Ken Traynor

Doug Miller 00:03

Okay. Well, welcome Ken Traynor in, I believe Victoria, yup, Colombia on the island. And this is October 17, Tuesday, we're going to interview Ken. I'm Doug Miller here in Montreal with Gwen Schulman, also here in Montreal, and this is for the Canadian anti apartheid activist history project that we've been pulling together. So Ken, I sent you the consent form, and you sent it back very beautifully. And thank you very much. But I needed an oral consent as well, a verbal consent as well. So you understand we're going to use this stuff for education purposes, research purposes, and that it's going to be archived, hopefully in the Library and Archives Canada, but also elsewhere for easy access and so I want, just want you to tell us verbally that you've read the conditions of the consent form and you agree to them, and that you're okay with all that.

Ken Traynor 01:06

Yeah, I have read it. I'm fine with it. I thank you for taking this initiative, and I hope it'll be of some use to somebody out there. What purposes?

Speaker 1 01:17

I'm not sure that we've actually said your last name. We're now speaking to Ken Traynor,

Doug Miller 01:21

Ken Traynor, yes, my goodness gracious, thanks for being here and keeping the old boy on track. So Ken Traynor, I would like you, if you would, obviously we know your name, but can you give us a little bit about your origins and how you where you come from, and what led you to get into social justice and anti-apartheid. How did your roots lead you into this kind of thing?

Ken Traynor 01:57

Good question. So I grew up in Saskatchewan. I'm a prairie boy. I went to university at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, took a degree in land use and Environmental Studies. I think the most you know, we were on the edges of a little bit of the anti-Vietnam War activities. Started to learn a little bit about how the world worked. Then I can still remember going to a big, in 1973 before I graduated, to a big piece on the coup in Chile, that was probably, I would say, when I really began to get a sense of, you know, kind of international politics and those kinds of things. When you grow up in Saskatchewan, I was, I'm always struck, even today, at how, how much our society has become individualized. Because in Saskatchewan, you know, linked to the agricultural economy, co-ops. We remember, of the co-ops, the telephone that went out to my cousin's farm, you know, was the line was strung by the farmers, you know, collective approaches. You know, we were all taught about how, you know, Medicare began in Saskatchewan and, you know, and I had a great uncle that, you know, I remember of CCF, and we had his speeches, you know, that that had given in the legislature in the in the 1950s you know, strongly democratic socialist, all that kind of stuff.

So, you know, that was the milieu that you grew up in but I was, you know, I was just a naive prairie boy that thought maybe I'd like to get out and see the world. So I had a professor who was taking a sabbatical, and he was going to study voles in Kenya. And he said, you know, if you decide to travel, because we talked a little bit about Africa, he said, if you decide to travel, come by and see

me, just drop in.

To this day I can't tell you exactly how I made the decision that, what the hell, I'm going to I'm going to go off to Africa and see if I can find that guy. I don't have a conscious memory of sitting down and working it all out, other than I think I got around the world ticket for 1500 bucks in 1975 that that I was able to use, kind of to go anyway. So, like I say, you know, life has a fair serendipity component to it. And the time I spent in Africa, how I ended up there, how it evolved, you know, meeting you, you know, the directions. That I got by my connections to you and through Q. So, you know, none of that was a plan. That's what I always tell my son, you know, you know, life is what happens to you, you know, while you're sitting around trying to plan what's, what's next anyway. So that's, that was me.

Doug Miller 05:15

Well, look, that's, that's, that's cool. And maybe, maybe then you got, you did the round tour, the round the world tour, and then you rebounded back to Africa. Could you tell us about that, that that whole discussion in your head?

Ken Traynor 05:30

Well, it was, I mean, Trisha always tells me, You know, I got to be careful. I can be a bit of a raconteur and go off topic and down through any range of –

Doug Miller 05:44

Pick a rabbit hole.

Ken Traynor 05:46

Kind of around it. But, you know, I still have vivid memories of when I bought a one way ticket from London to Nairobi. You know, I sat in the plane. You leave at nine o'clock at night, because you got to arrive first thing in the morning. Because, you know, Nairobi is that at 5000 metres, and it could be tricky, once it gets hot, to land those big 747, anyway, you know, I can, I can still remember the visuals of looking out the window and seeing the boot of Italy, you know, totally outlined by lights through the window. And then there's this, you know, black Mediterranean. And then you come across into Libya, and you're and you've got, like, all of the flares, you know, from the flare stacks and stuff like that. So they're everywhere, this pitch black and then just as you're getting towards Kenya, and the sun's coming up, you come you come up over Uganda, Northern Uganda. And I forget what they called it's something like, you know, kind of moonscape or whatever, but you're in this really rugged, not much vegetation and so on. I can still remember all that kind of jaggedness. And then you drop down towards Nairobi, kind of in land, you know.

So, you know, there I was at, what was I? 24 years old? I guess you're, you know that I can, I still have those memories, you know, of it all. And then, I mean, Kenya was again, just an amazing, I can be, I remember being overwhelmed on my first day, and there was a, there was a thing called a wimpy bar in downtown Nairobi, McDonald's kind of thing. And I can remember the relief of walking into that place, which looked sort of like home, and having a hamburger, you know, and thinking, “Okay, I'm here, you know, I'm totally out of my element, you know, what was I thinking?’. But then it just went on.

So I spent the better part of a year in in Kenya, and by sort of six months in, I thought, this place is, you know, this continent is amazing. I did find that professor, and I spent three months working with him.

You know, we were in, it's called Meru Park, you know, it's where they had, they were trying to bring back the white rhinos into the thing they so we used to go out every morning and check the trap lines for voles, because he was doing research on water stress on reproductive, the reproduction of small mammals. He'd done it up in the Arctic. He was doing it there, and so I spent three months walking in the wilds of me National Park with a ranger with a gun over his shoulder taking care of us. But he didn't, you know, he never had to. Maybe he had to chase off one elephant one time, but it was just idyllic. It was like amazing kind of time.

