Nigel Crawhall

DOUG MILLER 00:00

Good morning, good afternoon. I'm Doug Miller in Montreal with Amy Kaler in Scotland, and Nigel Crawhall. Could you just identify yourself, Nigel, and where you are right now?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 00:15

Yes, thank you, Doug. So, I'm Nigel Crawhall, and currently I'm working at UNESCO, and I'm based here in Paris. My home is Cape Town, South Africa.

DOUG MILLER 00:27

Okay, and, and you've, you've read the consent form that I sent you earlier, and you, you agree to this interview for the purposes that are outlined in it, and the conditions that we've stipulated, so would you just verbally agree to that right now, please?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 00:44

I confirm I have read the document, and I confirmed the conditions. Yes.

DOUG MILLER 00:48

Okay. Well, I thank you very much. And so to start, it, Nigel, could you just give us a bit of your background to your origins, and how you became sort of aware of apartheid, and got involved eventually in working against it.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 01:08

Well, that's complicated. So, let me give you the short version. So, my family is both British and South African by origin. So, I was born in London, but my grandmother was born in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, and so three generations of the women's side of the family were from South Africa, so I grew up with this whole sort of oral heritage of South Africa, and then as a very small human being we moved to Montreal, and I grew up in Montreal, and in that process I began to learn about different issues of social justice, and fundamentally, most of my focus was on the questions of the rights of Canadian First Nations, that was sort of my educational background, but in my family we always grew up with this issue about having a South African origin, and you know, so in the background there was always these issues about what was going on in that country.

But also to be frank with you, my mother really educated me that my grandmother, who was a very kind and gentle and warm human being, was really from the colonial generation, and she would say things that were really not well informed by understanding human equality and democracy and dignity, and so I was educated from a very early age that racism was intellectually completely unacceptable, morally unacceptable, and that I had to learn to distinguish from what my grandmother was saying from the reality of things, so it's not that my grandmother was in any way a nasty human being, but she grew up in a particular time and framework.

But the flip side is it also gave me an insight into that world and how white South Africans could limit what they understood about the world and sort of shape their own ideas to fit their own justification without necessarily ill intent, obviously some people did have ill intent, so I grew up kind of inside that, that, that world to some degree, and then really at McGill, the issues, it things were getting much worse in South Africa, it was a time of the emergency, there was a lot more media, and also there was a start of an international campaign to divest funds from particularly universities.

DOUG MILLER 03:30

Just to interrupt you a little bit. What period are we at now? What kind of date?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 03:34

We're talking early 80s. So I started at McGill University in Montreal in 19 September 1982 I had already become an activist in various social justice issues before I got to McGill, but it was really McGill that I began. I was studying political science, I should add, so I was learning a lot more about African politics, and in the background was the issue of South Africa, and maybe it's not very helpful, but just to say I also was concerned that people were Canadians, were very heavily focused on the injustices of South Africa, but not really understanding what Africa was bringing to the world, you know. Africa's, you know, we joke inside Africa that often foreigners think that Africa is a country, and you know, literally people have asked me in North America, what is the capital of Africa?

So, there were two campaigns. One is to really educate Canadians about the very important intellectual, political, and cultural heritage of the African continent and all its diversity, and the other side, that there was this country that was had a completely illegal and unjust system that sustained racial discrimination in a structural and legal sense that was offensive to the world community, and how that was going to change, and what Canada's role in that was.

So, maybe that's enough of an orientation, but that's kind of what started me off, and then eventually I met up. With others, including Amy and the Student Union Student Society of McGill University, had created a committee to advise the student union and the McGill population about the justice issues in South Africa, and it was called the South Africa Committee, and so I joined the South Africa committee, and eventually I headed the South Africa committee, and Amy and I worked on the campaign for the divestment of McGill University funds from South African investments. That was kind of the trajectory of the work.

