy ride.

Even though we were getting more support than the CLC could get from their own, from with all their resources, paid staff, etc, etc, we were getting more support from the Canadian Labour movement than the CLC could get, including financial knowledge.

SACTU gave us the specific mandated to get funds to support their underground work in South Africa through what was called the SACTU strike fund. So as part of the appeal to every local union, we would speak to the final part of the appeal was to ask them to make a contribution the SACTU strike fund on a regular, regular basis, if possible, sustaining basis. I forget, forget the exact numbers, but at the height of that campaign, we had well over 100 labour organizations giving sustained monthly, twice a year, funding to the SACTUs Franklin.

Now that’s a big thing in the labour movement. Labour unions are quite legitimate, want to get, to get receipts for the expenditure of their members money. You know, receipts going to come from an underground structure in South Africa. Best we could do is get a receipt out of London. After we sent the money to London, England, we get a receipt from the SACTU office in London. That’s the best I could do. And so to have that many organizations, and well over 300 organizations that contributed at least once the SAC and strike fund, but to get that many on a sustaining basis was an incredible achievement. The CLC saw that happening right under their eyes. They didn’t know what to do, but so big politics.

Doug Miller 31:25

I think you’ve, I know that you’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I think for our listeners, it would be very valuable just to elaborate a little bit more on that, that conflict between the official or upper structures and the base, because that’s where you were aiming, was the base, yeah.

Ken Luckhardt 31:46

Well, you know, and that that varies a lot, because some rank and file members are very aware of the Cold War, what it means for them in the labour movement. Most weren’t courts. They weren’t supposed to know. But our problem was, SACTU had been approached by the ICFTU in 1959. Steven Dlamini, the president we interviewed in Tanzania, told us a meeting he had with the ICFTU in Durban, the ICFTU representing the capitalist world labour movement in the capitalist world, said to Steven, “if you will break your alliance with the African National Congress, we will provide you with resources for your SACTU work in South Africa. In other words, you break the historic alliance between yourselves and the ANC, and we’ll give you money”. Stephen thanked them for dinner and left because that was the brutal honesty of what happened in the Cold War. You do what we want you to do. We’ll pay you, we’ll give you resources. So SACTU said no.

Once it said no, then the ICFTU deemed it to be too close to the ANC, too close to the Communist Party. All the politics kicked into activity at that point in time. So back in Canada, of course, CLC, as part of the ICF to you, would simply tow the line, and they would eventually get to the point where they didn’t want any of their affiliates to be inviting us, representing SACTU meetings, even their own meetings, Labour Council, weekend institutes, weekend programs. So we were kind of off the radar for the CLC, but we were still outperforming them because they weren’t getting the support from the affiliates that we were getting from their affiliates. So, you know, tell politics that.

Doug Miller 33:52

And I think we also want to reflect on a bit on Canada’s official position, and its particular hypocrisy, if I could make a judgement/

Ken Luckhardt 34:02

That’s the word, that’s the word, well, I’ll jump to the ultimate hypocrisy, and that is that Brian Mulroney gets credit for fighting apartheid.

Doug Miller 34:13

You got it?.

Ken Luckhardt 34:14

Okay, I’ll unpack that a little bit. The research we did on the Canadian connections with South Africa at the height of apartheid, is called Trafficking in Apartheid, and Ken Traynor deserves 95% of the credit for that. Research became a publication, public, public document, and as soon as it was published in Toronto, here, I sent a copy to Stephen Lewis, who had by that time, been named his ambassador to the United Nations. So I wrote a covering letter, said here’s our most recent research. I had met Lewis occasionally before he was appointed that I, he didn’t work for some friends, but we knew, we did know each other. He wrote back after I sent it to him, he said, “this is the most incredible research I’ve ever seen on the connections between Canada and South Africa, but I’m not allowed to speak to the question of sanctions”.

Let me make that into my own words, he was told, as Ambassador representing Canada that you would not be allowed to speak in support of sanctions against South Africa, even though the world was starting to impose sanctions. Yet today, a lot of people give Mulroney credit for having been the major, major player in fighting apartheid. It was. certainly he was caught up in the situation where the Commonwealth nations were increasingly harsh on South Africa. And he was somebody somewhere probably told him, “You could be a great figure in history if do this”. I’m guessing, I don’t know the Secretary, that’s part of the hypocrisy that you mentioned, Doug, you know what? What do you do with that? Expose it the same way you expose stuff that’s going on in Middle East right now. Expose the connections that people don’t know about, perfect.