And I just thought, “Okay, I want to stay”. So then the question was, how do you stay? And so I chased another, I went up to the University of Nairobi. There was somebody there who was running a study in Tanzania on, and so I chased him all the way down to Mombasa, and missed him. So I never got my chance to do sea turtle research, you know. So I missed that chance. So we turned north, and we hitchhiked from Nairobi up through Eritrea, or, I mean, Ethiopia, up to Egypt, you know, and so you're travelling through, we were on a bus. On the one morning going from Addis Ababa up to up north, and people were roaring through the streets. We you know, the bus had a real trouble getting out of Addis Ababa. And then every small town we went through, people were out with signs, you know, in America and so on.

And finally, we found somebody who spoke English to tell us what had happened. And it was the day that after Selassie, Haile Selassie had been overthrown. It was the day that they declared that they were freeing up land ownership. So you're riding on this bus not knowing that you know this major you know social change is happening all around you, and all you can do is, you know, struggling to try to find out what the hell's kind of going on. We went through, you know, the bus we took from Eritrea up in northern Ethiopia down into Sudan. You know, there's bullet holes in the back of the bus because, you know, the Ethiopians and the Eritreans were still at war up there, you know, we're blissfully going through all of this without any clear sense of it, you know, of what, of everything that's going on. You know, I, I rode up the Nile, you know, past the s, they were just, you know, on Lake Aswan, you know, went on a barge all the way up the Nile. So it's, it's the kind of kind of education and experience that, like, I say, I didn't plan it, but it was a fantastic kind of education. And by the time I was headed back, because I was running out of money. I knew for sure I wanted to come back. And I wanted to come back to work. Because, of course, you have such a different relationship to the people around you and so on, if you're actually working with them, rather than just, you know, trying to understand what they’re up to.

Doug Miller 11:57

So and so that led you to CUSO.

Ken Traynor 12:01

So 1976 I was back in in Canada, and I ended up on my uncle's farm in taking care of their sheep in Prince Edward Island. And in the middle of the winter, I thought a lot about going back to Africa, so I sent in my form, and again, you don't have much confidence, like, what do you know? You know, you're 24 years old and you have a degree, but you haven't really done much other than, you know, spend a lot of time on a farm in Saskatchewan. Anyway, they said sure. They told me that actually, I wrote on the form, you know, they, they always get that advice, you know, you have to make your thing stand out. So I put, when I put on there, you know, kind of what, what's your current occupation? I put shepherd and, and when I walked into the CUSO office for an interview, you know, is that I heard down the hall when I was walking in, this woman said, is that the shepherd, anyway, it was just, it was, it was a bit of an interesting little life lesson that, yeah, you know, you got to stand out a little bit on paper, because, you know, you probably, we'll probably all look, especially as white folks, we probably all look the same on, on paper, you know, not much experience, not very interesting places anyway.

Doug Miller 13:17

So, yeah, so then CUSO opted to send you, I believe, to Botswana at that point.

Ken Traynor 13:22

Yeah, they had a job as a land use planner with the land allocation boards that they had set up in in Botswana, and so they thought I'd be a reasonable fit for that job, despite having no real experience. And so, yeah, they sent me out to they sent me out to Botswana in July of 1976 and you know, that was kind of interesting, because I, so I went home to Regina for two weeks before in June, and I'm sitting in our basement with the TV on, and it's June 16, 1976, ABC, you know?

And so here I am. This is where I'm headed. I'm headed to Southern Africa, and at least I know where Botswana is now. You know, there was one book in the in the Regina library that had any information on Botswana. So I had a couple of one pagers, two page things from CUSO, but not an awful lot else. And there was the Soweto uprising all over the news. And so I don't know if we're into a bit of storytelling.

So then from that, I go back to for my orientation and shots and all that kind of stuff in Ottawa, before they put us on the plane, and I get drafted by David bBeer, who has been the, um, you know, Case Officer, field officer, whatever we used to call them, for the southern Africa program. And he's now back in Ottawa and he recruits me to, he says, you know, you're going to be working in rural Botswana. You probably have lots of time. How would you like to run a clipping service for us. And what the CUSO program had was they clipped information items just to get you a sense of where the technology was at. You know, I clipped out interesting articles from the Bulawayo Chronicle in Rhodesia, the Rand Daily Mail in South Africa. And I forget what the Business Weekly was called magazine in South Africa. And once a month, I would package up all of these clippings and send and mail them off to David beer in Ottawa, and he had they then printed or copied those up into a newsletter.

Doug Miller 16:10

I'll just intervene here. That was the Southern African Information Group in Ottawa, and myself, Clyde Sanger and David were sort of founding members of that news service and exploited to those resources too. So there you are. Now, part of it.

Speaker 1 16:24

I'd also, I'd like to take this opportunity just to step back for a second. I'm just curious about when you first heard about Soweto uprising, so it hits the headlines as you're getting ready to go down to that region. What did you know, at that point about South Africa, what was your understanding of the Soweto uprising, and what was actually going on before you then, you know, had your boots on the ground in the region.

Ken Traynor 16:51

I think I was, I was definitely aware of liberation movements, the ANC, ZAPU, ZANU SWAPO, I knew of them.

Speaker 1 17:03

And there's because of your time in Africa, or were these things that you would learn about in Canada?

Ken Traynor 17:08

I would, I would say, probably more like osmosis, in the sense that when I went to Africa, I mean, the context of the time is, was really interesting is that, you know, the new international economic order was what we talked about when we talked about economics, you know, I believe that, you know, the in the need for development. You know, was, was aware of the, you know, the tremendous inequity that our world encompass. So I was aware of that. I wouldn't say I had a lot of detail kind of around it and but it definitely interested me.

And then, of course, like in a very quick time, it's like, like anything Robertson Davies said, you know, the author, he used to have a theory of research, which was, as soon as you choose a topic, what you can find all sorts of stuff around you that you've ignored because it wasn't important to you at the time. So as soon as I had first been to Africa, suddenly you see all sorts of things going on in the news, where, you know, newspapers, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then as you focus in, you know, you find that all sorts of sources that are out there. So I think that that's a, you know, you got, you kind of get zeroed in as you go and your understanding begins, begins to grow.