DOUG MILLER 05:36

Wow, that's a really good trajectory, and in wonderful overview. Thank you. That campaign seemed to have been quite, quite successful, albeit probably a little bit of a battle to get won.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 05:53

A little bit of a battle would be an understatement, and Amy can share some more details, but it was a time, so there were several things going on. One is there was a movement in the United States universities to address these issues, but it hadn't really taken off in Canada, and we had colleagues who were working on other issues, so mining justice issues, solidarity with Central American countries, generally international solidarity and cooperation development issues, but this issue was getting in the media a lot, and things were getting very violent in South Africa. But also the South Africans had not at that point completely figured out how to shut down the media and keep things secret, so things were getting more and more into the public view, and Canadians were repulsed, upset, disgusted by what was going on, and so there was a lot of interest. What is this thing? But when you scratch the surface, most Canadians knew very little about apartheid, or South Africa's history, or Africa's history. And, of course, you know, for those of us who worked in this space, the philosophy and the architecture of apartheid was not substantially different than Canadian national policies. I mean, the whole idea of the separation of First Nations, of the dispossession of First Nations, of the creation of territorial areas that limited the space of First Nations, there was a very close dialogue, particularly in the early 20th century, of these philosophies, and then another stream, which also Canadians found abhorrent, was that the apartheid movement and the apartheid architects were very closely aligned with Nazi Germany and the National Socialist movement in Germany, and so there was a combination of having the colonial heritage of dispossession combined with organized fascism and the idea of racial superiority and inferiority becoming a policy framework.

So it was the South Africa managed to gather those two themes, but in fact Canada was also a participant in those discussions, so part of the part of the process was about trying to get Canadians to recognize the complexity of our own colonial history, as well as understand that this country was trying to achieve transition to a peaceful transition to a democracy at the same time, and it was a common had been a Commonwealth state, like, like Canada.

DOUG MILLER 08:27

So, on the ground at McGill, what were the actions you would take?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 08:32

A lot of it was information campaigns and providing, trying to provide accurate information. The thing that was a little more controversial, it was also trying to give space for South African activists to speak, and this included religious leaders, political leaders, opposition leaders, obviously, but also we worked fairly directly with the African National Congress, which was the largest liberation movement in the country, banned in South Africa, but very active at the United Nations, and politically, and there were other dynamics. There was also a university professor in the department of political science who was part of South African Information Network, who was attempting to justify the regime at the time, and that was pretty shocking for people, and didn't, was not well received, and so working increasingly. I mean, it wasn't an easy process, in the sense that we were trying to provide people with accurate information, but there was an entire disinformation campaign, obviously from the government, and just, you know, I don't know if Amy remembers it, but we used to get a thing called, I think, what's called SA Update, that was very generously mailed to us by the by the South African government with all of their version of reality and misinformation and disinformation, and they kindly sent it to us, so we could follow their version of reality.

DOUG MILLER 10:10

Wow.

AMY KALER 10:10

Could I jump in for just a moment with a question,

DOUG MILLER 10:14

Please.

AMY KALER 10:16

Yeah, um, yeah, so I mean, Nigel, you and I were, we're doing, I think, at more or less the same time there at McGill, and certainly spend a fair bit of time in various trenches trying to, you know, dig our way to the top, and when I was reflecting, when my own interview on those years, I was thinking about for made a shift in kind of understanding apartheid and what was going on in South Africa, in that I got involved with, I think, a pretty basic sort of liberal view, like racism is wrong, treating people badly because of how they happen to be born is wrong. The South African regime is entirely based on that. So we need to do what we can to stop this, because racism is bad.

And that's all true, but in the course of my engaged engagement as a, you know, starry-eyed 18-year-old with the anti-apartheid movement, I came to kind of understand about capitalism and the way that the form of capitalism in South Africa almost requires racism, it can't function, you know, without, without racism, and starting to see the ways in which racism is not just sort of a, like a moral defect that pops up now and then, but is actually integral to the economic functioning of many places. And as I recall, within the South Africa committee, there was a bit of a bit of tension because we could get people on board for the liberal “racism is bad, therefore we have to try to do what we can to help South Africa become non-racist and democratic”, and the people who understood racism as sort of bound up in other forms of oppression or forms of inequality, so we had to kind of balance between what was palatable for the Canadian public, and at least for me, this kind of more complex understanding that was growing over time.