Doug Miller 36:15

The other thing that I think is a bit missing is, is you’ve talked a lot about the strike fund and the raising of money, you also mobilized large scale actions on the part of unions that were trans-Canadian.

Ken Luckhardt 36:32

Yes, very important point. The best example is dockworkers in Vancouver. I had done education work with the international ILWU Vancouver local.

Doug Miller

Would you tell us what they are? What’s an ILWU?

Ken Luckhardt

International Longshoreman Workers Union? ILWU, very strong in the West Coast, not strong on the East Coast in Canada at all, but very politically strong as a union in the Western United States, San Francisco in particular, and up and up into Canada. So I had done education work with the local. I remember the first local I spoke to there. I said, “How many people are going to be at the meeting?”. And the President said, probably about 1800 local union meeting, 1800 workers. I said, “Well, you normally give materials out to everybody”. And at the end of the meeting, I had talked about the strike fund, some brother in the back of the hall stood up and said, “I think we should give $1 per member”. It was $1,800 with one meeting just like that.

So part of that process also, Doug, your point. We needed to know what was coming into Canada from South Africa by boat, by ship. There were three Nedlloyd ships that fly between Durban and various ports in South Africa and Vancouver. So I had met the person responsible for the International Transportation Federation, overarching transportation union based in Geneva, I think at the time, I said, “Jerry McCullough”, I said, “Jerry, we need to know what’s coming on those ships”. But he took it upon himself to organize with the local in Vancouver a mechanism whereby every ship that came into port in Vancouver, we had a manifest what’s on the ship, he would get that information to us in in Toronto within a matter of two or three days. So we know it was. We know what’s coming in from South Africa, which helped Canada and the research incredibly. And you know, what do you say to workers are willing to risk the, sorry, what do you say to workers are willing to risk their jobs? To risk their jobs, to send manifesting information?

It was even, deep the details we could give you, the names, the family names of white South Africans who were moving to Canada because they saw the writing on the wall back home so they were going to move to places like Vancouver, Sydney, Australia, were similar climates. We could tell you the address where they were going to live in Vancouver. The detail that was on that documentation was incredible, and other workplaces across the country, second,

Doug Miller 39:59

That’s great, a great, and I remember that as part of the pedagogy, if I could also reflect and that was, yes, you educated, but whenever you left a meeting, you left them with something to do. On the one hand, it was fundraising, and on the other hand, it was the different kinds of actions that their company, sorry. On the other hand, it was different kind of actions that they could get involved in to further the cause and further the education and so on. Yeah.

Ken Luckhardt 40:30

I mean, auto workers in London, Ontario. Picture this, you know, we organized fairly well paid skilled tradespersons in an auto plant to go shopping at the grocery store on a Saturday morning. They probably had never been in a grocery store on a Saturday morning in life. The rest of family members would have done it. They go into the grocery store in with the intention of putting on the, in the bottom of the cart canned South African fruit. Then they go around the store and fill up the cart with everything else, get to the checkout aisle, and the get to the checkout, I’ll put all the stuff on the bench. It goes through the checkout. Person is still using this kind of thing, no scanners in those days. Puts in the price of every item. And then when they get down to the canned fruit, which is the last to go on the conveyor belt, the person will say, “Wait a minute. This says, made in South Africa. Yes, I’m not going to buy anything from South Africa.” So he, he or she mostly she walked out of the store, disrupting the process in the grocery store considerably. Now, how many white male skilled trades persons have been going shopping on Saturday morning before we before we organize that? Once people know what the hell you, what hell needs to be done, they’ll do it. That’s what worker education is all about.

Doug Miller 42:07

And finally, if I could or mom, there may be other things as well, but I’m thinking that there was also a big event that was nationwide where workers did a symbolic strike them for today or an hour or whatever.

Ken Luckhardt 42:21

Five, I believe it was, we asked four unions to take actions at the workplace in support of a week of sanctions.

Doug Miller 42:31

So what year was this?

Ken Luckhardt

85 I believe.

Ken Luckhardt 42:36

You can pick that up in the other interviews we’ve done before. Dock workers in Vancouver refused to offload the ship of cargo coming in from South Africa. Telephone workers, when they were still telephone operators, remember those days, predominantly female workforce, they refused to accept or plug in any calls from South Africa, or going to South Africa when they still had the ports to clear the phone system. Airline reservation agents refused to book tickets to or from South Africa. Postal workers refused to handle mail coming in from South Africa or going to South Africa, four major unions decided a week of action, and not a single worker who took action got disciplined, because by that time, the South African issue was in front of everyone.