And so I just, I just remember, like I say, I can remember sitting in the basement and just the I don't know, you know what I what I think of is this tremendous respect for students, because I wasn't much removed from being a student just standing up the way they were. And so, yeah, it excited me. You know, that's kind of where I was headed. I don't know that it excited the rest of the family in quite the same way, but, but it was definitely for me. It was, yeah, you know, this is, this is going to be quite a ride.

Doug Miller 19:19

So on the way to Botswana, you had a layover in Lusaka because we wouldn't let our volunteers travel through South Africa in those days. So I'll let you pick it up from there.

Ken Traynor 19:31

Well before we got on the plane, one of the things David Beer did is that he sent me to meet with the southern Africa desk person at foreign affairs, and I walked in, and of course, this is where the naivete comes through. I assumed Canada was, like, totally on board around supporting the ANC, you know, and opposing apartheid and so on. And. We were just like, you know, we were talking at each other just like this for the first 15 minutes. And the guy you know, sort of blew the whistle on it all. And he sort of said, “hey, hey, look, let's, you know, I don't disagree with many of the things you're saying” and so on, he said, “but let me give you a quick, short synopsis of how international diplomacy is carried out and how Canada views it”. He says, “You have to think in terms of interests, and the Canadian government represents all of the interests, economic, social, international relations” and so on. And he said, “So our task is much more complicated than your task of choosing sides is’.

Anyway we, we sort of went through all of that, and for me, that was, like, really helpful, because I began to understand about that dynamic. And when you hit, when I we landed in Lusaka, we knew a variety of characters that were in the Canadian Embassy in Zambia, some of whom were, you know, very sympathetic, you know, and you learned a lot about from some things others, you know, you never kind of connected with.

So for me, that was like the beginning of a much more sophisticated understanding of both the forces at work and the challenge of what it takes to actually bring about change in those relationships, rather than just two sides, you know, because the choosing sides, I found really easy, but coming up with something that would be useful to actually move my side of the agenda, if you want to say forward, I began to understand just how complex a piece that was.

And, you know, when the things that being in Zambia was, you know, you had all these liberation movement representatives there. You know, Doug knew a lot of them. And you know, I met two or three just in the short time that I was waiting to go, move on to Botswana and trying to get a bit of, you know, kind of language training.

And anyway, it was, it's a, I talk about it as my very high quality graduate education that began when I signed up for CUSO. It really began when I, you know, when I began to travel in Africa. But it really accelerated when I hit the ground with, you know, and got to interact with the people that that worked for CUSO. You know, the CUSO was supporting through the Southern Africa Support Program, you know, just these fantastic individuals involved in liberation movements. And then you know, all of the day to day folks that I encountered in Botswana, it was, it was a wonderful education, you know, and a very compressed one, that's for sure.

Doug Miller 22:51

And then you got a request from the ZAPU Research Centre, right?

Ken Traynor 22:57

So one of the things, I guess, is that 0

Doug Miller 23:02

Let me, let me just go backwards a bit, Zimbabwe African People's Union. It was one of the main liberation movements, and it had its rear headquarters in Lusaka, and they had as part of their work research office, right?

Ken Traynor 23:19

So, so needless to say, I had a really much better understanding of what was going on sitting there in Botswana with, you know, in from 1976 till 1979 with the, you know, what was going on in South Africa, like we, I had friends who lived right down on the border between Botswana and South Africa, you know. And many mornings, as they were walking from their house to where they worked on this sorghum project, you know, they would run into South Africans who were crossed illegally overnight, and would come up to them and say, “Where's the closest police station?” Or, you know, “where, how do I? How do I contact the boss, authorities” and so, like, it was just a regular kind of occurrence.

After a year in the south along that border is that I was transferred up to the north in Francistown, which is right on the border with Rhodesia and my boss was also in charge of the UN refugee camp, responsible for the UN refugee camp that was just down the block. So every morning I come out from my house, walk down to our offices. Some days there'd be a few people. Some days there'd be 200 300 people that have crossed overnight from Rhodesia. When we used to do our surveys along the border that we were land use surveys that we were doing, you could hear gunfire occasionally across the way. So it was, you know, the evidence of the liberation struggle was all over Botswana.

You know, the South African army came in and killed some ANC comrades in Gaborone one during the time that I was that I was there, so I was very aware of it. CUSO was intimately involved, and made sure all of us that were in country had an understanding of what was going on so, so we knew what we knew about the liberation movements. I'd spent a lot of, you know, time reading on it. I found it, you know, a really interesting aspect of it.

And so when Doug, through the work that CUSO was doing supporting the Zimbabwean African People's Union who were who were based in the SAC at the time, is that they asked me if I could go into if I would be willing to go into Rhodesia to gather materials that could become part of their planning, because they were already assuming in the next few years that liberation was going to happen and that they needed to begin to try and develop plans of how they would deal with the realities of Rhodesia when it finally became liberated.

So I said, and, you know, and this is where, where the naivete comes in. I said, Sure, why not? You know, like, of course. So we cooked up a story, which was that I was working in Botswana. I was going back to be a grad student at Dalhousie University. And I was going to say to these folks that I was meeting in Rhodesia that it was really important that we have really up to date materials that could be in the Africa Studies Department at Dalhousie. And would they give me stuff?

And I started writing letters to government departments and all that kind of stuff. And I got reams of stuff, you know, back from them, and then I made a trip into Rhodesia. And people always ask me when I'm when, when we came back. They said, “Were you ever scared, you know, when you were there and so?”. And I said, “Well, okay, occasionally on the road, driving could be a bit hairy”. But basically, no, you know, I saw maybe four snakes, and all the time I was there, like, you know, all the things that people asked you about, you know. And technically, we were in the middle of a war zone in southern Africa.

But no, I never been scared until I was sitting in the bar in downtown Salisbury. I was in a hotel there, and I'd arranged all these meetings to go meet with agricultural people to get their documents and all this sort of stuff. And I was sitting in the bar, and there's this sort of small guy beside me, an Irishman, sitting beside me, drinking, and then he's talking to the guy beside him, you know. And what you realize is these guys are Irish mercenaries. They're fighting as part of the Rhodesian defence forces. And there's some of the hardest just the nature of their discussion, what they were talking about. And that sent a chill, you know, kind of threw me. That was the first time I'd really encountered somebody who went out looking for the chance to participate, you know, in the wars and so on. And yeah, I definitely felt kind of alone and that night, kind of around it.