I'm talking a lot, so I'll come to the point. Do you recall anything like that, tensions between what you understood about South Africa and the way that you had to try to interact with institutions or work with public opinion to get buy-in to get traction for things?

DOUG MILLER 13:11

If I could just piggyback on that, did you feel the presence of, or the effects of, the Cold War at your period in history when you were doing this kind of stuff?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 13:22

I mean, all of the above, so, and I would say there's other dimensions as well, so, so let me first address what Amy said, and then add a piece, and then let's get back to the Cold War issue. So maybe also a place to start is as young naive people growing up, you know, in the Canadian education system, the assumption is that Canada is a normal place, that is a neutral place, that it's a nice place, that you know good things happen in Canada, and Canada's a democracy. So that's where you start. Then you see this terrible country with all these terrible things are happening, they are bad, you are good, and then you try and communicate about that.

Then you begin to realize that there are structural relationships. So, first of all, that Canada was actively involved in a whole bunch of economic activities in not just South Africa, but also neighbouring countries, which it has not ceased doing, which raised a lot of ethical questions around Canadian business behaviour on the African continent, and the whole question of the racialization, ethnicization of a subclass, sub-proletariat in the creation of not only a national economy, but the whole point of South Africa was it was part of a global economy. And while I have to say that in the McGill student movement, not we were not alone focusing on South Africa. We had a whole team that were, people who were working on issues in Latin America around labour and rights and democracy, and a number of Latin American countries had experienced destabilization within the Western, uh, hemisphere dynamics, so nobody was in the student movement was naive about this. We also had a lot of solidarity with the with the labour unions at McGill University, so listening to their interpretation of what power was like at an elite university in the country, but then we also dealt with the Black Students' Network that had come together, many of whom were of Caribbean origin, some of African origin, and some of Canadian origin, and their analysis about Canada's inability to see its own racial history and legacies of racism, plus my own background and the network to working with also dealing a lot with First Nations issues, which included a whole parallel process around the extraction of uranium and the movement of uranium for Canadian nuclear interests, where Canada was very active in extraction of uranium from Namibia, which was under occupation at the time, by South Africa, so there were some.

The more you pulled the threads, the more complicated the story got. And then also, because of the divestment side, we had to study a lot of the financial relationships, so they were often parent companies. The South Africans were quite good at creating obfuscation of who owned what, so in particular, like Black Label beer and things became a big issue, but often we had a team that used to work, we had a lot of feedback from other knowledge networks about who really owned what, because the South Africans were quite, they had to, the South Africans obscure ownership issues, because otherwise it was, you know, they were constantly facing these, you know, people being repulsed by their behaviour

But yeah, I mean, I think what we were trying to do is say, you know, if you concentrate on why Canada is investing in apartheid and extracting benefits from such an unjust system, you may understand the racial discrimination, anti-democratic human rights violations that may be where you concentrate, or there's this bigger universe where we have a globalized economic system, which is built on certain principles that Canada buys into, and which is sustaining a very complex system of very vulnerable labour in different parts of the world to enable the elite, and I think that didn't sell very easily.

I still remember today this young fresh-faced lad said to me, “Well, it's okay for you, you're a radical. I'm like, radical, I'm a political science student, how rude!”.

And then I was like, oh, from his perspective, all I'm doing is telling you what I read, but actually, now that you say that, maybe, maybe I have some radical interpretation of this, but so I think there were, there were, there's a series of intersections of what was going on, and I think to the credit of the McGill student movement, the idea was to allow all of those into the same space and to allow a diversity of political opinion. But that there was a cut off point where anything that was an apologist view or was trying to obfuscate these issues of ownership and power was not acceptable, and Doug, you will recall.