Gwen Schulman 43:39

Can I ask? What kind of media coverage that got to what extent were Canadians exposed to that, aware of that action?

Ken Luckhardt 43:47

Well, probably 1/10 of what we would like. Because, you know, I think the postal workers, maybe, you remember, remember Doug, they had a film, so short video of somebody refusing to handle the mail. You remember that from when? Yeah, so maybe very local, somebody would know about what happened. But generally, no. I mean, we tried to both beside as much as possible.

Gwen Schulman 44:16

But was it not so again? You know what was going on at the time, but a lot of the people who will be listening to this won’t. So what in your recollection? Let’s talk about mainstream media. To what extent was mainstream media covering these kinds of incredible initiatives?

Ken Luckhardt 44:39

Well, to some extent, because, as I said, by that time, sanctions against South Africa were being talked about nationally, internationally, so the Commonwealth nations, some more than others, but not a lot. The key to getting workers to do at the workplace with the education we had done in those locals, explaining the connections they wouldn’t find in the mainstream media ever.

Gwen Schulman 45:12

Part of why I’m asking these questions is just to understand what some of the obstacles were to the movement in Canada. You know, you hear things like this, and it, you know, it sounds so well, it is so incredibly amazing, but there were so many obstacles involved, not the least of which was how to get the word out to a broader Canadian public, especially around the issue of sanctions, where Canadians are trying to build a movement in favour of sanctions and a media that’s largely deaf to all of these actions. So it’s just, you know, I, it’s important to bring this up and look at what were the alternative means of getting this information out and building a movement?

Ken Luckhardt 45:55

Well, we did what. You know, there’s always some journalists somewhere, in office journalism, we would try to find those people as much as we could. There were a couple people in Toronto who did very good work on the media, but by and large, I would say that the word did not get out, but what neighbour X did at the post office that day,

Doug Miller 46:20

I think maybe we could also reflect a bit Ken on how it is in 2023 the narrative you’ve just given us about union activism and union participation is largely unwritten about in terms of this anti-apartheid movement. When it’s been written about the anti-apartheid movement tends to be from a very different angle, a very different perspective. Maybe you could reflect on that.

Ken Luckhardt 46:46

Well, very much. So that’s why we decided that veterans of this act to work in Canada have decided, with your assistance, to have documentation done in a similar fashion what we’re doing right now with the people who were active in those unions at that time, if they’re still alive, we’ve got incredible documentation from many brothers and sisters in Canada who are mostly now retired, but what they did, what they thought of, what we did in their own that’s very important information is now archived into these video interviews.

Doug Miller 47:22

But then could you also talk about why do you think that dominant narrative obliterates this, this kind of activism, and doesn’t bring it up?

Ken Luckhardt 47:34

Workers are not accustomed to taking actions other than what they’re hired to do at the workplace. Takes a lot of clinical understanding, a lot of education work before they risk their jobs, risk some kind of penalty, take this kind of thing on. And so I guess the point is I’m making it you have to get to them through some mechanism that they respect, and what mechanism they most respect is their own leadership, because they voted it in. So if you can get to that leadership, you can begin to get new things happening in the labour movement. But it’s not happening now, not happening now like it did in the 70s and 80s,

Doug Miller 48:21

Till the labour movement as well is not famous at the grassroots level, of telling its story, of saving its documents, of following up and writing those histories of their movement, which would then include, of course, some of this kind of activity.

Ken Luckhardt 48:38

There’s a book called Labor’s Untold Story, and that’s what we’re talking about here.

Doug Miller 48:42

Yeah. And the other thing is, a lot of the writing has been done by other sides of the Cold War. Even though they might have been anti-apartheid activists, there were a number of people that were nonetheless very opposed to supporting anything that had the communist party involved, wherever it may be, that’s right. So, so they, they did the writing. And those kinds of people write a lot about things, but our workers don’t write that much.

Ken Luckhardt 49:12

Look at the situation now with regard to Palestine, it’s the same kind of ignorance that we faced in 1980 when we came back from Southern Africa. People don’t know the history of Israel, and who’s going to tell it? That’s a rhetorical question.

Doug Miller 49:35

Gwen, what do you think?

Gwen Schulman 49:37

Well, so it’s a couple of questions that we like to wrap up with is a little bit of the transformative nature of the movement, obviously, in terms of its contribution to bringing down apartheid, but also internally. So in your recollection, can I mean, do you remember struggles within, within the movement around issue? Issues around sexism and racism, like, were there weaknesses and sort of, yeah, I guess, were there any struggles at that level that that you recall, and how those issues, if they, if they were identified as issues at the time, how they were how they were, how the movement tackled those things?