But, but yeah, so I shipped a hell of a lot of paper from Rhodesia into Francis town. Then we took it up. But it was, it was interesting because, again, I got, I got to know people within ZAPU, you know, you get to talk to them, and you're trying to get an understanding, and you begin to get a sense of the scale of the problem which they're looking to, you know, besides having to deal with all the refugees that were coming out, they had, you know, they had large refugee camps in in Lusaka. I can remember being, you know, in those camps when you could hear the Rhodesian Air Force flying over Zambia. They used to fly their jets periodically, just to send everybody into their foxholes and, you know, and the kids like, I remember one time Doug and others had organized for Flora MacDonald, who was Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, to come and visit. She was on the visit to Zambia. You know, they were beginning to be negotiations.

Doug Miller 29:33

Just a small correction. That was just after my leaving, and it was David Beer at the Commonwealth conference in Lusaka in 79 right?

Ken Traynor 29:43

So that, you know, I can remember being part of the group that took her around the camps in Lusaka, because I was, I was living up in Lusaka at that time, you know, and you began, you really had a sense then, of all of the four processes that had to be brought to play to try and bring about change in Zimbabwe and all of the price that people paid. And, you know, so, so, like the liberation movements they had, they had responsibilities for, you know, what amounted to a bunch of kids, families, you know, they were carrying out an armed struggle. They had to feed all those folks, and they had to try and anticipate what happens if, if you actually win, if you actually get, if liberation happens. So, yeah, it was like, I say it was a wonderful education, and like to think I was able to do, you know, kind of wee little bit on the edge of contributing to that.

Doug Miller 30:39

Well, it didn't end there either. You came back to Canada.

Ken Traynor 30:44

Well, that was the time, you know. And again, I give full credit to Doug. Is that, you know, well, Doug and everyone that worked with them, you know, Nelly, you know the crew in Zambia, because they had tremendous connections to liberation movements. And if you came through Doug, you had credibility. So I spent the better part of almost a year, I guess, in Lusaka.

After I had left Botswana, I finished my job in Botswana is I worked with, basically, for the African National Congress's refugee support office. And what I was doing is, you know, as a good, you know, kind of bureaucrat and training, which I've been to a degree in Botswana, is I wrote, I researched and wrote funding proposals that the ANC office and personnel took to, you know, the Danes and the Swedes, and to get you know, so we wrote proposals to set up daycare crash that would be both a training centre and take care of all of the babies and stuff that there were in the in the refugee camps, and that was going to happen in in Tanzania.

And we wrote up a bunch of truck proposals. For big Volvo trucks from the Swedes and we had a garage in in Lusaka that would do all of the maintenance on them, because they were having to bring truck in all of their supports for the camps in Angola and Zambia and so on. Had to come in from Dar es Salaam, from the ports there. So we were going to train South Africans to be, you know, to have skills as well as carry out these things. So, so again, I, you know, I got, I got to work with all of these really interesting people.

You know, I still have this one little vision of one Christmas Day is that I was had to go around to the ANC enclave and in Lusaka, you know. And I bang on the door, you know, big steel doors that you've that you've got around the compound. And there's a guy, you know, with AK 47 over his shoulder that comes to the door and opens it and says, Yeah, you know. Oh, he says, you know, “Hi Ken”. And I didn't, I didn't like recognize him for saying. He said, No. He said, “No, I see you here all the time”. He said, “My name's Ken, too”. And, and so, you know, it's, I can still remember that Christmas Day we're chatting. You know, he's maybe three or four years younger than me, because he came out in 1976 he was a student then, and so you're just chatting with this character. And for me, it was one of those little things that, you know, he was my age, you know, we similar, you know, kind of views of the world. He was in a liberation movement, you know, carrying a gun. But we both shared the same objective around South Africa.

I don't know, it just it's always stuck with me as just a personal character of the people that are involved in these, you know, what are earth shaking kind of events and so on. So, yeah, that was, that was kind of one of the little kind of pieces that time in in Zambia was, was really important, right down to, you know, the curfews and standing in line for bread and all of those things that you never had to do before.

Doug Miller 34:12

You know, Asian jets flying down the main drag. So you spent that year very profitably, and eventually you came back to Canada, do I dare say, yeah.

Ken Traynor 34:28

So it's, you know, again, it's, it's interesting. So one of the things was, when you live a bunch of live amongst a bunch of expats, which is what was lots of the folks in, in in Africa, it gives you a, it gives you an interesting viewpoint on political engagement, because it's one thing to engage around ideas like I knew. I knew what I thought should happen in southern Africa, you know, and I knew which side I was on and so on. But a question of urgency, you know, and if you're part of a liberation movement, you've got some urgency, and you're targeted on going back to South Africa or Odisha Zimbabwe, kind of thing like that.

But I must admit, I got restless around the political component, component of being an expatriate in in in these spaces. And so I decided that, you know, I had, I had a chance to, you know, I talked about the serendipity. I had that chance to become a sea turtle expert, maybe, or, you know, which didn't pan out. And I had another, I had an offer to go to Vanuatu and from CUSO. And I thought about that because it struck me as a really interesting place to go, but it somehow didn't, you know, that idea of being an expat for another three, five years, you know, maybe wasn't for me. So I headed back to Canada and when I got there is they asked me if I would participate in a cross Canada speaking tour –

36:05

About, who's they, CUSO?

Ken Traynor 36:09

So it was, but it was, again, yeah, the details are hazy, but I think it would CUSO was, was the major, I think they paid for it. But the idea was that, you know, things in so this is, this is 1979 so things have really heated up in Southern Africa and so I was, I did a speaking. I spoke at, you know, in church basements, in, you know, development centres right across the country. And it was a mix of the Development and Peace, CUSO, you know, the Development Centre in Saskatchewan, you know, I was interested out in BC, without that, the Metro Labour Centre or the Maritime Labour Centre.