But as we got to the end of our particular undergraduate time, there was another movement on campus funded mostly by foreign sources of creating a very different narrative, a different set of student media that was aligned with a very different perspective, which now is quite dominant on our planet, but you know this extremely conservative view and anti-South and anti-an any kind of social justice process to us it was comic when we saw that starting, but little did we know that this was, you know, the train had not even come into the station yet. So we went from a period in the 80s where you had this huge prise de conscience in the Canadian public, there was enormous support from the student body, and eventually, you know, the board of the university agreed to proceed with the with the divestment on the basis of ethical and moral arguments, not necessarily on the basis of the arguments of how capitalism dehumanizes parts of the human population, but, but rather this gross system that was unacceptable, but it didn't, it didn't finish the process of understanding overall Canada's place in the world economy, and our relationship with our neighbours, and the relationship with, with countries in the south.

And in particular, we had one, we had some dialogues with the Canadian government, particularly around our position, the United Nations, and I, in my probably my worst public intervention, tripping over my tongue 300 times. What I was trying to say was, if we are calling for justice and equality and democracy, how can we at the same time be actively involved in this economy and bringing resources that are meant to be under a banning order by the UN, you know, why are we not more closely aligned to other African governments in this? And the answer was, you know, Canada acts according to its alliances and its principles, which is, i.e. what Africa wants from us is interesting, but not necessarily what makes our decisions at the higher level.

DOUG MILLER 20:51

What a magisterial overview. Thank you so much. I hearken back to actions, I guess that's a little bit my style, but before we started here, you mentioned the radio, and I think that would be part of your initiative of education, would it not?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 21:09

Yeah, Amy, I was just saying how we set up Uhuru na Ufahamu, which was the student group focused on developmental issues and cooperation between the North and the South. We created a radio program that was as much about cultural diversity as it was about other issues, and we did cover a number of these issues about the anti-apartheid movement, but also trying to just expose students to the many different stories around the planet. McGill was a very diverse university, and trying to create as many voices as possible there, but also trying to educate people that Canada was, you know, the, you know, there was always this risk in North America that the North Americans behave a bit like they're on an island, and trying to understand that, first of all, that economically that's obviously not true, but culturally and politically, you know, where are we in the world,

DOUG MILLER 22:08

And, and that would have been the precursor of CKUT, and eventually, and –

NIGEL CRAWHALL 22:13

Eventually, that's right, that was just as I was leaving, they were doing the transition.

DOUG MILLER 22:17

Oh, that's wonderful, that's amazing, Amy?

AMY KALER 22:22

Yeah, just a couple of things. I'm not sure if these are remarks or questions, and I have some of Gwen's specific questions as well to bring in. I think Doug, you brought up the Cold War, and Nigel can also comment on this, but I recall that as being very much a live issue. There was a lot of talk about, you know, emanating from the South African government, and this particular professor in political science, and so forth, about the dangers of communism and that you know the white regime was just kind of remaining as a bulwark against communism, and that's why they needed to be kind of engaged with delicately, and you know, to just sort of move them towards being less racist, I guess, rather than abruptly, because, because they were, you know, holding back communism spreading in the region, and there was also a lot of talk about, about Nelson Mandela being a communist, and would he be a fit leader, or should he just stay in jail for a really long time, and so forth.

So I remember that being alive, a live issue, and I also remember, as Nigel says, towards the end of that period, the influx of conservative money onto the McGill scene, like Nigel said, funding a kind of bad newspaper, and so forth, and that was clearly coming from people who were very invested in the Cold War, even though, you know, 1989 and the dissolution of, of the Soviet Union was just around the corner, I think Nigel, as I recall, you were, you were involved for just to sort of broaden the focus beyond McGill, you were involved with the group that was trying to block uranium coming into the Port of Montreal with me and Daron Westman and John Kinloch and Robert Todd, is that ringing bells?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 24:50

Yeah, no, totally. So, I mean, part of the idea is we were trying to argue that social justice had to be transversal, it had to be inclusive. So we were also there was a strong movement around gender equality or empowerment of women, we had a lot of contact with women's union at the time, there was also the Plowshares group, there was we were trying to create an alliance of different social justice movements, partly to educate the student population to help them think about the world, and, and how these different issues relate to each other.