Ken Luckhardt 50:22

That’s a big question. I hope I can speak to it properly. We would get South African trade unionists on tour in Canada and some more intelligent trade unionists, mostly women, would say, “Where are the women? Why don’t you have women on these tours?”. They weren’t, we didn’t pick who would come. The organisation did. So it’s, it’s a big question, but it takes the political consciousness of people here to identify the problem. That was one, one thing I remember, but we especially then made efforts in our own work in Canada to make sure we were gender, properly gendered in terms of people going out to speak to labour union meetings. We fortunately had people like Jane Armstrong, who was a staff member of Canadian Auto Workers, Laurel Richie and Madeline, big names in labour history and Canada who were seen to be out doing things that they wanted new and they should be doing.

Gwen Schulman 51:32

What about I know from my experience, so I was kind of active a little bit later and more within the student context that there was, there were charges made against us in the movement, that we were racist, that we were not working in collaboration with anti-racist struggles in Canada, that it was a largely white movement, that Black Canadians felt marginalized from. It, does that ring any bells for you?

Ken Luckhardt 52:00

Yeah, at that time in Toronto, at least, there was a group, a coalition of black trade unions, which was a spin off from that same organisation. In the States, they were starting to mobilize their own workers of colour organisation. That was something that we tried to not take advantage of. We tried to be a part of, because it was important to have those connections, especially in certain sectors, garment sectors, predominantly people of colour, working in the garment sector in Toronto. So we were sensitive to that. And in terms of the work in Vancouver, in that week of action, we made sure that people from San Francisco were taking actions like that on many occasions against South African votes, they would come, we would bring them to Toronto, sorry, Vancouver, and they would help mobilize on our behalf, the same kind of actions.

So we were definitely sensitive to the race question. Remember, these are, we are predominantly white activists in the committee in Canada. So there’s always, “do you really represent SACTU? You’re a white guy from Toronto. You’re a white woman from Australia. How do you, how do you?”. No, it’s not easy. I’m representing South Africa that we had the mandate right here and a hand, yeah.

Gwen Schulman 53:20

What about just lastly, on that point, was there any solidarity between the kind of work that you have described and you were doing and indigenous struggles, whether in BC or elsewhere in Canada? Were those linkages being made at that time?

Ken Luckhardt 53:35

To an extent, but I would say more with Central America, terms of Latin American working group around issues in Nicaragua, and we did some joint activities, joint meetings that produced, you know, joint pins, when on what happened dealing with apartheid happened in with Nicaragua and things like that, T shirts, we were aware of that indigenous.

I think the indigenous story is summed up one by one of my trips to Saskatchewan. It’s being organized by the Saskatchewan Government Employees Union. Fiona Bishop in charge of the programme. When I got there, I did my thing usual presentation. She said, “I want you to meet someone”. Fine. That’s what I was there for. So she takes me across the street to a local restaurant where I met and named Ron bougie. Ron bougie, he’s a native law student. He was, it was a native law student from Ottawa, and I kind of said, why we’re meeting? He said, “Well, when I was doing my research for my law degree, I came across a box of dusty material, archival materials in Ottawa, and I looked at them, and what they were letters from the white South African bureaucrats in South Africa, and we’re thanking Canada. It for the offer to come to Canada and study the Indian Act and the reservation system, which were critical moments for South Africa to set up the bantustans”. The letters he found were thanking Canada for having had the opportunity to come and study these institutions of oppression and colonialism in Canada and how they would be helpful to set up bantustans.

So I tell that story. I told it last week at that Palestine meeting. Canadians don’t know that you think of apartheid being something unrelated to Canada, because those same bureaucrats were sent to Australia, New Zealand, United States, where colonial oppression had been much worse, some respect, than here, but they didn’t find the answers for what they needed in South Africa. From those countries they found independent, and that story has been told repeatedly.

Gwen Schulman 55:58

Was there were you able to do anything with that material in terms of in the moment within the movement, did that open the door to work with indigenous struggles in Canada?

Ken Luckhardt 56:12

We didn’t do anything directly on the Indigenous struggle in Canada except be sensitive to it.

Gwen Schulman 56:18

But yes, any reflections as to why? Because it’s, you know, you talk about that. There was some work with Central American indigenous struggles, but not with Canadian indigenous struggles. Any reflect? Does that reflect in any way on the nature of the anti apartheid movement in Canada? Do you think?

Ken Luckhardt 56:39

Probably looking back where it probably does, and I don’t have a simple answer or adequate answer to the question.