But you know what it was? For me, what was fantastic was it was like a chance to get to know my country again. You know, it was a wonderful education about Canada, because I hadn't travelled that much in Canada, you know. So I got to go coast to coast. I got to meet, you know, people that were politically engaged, very talkative, very opinionated, you know, it was a wonderful reintroduction into Canada. And then I could kind of layer my understanding of the world, which I'd gained by, you know, participating in these events, you know, and then trying to figure out, what is it you're going to say based on what you have, you know.

Like, I mean, one of the things that was fascinating is I got off the plane when I came back from Africa in Halifax, because I was going to see friends and my uncle, aunt and uncle in PEI, and I was going to start there and then work my way across the country to, you know, kind of, because I didn't have much money and, And so when I was I got shuffled at customs. I got shuffled into the, you know, go through all this stuff line. And I had a big tube when I got on the plane. Is I had this, this big tube full of ZAPU and SWAPO and ANC posters and all this kind of stuff. And I had a beautifully carved statue which Doug and another friend had given me to carry on the plane was like, made out of iron wood, you know, you know, it's probably 25 pounds. I was this huge, really heavy kind of thing that I was carrying under my arm. So the agricultural guys want to know, is this tree really dead, or should we confiscate it? They let me through with it. But when they opened up the posters, you know, which were the classic liberation posters of the day, you know, this guy sort of said, “what do you have to bring this shit back into this country for? You know, they're like, across the they're across the ocean”, like, what, you know, this kind of, sort of stuff. And it's kind of, I kind of, I kind of kept my mouth shut at that point, because I figured, no, that's okay. I want to get back into the country, and I'd like them to, you know, give me the posters, because I want to take them, you know, kind of thing like that.

But anyway, it was just that little like, right off the top, you know, is you really, you understand the nature of the system that you would have to bring about change. Because they're, you know, solidarity is not their knee jerk response to the realities that I'd experienced and so on. So I was back in Canada. I got this wonderful experience in all across the country. I realized how in, you know, you stay away from a country for three years. You don't know what happened at the, you know, labour, the Canadian Labour Conference conventions. You don't know how hard hot the anti communism was at that time, you know. You don't know that all the little Maoist groups and so on that were on campus, you know, that have kind of gone through and all of their debates. And anyway, it was, it was interesting.

You know, when I was in Botswana, the idea was, you want to hone your listening skills, because you don't want to talk. You want to understand what's happening around you before you kind of step into it all. And those lessons that I learned, you know, the humility, I guess, of saying, “Yeah, I don't know how Botswana works”, so you ask people how it works and so on. When I came back to Canada, that same approach was really valuable, because I didn't know how it worked. Now, three years later, and, you know, I changed. The world had changed. And so I think I was reasonably well prepared, at least, to come back and learn about what was going on in the country. And that little cross country tour really gave me a good grounding, and that was at the core of all of the work that we did around the SACTU solidarity committee was going back.

Speaker 1 40:54

I want to jump in for a second. So you're back in Canada, you're travelling across the country. You have, you know, clearly changed to your experience, as you said, the country here, Canada had to. But do you remember in the moment, to what extent, first of all, what year are we talking now? What is what you return? What year, 1979 Okay, so do you remember just in that time, what the what Canadians knowledge was of South Africa and Apartheid and notions of solidarity, as you're doing this cross country tour on behalf of CUSO, what was your general impression of the level of knowledge, concern, commitment among regular Canadians?

Doug Miller 41:41

And I'll add to that, the war in Rhodesia had really reached its –

Speaker 1 41:46

Well, this is it on the cusp of independence, yeah.

Ken Traynor 41:51

So what I remember most from that period are those amazing church basements and labour meetings and so on that I was addressing. So from that point of view, it was clear within our society, there was, there was an awareness Canada was, I would say, I had a sense of sympathy in the sense that people believed in liberation. But the level of understanding was not, you know, the questions that I got from people who weren't politically engaged were all really personal in character, and you would try and in your answers, you would, you know, you try and be able to turn them back to the, you know, kind of the fundamentals of what South Africa was doing in the region. So, you know, “were you scared?” “Well, yeah, no, this the snakes. Don't worry about that. You don't have to worry about that”. But, yeah, you know, there was a liberation war going on in southern Africa. And people say, oh, yeah, you know, you so it's, it's a bit of that, I wouldn't say there was a wide awareness, but I think in the political sphere, there was an awareness of what was, was going on.

Speaker 1 43:13

And were people how to what extent were the people you were meeting in these church basements and union locals? To what extent were they comfortable with the notion of liberation struggle, armed struggle? Did you find that it was, you know, that they were open to it, or did it require a lot of explanation and to, you know, bring them around to the notion that this was part of an armed struggle to overthrow the system?

Doug Miller 43:39

Again, I'll add to that the anti-communist reaction of many people.

Ken Traynor 43:46

So, yeah, so I would say in that first instance, it was, it was very much the people I was speaking to. They were all engaged in struggles in one way or another. You know, in Canada, you know, in the late 70s there, there was a lot going on, you know, is so in that first blush, it was, yeah, these people wanted to hear what I had to say about those movements. So you had to make sure you did it straightforwardly and didn't assume kind of knowledge.

But there was definitely, definitely a receptivity once we shifted over to more systematically, trying to build support for the ANC and SACTU within the labour movement is that there it was much more. You had to have a really developed argument that was rooted in solidarity. You know, an injury to one is an injury to all. It was building solidarity, you know, and you couldn't assume that just because he's an auto worker in London, Ontario. That, that you know, if you gave him my, my view always was, if you gave him the right information about the reality on the ground in South Africa, or you brought really quality people from SACTU who could present the struggle to them, is that you could, you would get that solidarity, but you had to work at it, and you couldn't be naive about the anti-communist character that came at you. You know, systematically, many leadership levels in the Canadian Labour movement, and, of course, in Canadian society. So it was, what one of the one of the things, yeah.