I mean, it's hard to imagine that this was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, and the end of the Soviet Union, but you know, the Cold War was alive and well at the time, although changing much faster than we imagined, and I do remember very specific things. So the part of the charge that the African National Congress and the South African Liberation Movement and SWAPO were all communist agents, and this was, you know, it was in the interest of the West to support non-communist regimes, including those that were totalitarian or fascist, this was in the interests of the West, which obviously some people agreed with them. We also had to emphasize how much the liberation movements were supported by Sweden, for example, by the Nordic countries, by other African countries.

You know, we raised money to help the school, so we were trying to show the, you know, there's many dimensions of what liberation looks like. So the Solomon Mahlangu College in Tanzania, we did a big concert to raise money for the school, so the idea of what quality education is, education for social justice, education for empowerment, these were also dynamics of what we were trying to emphasize, but I think generally the some of those messages were quite complex for the public to understand, and you know, I also just, for me, because, because I had an African family, and I was actually getting ready to leave, and I mean, I didn't know it at the time, but eventually I would move to Zimbabwe, and then to South Africa. Most Canadians thought Africa was really like a far away, weird place, you know? It was like saying you're going to the moon, and just this is more to entertain Amy, but I was standing in the lunch queue one day, and Professor Dougard Laban from the political science department, standing next to me, I'm like, and she goes, "Oh, what are you doing after graduation?”. I said, "Oh, I'm going off the University of Zimbabwe to do my master's. And she's like, basically, “are you insane? I'm like, "What are you doing? I heard you're changing position”. She goes, "I'm going to University of Novosibirsk”. I'm like, "Which of us is crazy? Like, you're going to Siberia and I'm going to Zimbabwe personally, I think I'm getting a better deal here”, but I think I underestimated the importance of the University of Novosibirsk, so I hope it worked out well for her.

But the point was that we were so invested in trying to understand this world and to help interpret it for Canadians and to bring many different voices into that discussion, but it was a time of what was going to be tumultuous change in the country, and some really big things were going to happen, which again post-seeded the divestment movement, but South Africa invaded Angola, the Cubans defended Angola, there was absolutely critical battle, and I was in Johannesburg when that happened, and, and the South African newspapers all published complete rubbish, saying that the South Africans had had a big victory in Angola, was in fact the South Africans had been beaten by joint Cuban Angolan forces, and it was basically the end of everything, so it to get their troops out, they had to agree to the independence of Namibia, and once Namibia separated from South Africa, it was the beginning of everything changing. So, so a lot was happening very, very fast in this period, but we had to work with people's different ideological perspectives and level of information.

DOUG MILLER 29:02

Wow, and easily amazing, amazing. You had an amazing seat at that point of history. It was incredible. The well, I don't even know quite where to go from here. You've mentioned so many cross-sectoral or intersecting issues going on, and they, that, that, that's been part of our interest all along. What, what, where, where are you, and how did you feel when Mandela was finally released?

NIGEL CRAWHALL 29:33

That's a big one. So I was at a linguistics by training a sociolinguist, so I was doing my master's in Harare, and I got invited to a really major linguistics conference in Johannesburg at the University of Witwatersrand. So that was very exciting. I was there, and I could see all the South Africans listening in on their radios. People had little portable radios, and then there was this eruption in the audience, and people were crying, and it was like, what is going on, and they were, it, they had announced that Mandela would be released, and the ANC would be unbanned, and I was not even living in South Africa at the time, but, you know, I happened to be there, and it was just like an eruption, you know, it was like, I mean, there had been several steps before that, but this was it now, and, and the Soviet Union was collapsing, and everything was changing at once.

I then went back to Zimbabwe. I then got a job in Cape Town. I moved to Cape Town, and in the midst of all of this, Mandela and some of the Robben Island prisoners came to Zimbabwe when I was there, but then, yeah, I mean, I watched the release on television, which was extremely emotional, but then when he gave his speech from the City Hall in Cape Town, I think the night before the inauguration, I, like millions of others, we all walked into the centre of Cape Town. It was just a sea of people of every colour and background and culture, and whatever, and this little man, this little incredible man with, you know, amplifier system speaking to us. And it was, you know, you knew that these were historic days, you know, this was, you were watching history unfold in front of your eyes, and that was very exciting,.