Doug Miller 56:47

Can I step in for just an aside that is related as an active unionist that was going to a lot of conventions and meetings during the 70s or 80s, late 70s, early and they through the 80s, many of these struggles were coming to the floor of our congresses at that time, and being and like the feminist struggle, was really under, under, under, forcing the unions to undergo change, real structural change. Before that, there was never a woman’s office at the CLC, even though that’s a bad example, and it took the kind of activism that was going on in the local locals discussing gender, race and indigenous issues, as well as environment, that percolated through, but slowly through, in the face of that opposition that we’ve already talked about from that deaf ear of the media and the elites.

Ken Luckhardt 57:47

And I know in CAW, which I then became a staff member on at some point, we, Bob White especially, and subsequent leaders always tried to establish the connection between the union and the indigenous organisation, but we had speakers that would come and talk about Indigenous issues to a broad convention membership. We would always be there, and we would try to take political advantage of anything we could in terms of both struggles. And of course, some percentage, you never know quite what it is of membership of local unions are indigenous people, and to the extent that they heard our presentation, would probably be the extent to which they knew about apartheid.

Doug Miller 58:30

Well, just as one example of the SACTU solidarity committee’s impact on issues of race, the locals in Toronto often had black workers and people of colour and one young worker at the time, just fresh from Guyana, was Hassan Yusuf, who quickly joined as one of the board members of the South African Congress of Trade Union solidarity committee at the same time as he’s active there, Bob White is pushing the movement the that issue in his CAW, and sets up an office. And who does he invite to be the first representative of people of colour in in the CAW formal structures? and it was Hassan who eventually, then goes up to be the CLC, as we know and –

Ken Luckhardt 59:24

But to complete the story, Doug, Hassan was on our committee in Toronto. Yes, he started out there, that’s right. I meant to say, yeah, yeah. He came out of a small plant in local 252, in northwest Toronto, and he was clearly committed to raising the issue of gender, I would, sorry, class and colour in the labour movement, later become the president of Canadian Labour government.

Doug Miller 59:54

So it was a bit of a training ground for a lot of people doing a lot of things.

Gwen Schulman 59:58

Yeah, part of the legacy of the movement,

Doug Miller 1:00:01

And in my estimate, probably the exemplar of solidarity organisation in terms of the principled work and the way it was operated. I don’t know when if we have much more well, Ken.

Gwen Schulman 1:00:13

Do you have anything, and do you feel like we’ve missed anything, or there’s something that you would like to add?

Ken Luckhardt 1:00:19

I just think this is really important, what you’re doing, and I can only say it that way, capture the histories of people that were willing to commit themselves to a struggle 1000s and 1000s of miles away. That’s something that needs to be known. Is now going to be known and accessible to people whomever in the future.

Doug Miller 1:00:42

Just for the audience of this tape, the South African Congress of Trade Union SACTU Solidarity committee has already made a deposit of some 30 plus interviews at the Library and Archives Canada, along with materials collected from militants across the country, and so it does exist already in a formal way, available to the public, based on the kind of work that we’ve started here, and that we hope this will then become part of the an expanded library there.

Gwen Schulman 1:01:16

Oh, can I, do have to based on that? Maybe I have one last question for you, those 30 tapes that you recorded in Dar and in Lusaka. Do they still exist?

Doug Miller 1:01:26

100 tapes,

Gwen Schulman

100 tapes?

Ken Luckhardt 1:01:29

Yeah, exist somewhere, but I don’t know. I can’t tell you where the materials I was told. I sacked two people before 1994 before they went back, if they were still alive, were sent to South Africa in the good hands of people that would know what to do with them. So I can’t tell you exactly what happened, but –

Gwen Schulman 1:01:47

They’re out there somewhere, somebody’s interested in them. Down. Cool. Okay, great, thanks.

Doug Miller 1:01:56

Well, with that, Ken Luckhardt, I’ll thank you for your participation in this aspect of the project. Very informative, always insightful. And thanks again, Gwen.

Ken Luckhardt 1:02:09

I would only say in conclusion, Doug and Gwen, is that if we had started this kind of work 15 years ago, the people were still alive that were involved in it, we would have a lot more information. And that’s our this. We didn’t do that. We could have done this 15 years ago.

Doug Miller 1:02:29

Life has its way. What can I say?

Gwen Schulman

1:02:33

Thanks so much. Ken. This has been great. Thank you.

Doug Miller 1:02:35

just going to turn the recorder off.

Ken Luckhardt 1:02:38

Okay, I’ll send you the document.

Doug Miller 1:02:42

Perfect.