So I was back in Canada, and I didn't have, I was living with someone who had just gotten the job in Toronto as an organizer with the Canadian airline Employees Association. So we moved to Toronto, and I started looking for work in Toronto. And the first thing so I figured, how do you, how do you meet interesting people? You know, you got to find your people. And one of the things I did was I took a course called workers control at Humber College labour program. And that was a good start at one point. I eventually started teaching that later on, as part of a team of people teaching that control. It was on worker co-ops, basically.

And, you know, you start to try and say, when you're back in a place is that, how do you reestablish yourself in the politics? Because I didn't know Toronto, you know, I was brand new and again, that's where the serendipity of being in the place is that Ken Luckhardt and Brenda Wall had been working with SACTU in Lusaka, and they had worked done interviews with SACTU veterans, and had written a history of the South African Trade Union movement and they were now back in Canada, had, and had been asked by SACTU organize, specifically developing solidarity with struggle in South Africa amongst Canadian unions.

And I have no whether it was Doug gave them my name, but they got my name and myself. And the woman I was living with, Jane Armstrong at the time, is that, you know, they said, “Do you want to do this?” And I thought, I don't have any other plans at the moment. So we started. We formed a South African Congress of trade union solidarity committee in a bar in, in Toronto in by that time, it probably would have been 1980 I guess, and the rest is history, so to speak. You know that was again, seven really intriguing years of work and learning and some accomplishments, although that as you get older, you look back and reflect on what hasn't happened, not just what you did,

48:21

Could you, could you elaborate on that?

Ken Traynor 48:26

Well, it's, it's interesting. So I was so the work that I did in the in the SACTU solidarity committee 1980 to 1987 when we were, when the organisation was at its height, is that was just really, really engaging and I learned so much. You know, we used to, we used to say by the by the end of it, you know, collectively, the three of us Working in the office where we're speaking probably three times a week, and union halls around the country directly to workers and like I say, I just, I just learned so much.

You know, we, we were at, you know, we were involved with the Canadian the UAW Canada, in their negotiations. They took demands to get investments in South Africa out of their, the workers pension plans. So they took that to the negotiating table. So we were assisting them in in in that piece and so we got to, you know, got to meet Bob White. We got to, you know, make our case to the organize the bargaining committee of the United Auto Workers. We were there because by the that time, the woman, Jane Armstrong, my partner at the time, was working for the as an organizer with the Canadian Auto Workers Union. So when the CAW basically split from the from the United Auto Workers in the United States who are close to that you understood, you know, the value of quality leadership, which is what Bob White gave to the to the Canadian Auto Workers, and then the power of well-organized, you know, popular institutions like trade unions, when it's done well, all of that, you know, kind of was going on.

And then, you know, as I've gotten older and shifted out, I did work, you know, I worked for the coalition against free trade. I was very involved in the Anthony anti NAFTA campaigns. You know, we developed fantastic international solidarity organizations, links amongst popular organizations, you know, around the Americas and to some degree around the world. You know, we used to go to conferences of our own making, with the Third World network and these kinds of things.

And, you know, 20 years on, is we have to say, is that our politics were not up to the tasks that capitalism kept putting in front of us, the evolution of the system that we wish to change was faster than our ability to collectively build the institutions that could confront them. Not to say that there weren't all sorts of positive changes and things accomplished and all the rest of it, but, but, yeah, there's we're a long ways from what we had hoped we might see back in our younger days, in the in the 80s and so on.

Doug Miller 51:52

You've talked about your role as an educator in SACTU committee, but you had another role as well in research that was very significant.

Ken Traynor 52:01

Yeah. So that was, I spent I once, I called it my ode to librarians, which is maybe a bit strange in today's times, but it reinforces one of the points that that I kind of wrote to myself here, which was, it is fascinating to think of how much change I have seen in my life in a host of things, and reflect on what that means.

So, for example, this morning, I went in and I have a stack of those blue Air Mail forms that you used to send, you know, and my mother kept them all when I sent them to her, I used to, like, maybe once a month, maybe less often, but she kept a bunch of them. And my younger brother tells me about how she used to nobody else could read my writing. So she would read them to my younger brother. You know about what was going on in Botswana. But anyway, so you think, you know that's, that's how you used to communicate. You know, I phoned in five years of time away in Africa, I made two phone calls to Canada. That was it, you know, everything else was written, you know, so, you know, Gestetner machines, you know, we used to when I worked in Botswana is that, you know, all of our work was done on, you know, you typed on a Gestetner machine. You then printed that off, you know.

So those tools were the things that that we used back then, and I compare those now to how we have access to so much more information. So I spent a year and a half in the Toronto Reference Library and Statistics Canada library in in Toronto, and Board of Trade library, and, you know, researching trade between Canada and South Africa.

And we wrote a treatise called Trafficking in Apartheid, which basically said that, you know, Canada could put sanctions in tomorrow, and it would have no significant impact in the larger Canadian economy. It would only impact the multinational corporations and so on that are involved in that, in that process.

You know, I look at that today, for example, I live on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, so when I go out in the mornings, I often, you know, we'll see a ship going by. And on my phone, I can pull up Marine traffic.com and I can get the name of that ship, and I can get its itinerary of where it's going. And I don't have to rely upon the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union to tell me where that ships going, where it's been. And in many cases, I can get, you know, I can get all this anyway. I could, I could probably do in a month what it took me a year and a half to do, kind of around that.

So but what you realize is it isn't enough just to have the information you, you know. I spent a year and a half developing this political argument, which we then carried for four or five years in a what we thought of as a relentless campaign to convince people that they that sanctions would work, and conversely, to use it as a cudgel to hammer away at the Canadian government about how there's so much more they could do and so on. So it's one thing to have information, you know, and that's we have so much more information today.

You know, we know the names and the cell phone locations of, you know Israeli citizens who were taken by Hamas across the border. But that doesn't help necessarily allow you to solve the problem of the Israeli Palestinian or the Palestinian dislocation that's at the heart of this crisis. So information itself is not enough. And we began to understand that.