And also to say, I mean, for various complicated reasons, I had a permanent resident card, but I wasn't actually a citizen, even though my family's South African, and I got to vote in the first election, so I got to queue, and I got to put the X next to Mandela's name, and that was very satisfying.

DOUG MILLER 31:45

That's a great story.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 31:49

They didn’t know who were citizens. There was everybody had every different ID book you can imagine, so they said if you have an ID book or if you have something like an ID book, you can vote. That's the way it's going to work.

AMY KALER 31:59

So a library card.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 32:03

Like a refugee card, very chaotic, because there were all these people from the Bantustans, from the homelands who didn't have South African identities, and then there was everybody coming home. It was a complete chaos, but they did a really good job, and I was allowed to vote, so I was very.. and I then regularized.

AMY KALER 32:20

I remember watching all of this from oceans away in North America, and when I do remember when Mandela was released, because it was like 3am or something in Minnesota, where I was at the time, and I remember kind of waking up, you know, turning on the TV, looking around, he's not out yet. Okay, go back to sleep. Set the alarm for 40 minutes. Look around, he's not. It was like a live feed. God, he's still not out. Like, you know what? Is he in the bathroom, or you know what's going on? Go back to sleep, wake up 45 minutes later, and you know, yes, there comes Mandela. He's really, really out.

But it was almost like I wouldn't believe that Mandela had really been released until I saw it, even if I'm just sitting in a student apartment in Minneapolis, on the other side of the world, and not, you know, in a cheering throng. It was still really important to see with my own eyes, as much as you can, when it's on TV, that that this had really had really happened, and I remember being, you know, very, very glimpsed about it, and also watching the elections on TV, trying to, of course, I was, you know, watching the long lines and trying to spot Nigel, so I was, it was also one of those things where I felt like I need to sort of see this to know that it really happened, because you know, in the olden days at McGill, and this is possibly one of our flaws, as well, so much was focused on free Mandela again, partly because that's something everybody can, well, most people consider rally behind and non-racial democratic elections, so to see that come to pass was a bit like –

NIGEL CRAWHALL 34:25

Yeah, and it was unbelievable.

DOUG MILLER 34:28

Yeah, from my perspective, I started in 68 and even earlier at Carleton, when I was at university, and by the time I left Zambia in 79 the struggle had really gotten bitter. Of course, Soweto had happened in 76 the ANC changed overnight, but so it was just endless, and it didn't look like there could be an end, and just have so.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 35:00

Even in the –

DOUG MILLER 35:00

Punctuation in the 80s

NIGEL CRAWHALL 35:02

Even right up, I mean, by 90, you know, there were very key moments, like I was still in Zimbabwe at the time, but they had, De Klerk called for the referendum, and you know, a lot of people said no, it's absurd to ask white people what their opinion is on the subject, but it was psychologically a very key moment, because the white population voted in favour. They gave him the mandate to negotiate change, so people didn't particularly like that point of history, but psychologically it was the absolute turning point, because basically the whites had consented that they would now negotiate the rest of the process, and you know there was every promise that this was going to be a really violent and terrible person.

There was a lot of violence in the east of the country, KwaZulu really got battered, but the fact that it was a peaceful transition, and it's also the more you understand South Africa is like such a strange place sometimes, but you know there was no crime, there was no violence, it was complete peace for the for three days during the electoral period. I mean, there was just the entire country became calm, and people had to queue for hours to do this voting, and this, and people were laughing and being friendly with each other, and it was this other side to South Africa, it's like all of its tensions and anger and all these issues, and then this kind of joyful, playful, celebratory culture, and the elections were that moment.

DOUG MILLER 36:32

During that period. 92 Mandela's release in 92 the election in 94 there was a lot going on in at that time, you've talked about the violence as well. You were still in Zimbabwe at that point.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 36:48

No, I was right in the middle of it. So, I had – I will not bore you with all the details – but I had a really hair-raising experience. I had to, I was working for a local NGO in Cape Town, and we were working on national language policy and the transformation of the constitution, and I was on a national advisory body at the time, collecting information about the transition and the new language policy, and I had to go up to Joburg, and I was actually meeting with language minority groups, so I had meetings with the Portuguese community and the Greek community, and we were doing a lot of on African immigrants and their languages, so pretty busy.