And it was, it was interesting by the by the end of our time, our activity in the labour movement is that we got pushed aside. I think is a fair way to say it, because in a political calculation, which was that liberation in South Africa could be negotiated, but Canada and some of the other major players in the Commonwealth were going to play significant roles, and we were an irritant in that equation, and that the decision was that it would be easier to accomplish that integration of Canada and into the Commonwealth process. You know, that was more valuable than having a mobilized labour movement to the maybe that mobilized labour movement, and its support politically was now something that they knew they had. And I think that's true, is that, you know, we had built enough of a real world support for it amongst Canadian Labour leadership and so on and, and so that was, you know, so it was interesting to be shunted to the side a little bit.

Speaker 1 57:22

Sorry, who made that decision to kind of sideline SACTU?

Ken Traynor 57:27

I would say it was, it was the ANC. You know, SACTU communicated it to us, but at that time, by that point in time, we didn't know all this at the time, but in hindsight, is that, is that SACTU was being wound down in its external space, and the comrades were going to be go back to South Africa, and the ANC was definitely taking the lead in the political negotiations at the, at the end of, in the in the late, in the late 80s, as you were beginning to move forward on that, and so we were put aside and it, you know, so that was, again, you know, this is, this is all part of an education of how the how the politics unfolds.

When we were beginning to look at the, this work around SACTU solidarity committee and so on, we went, you know, in this history project, I went digging, and I found the Commonwealth Secretariat was doing a very similar thing is it was trying to do these kind of interviews with leaders, historic leaders in the Commonwealth and there.

And so, there's a there's an interview that was done with Joe Clark, and it was really fascinating to go back and read his interview, especially of all the things that he was doing on behalf of the Mulroney government, as a lead in engaging with, through the Commonwealth committee, that was kind of the interlocutor between South Africa and the ANC that that whole process that was going on. And so he had a very, you know, he goes back to his time at university and he, he was talking about how he, as an individual, pushed within the Conservative Party to support, you know, to be against apartheid in South Africa and all these, this, this kind of thing. So it was always, it was interesting to see someone that you had railed against, argued against, demonized and so on, to hear his rationale as a person you know, of how his politics got him involved and he was, he was definitely you know very sincere about ending apartheid, you know, that's that wasn't an issue.

But the question of what's accomplished post apartheid is that, you know, as we all know, is that that's the really tricky thing, you know, is, is what, what change you can actually kind of accomplish. So, yeah, so I look back and say, we, we did lots. It was a fantastic education. I learned a tremendous amount. It shaped my view of the world going forward. There were lessons that I could take from, you know, my time in southern Africa when I was working as, you know, for example, I was working in support of mining communities in Peru, for example, like all of these lessons that you get, you know, allow you to, you know, have a more sophisticated approaches as you go on.

So it's, yeah, so I that, you know, that research function was, it's always been, you know, part of what I do, I ran a what amount of to a research information system around, you know, critiquing free trade agreements and all of that work. I helped set up an organisation in Canada that continues to this day, and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on all of that. You know, I took the lessons that I've learned around Canadian organizing, and was very involved in the establishment of Mining Watch Canada in the beginning. So it's, yeah, it was, it was a I learned a lot like I say, that education that I got by courtesy of Doug and CUSO and the people of Southern Africa has been very valuable over the years, as I, you know, tried to make a contribution to things here in Canada.

Doug Miller 1:02:02

My goodness. Gwen, where to now?

Speaker 1 1:02:07

Do you still have the SWAPO and ANC posters and all the other ones you brought in that tube?

Ken Traynor 1:02:12

I do not actually, it's I thought, no, I thought about that, you know, so that I forget. How many I forget. I one time sat down and say, said that when I've been, when I've been back from Africa, is that I'd had in 13 years, no, in 12 years, I lived in 13 different places. And you lose a lot of stuff. I should constantly kind of move and then I was a little more settled. But as you downsize, you know, move around Toronto, leave Toronto, you accumulate stuff, and then you pair it all back and I don't, and I think about that a little bit. I have a few pictures. I have this wonderful picture of coming back to Montreal, and I used to stay at Doug's place down on Saint Catherine. Was it Saint Catherine's? No, it was –

Doug Miller 1:03:06

Oh my gosh, it was almost –

Ken Traynor 1:03:09

Yeah, downtown Montreal. So, you know, like, Harry, I always cherish that time that I got to spend in Montreal, you know, trying to understand, like, I mean, this is, this is part of it, trying to understand Quebec independence. You know, like I in Canada is, people used to scratch their heads thinking, you know, the battle isn't against, you know, the battle is to change Canada, you know. And the idea of, you know, the Quebec independence movement is, a lot of people had had real troubles with that, and I used to say to them, “well, think of it, think of it from their perspective. You know, is that they've been hitting their heads, you know, at the nature of Canadian capitalist society for as long as we have, they have the same hate on for it that we have developed over time, but they see an option of opting out, and that of actually building something for themselves”. And of course, in the 80s is that there were lots of places around the world where or, you know, countries, peoples, you know, independence was a very real concept that you could fight for and so I said, “No, I like I have no problems with that”.

Speaker 1 1:04:34

Speaking of struggles. Do you remember that at the time, any relationship or interaction with indigenous struggles in Canada?

Ken Traynor 1:04:45

No, and that's, that's, that's, like, that's a really good question, because, you know, kind of, now, I've spent time out here in British Columbia, you know, where I've been, you know, directly engaged up in the Cowichan valley with folks from the Cowichan tribes in both their treaty negotiations. You know, there, because there were no treaties signed in southern British Columbia. You know, the context is very different, and it's been, it's fascinating to think back to, you know, Saskatchewan, and you know, where I grew up, and what I didn't know, you know, and all the rest of it.

I would say that that over time, is that so, the like I was in, I was involved in, organizing the around, in the Anthony anti North American free trade agreement negotiations, I was a Canadian representative that worked with a guy from the United States and an organizer from Mexico in putting together a trip tripartite citizens organisation in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations and the and what was fascinating was, you know, so we had, you know, the trade union movement, we had the church movement, you know, we had popular movements. But the, the real core of the of that movement were representatives from the neutral north in British Columbia. So this is, like, you know, we're talking the early 80s, is that they were in negotiations at that time over the first modern treaty in British Columbia that they were, that they were going for. So Art Manuel was, his name is that he participated in these because they wanted links to link up with other Indigenous organizations in the Americas. And our Canadian network provided them with a way to do that and funds to be able to travel and so on.

So that was, that was one person I'd also in that tour I talked of earlier, is that I gone out to Port Alberni and spoken there, and there had been a number of very interesting people that I'd met in Port Alberni who were representatives of the First Nations in Alberni, who were very interested in that, what had been going on in South Africa. So I, I'd encountered these, the these things, the other group was the National Farmers Union, you know.

And the thing with in hindsight, what you got was, you know, folks in the National Farmers Union, you know, they made, they made economic decisions every day about what they were going to plant, about anticipating what markets were going to be like, about trying to understand what the North American Free Trade Agreement was going to mean in their day, day to day, lives and so on. And it wasn't filtered through, you know, a national organisation or whatever it was. So I learned a lot, and it was interesting about the very different motivations of the different elements of these Canadian delegates, delegates, you know, what they what they brought to the table, and what they were looking for out of that. And so that was, that was really insightful.

And then the flip side of that was just the, you know, for example, the Mexican organizers on the other side, at the core of, of their political strength, was co-op movements. And of course, the North American Free Trade Agreement targeted the state supports for the co-op movement in in Mexico very effectively, and really helped undermine it and so on. But so that it was always, it was, it was really instructive to get an understanding of the way in which you had to look at these, not just around rights at the national level, but you know, the way in which you know it undermined the social pinnings of our collective economies, and what the implications of that were in the way, it undermined those institutions which we use to fight back kind of politically. And so I got a lot of those kind of experiences from that that work? Wow.

Doug Miller 1:09:25

Well, I'm, I don't know, Gwen, unless you've got other things, can you you've given a magisterial overview of things. Do you have any last thinking on the whole anti apartheid struggle and where it's at today?

Ken Traynor 1:09:44

Well, I think I was quite struck by the interview you did with Jay Naidoo, you know who was the executive secretary of COSATU called Congress of South African Trade Unions. Uh, and he said he his view was that we were in a, we're in a world struggle, if you want, is that, that's how you have to couch it, is that, yeah, you can, you know, individual countries are, you know, we have our own kind of individual battles, but fundamentally, we're up against, you know, a large scale capitalist system, which has been able to entrench, you know, ownership over world resources and so on in a very number of small hands and so on, and that we have to fight it kind of on those terms.

I think back I one little story I'll tell is that my son's 31 now, and he's, he's a techie, you know, kind of involved in providing the tools to popular organizations, to organize themselves and to push back and for change. You know, he and I share, you know, a worldview that's very similar, and so on. But I hadn't, we hadn't had a face to face engagement for a couple of years during covid. And so we came out to visit last, last spring, and so on. And we were carrying on as we do. And any, he jumped on me hard one time, you know, in this conversation, and he said, he said, “That's just blame the victim

“ So we, you know, you're just blaming the victims.

And he and I got, got into it around because I was talking about my disappointment with what we've been able to accomplish on, you know, our political organizations, and, you know, been a member of the NDP for forever, and been sold out at lots of different kinds of times, and, you know, and anyway, you know, that that kind of a piece. And so, anyway, so then he went out and had a smoke, and we both kind of cool down, you know, because I took it pretty hard, you know, from his critique. And then, and then afterwards, we sat up and I began to talk. And to some degree, I told him some of the stories that, you know, we were sharing today, that you know, he and I have never really sat down to talk about as adults, because, you know, we haven't spent a lot of time together in since he lives in Toronto. I live out here.

Anyway, is that I told him about how, you know, when I was his age, I had, I had known people who were fighting internationally for the new international economic order. You know, they had written tremendous economic critiques of what was possible in the world, how that could come about. Many of them had fought, taken up arms to liberate themselves and so on. We had engaged with a press where we could meet with journalists, we could gain their trust. We had to develop a strategy of how we could use those that access to media in order to be able to influence the discussions that were happening within our society. We formed things like the Action Canada network, which had representatives from organizations across the country, and we came together, and we made decisions and at that time, we believed, you know, that we could improve the status quo, and we could resist the change to what we began to see, which was the beginning of that neoliberal approach. So, so that was we had a lived experience that was different from what ultimately evolved in the neoliberalism that's been imposed on us over the last 20 years.

So then my son has grown up with, you know, the so called commonsense revolution in Ontario, you know, and all of us just raving away against government in Ontario, and you know, and his experience has been building his understanding of how exploitative and impactful the neoliberal world that's been constructed for us is. And he's really angry as a young Canadian. He wants to see change, and he has a lot of anger, and while I share his critique of that, I think my anger has been, Doug, by that reality of, how do you accomplish what we're trying to accomplish, kind of around it.

But it, for me, it was, it was really interesting that that little engagement with them and I hope, you know, I hope that he can gain some of the he's off to Columbia in in a week, as part of this, an organisation called. Called OPEN, which was, is basically, as it does. It's 11 countries involved in providing collective internet based tools for organizations. And they're, they're having a get together of all the techies to talk about how you do this.

So I kind of come back to that, you know, today I read The Guardian, you know, news online, fantastic website. You know, it used to come in 10 pages of flimsy paper that you got in the mail weekly. You know, I can, I can still remember the first time I went through London and went into the bookshops in London and the whole, there's a critique of the whole world, you know, on two or three shelves. You know, the world music I still listen today to, you know, musicians from Madagascar and Ghana and Mali and so on. And some of them are actually living in Vancouver now and so on. So it's, it's, it's had a tremendous impact on me, you know, tremendously positive impact, even though we maybe haven't been able to accomplish the change we might have wanted, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't have had it any other way. You know, it's been a really intriguing journey. And, you know, and like in talking with you, it dredges up lots of it, and, you know, it adds another kind of layer to my memories.

1:16:35

Wow,

Doug Miller 1:16:36

fantastic. Thank you so much, Ken, what a wonderful interview.

Ken Traynor 1:16:39

Well, thanks for doing this.

1:16:42

Thank you. Ken, terrific.

Doug Miller 1:16:44

It's terrific. Yes, so I'm just going to turn the this, the recording off at this point, and hope that we don't come up with a lot more wisdom in the –