It was 90, it was just before the elections, let's say it was like six months before the election, maybe, maybe a bit more, maybe eight months before the elections, and the dates are not at my fingertips, and I had to borrow a car from a friend, because there were, you couldn't, there were journalists upset everywhere, you couldn't get a car for love or money, and it was the Shell House killings, it was the riots in, and it was there's a long story behind it, but I had one of the longest days of my life, I, I had to drive into central Johannesburg with the city being evacuated, helicopters overhead, people had been shot. There were Kasspirs everywhere, there were armed people everywhere. It was one of the craziest days of my life.

And very interestingly, in the CUSO group were people who had been in Brazzaville during when the war broke out, the Civil War broke out in the Congo Republic, and other people have been in Angola and Mozambique, and people were talking about how you think your day is going normally, and then everything, the wheels come off, and South Africa was there, we were on the edge over and over again.

So there was third force concerns there was the very destabilized and violent situation in KwaZulu-Natal and Durban, but, but right in the heart of Johannesburg, we almost had a coup d'état, and you know, anything could have happened, so there were crazy days, and even in Cape Town, where I was, but there were bombs going off, and I mean, the irony of the irony is that when I was a child, there were bombs going off in Montreal as well, but for a different reason, but you know, you actually know what the sound of those things are, so, so, yeah, I can't tell you that right up until the election nobody knew if we were going to make it or not, and then once we got the election, there was kind of a national consensus, and then everything began to move forward.

AMY KALER 39:25

Go back to a couple of things that you've mentioned that are out there, and I'll just say what both of them are. One is you mentioned CUSO, and that's an organization that comes up time and again in, in, in these interviews, so I wondered if you could say a bit more about your interactions with your involvement with CUSO, and the other is just to, to back across the ocean to Montreal, and you mentioned, you know, bombs going off in your childhood. I was a transplant to Montreal, so I didn't have that experience, which brings us to the divides in Quebec, you know, Francophone majority, Anglophone minority, McGill was very much of the Anglophone minority, and I, I would say one of the things the McGill South Africa Committee did not do particularly well was engage with either our francophone peers counterparts or with the fact that people made jokes about McGill being like Rhodesia or something, but with the fact that we were a minority in a majority province, so I wondered if you had any thoughts about either of those, CUSO or the McGill work vis-à-vis the, you know, the rest of the province, the Francophone majority.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 40:55

There's a very good question, so just on CUSO, CUSO was and youth, a cooperant sending organization, but CUSO had matured in a very special way. So, when I lived in Zimbabwe, I knew a number of CUSO cooperants, but I wasn't working for CUSO, I was studying at the time, but CUSO had kind of evolved into understanding that development issues had shifted. So there had been a thing at a particular point in time of sending young, enthusiastic North Americans through various mechanisms to the South, present company included, to help people with various developmental issues that they had to deal with, education, healthcare, agriculture, agriculture extension, whatever, but by the 80s and 90s, many of these developing world economies had gotten more sophisticated, and there was more national competence.

So particularly in its relationship to South Africa, CUSO I think took a very progressive stance of not sending young naive whatever people to help, which is not a bad thing, but it's just they shifted more to really Canadian technical people who go into existing organizations and do capacity building and support, so not run the show, not teach the children, not, you know, dig the wells, whatever they were doing, but really work on the capacity of the civil society to improve what it was doing, whether it be fundraising or there was a lot of useful work, very good work in cooperation with the Quebec equivalents to go on.

Social housing, for example, which was already a huge issue in South Africa, but was about to go on to a completely different scale, and so I, when I moved to South Africa, I got hired by a South African NGO, completely Indigenous NGO, but then CUSO came to me and said, "Listen, we'd be happy to support your salary”, and, of course we all had no money, so that was really welcome. But there was a very important social network between the CUSO cooperants in South Africa. We met regularly. We had Joanne Noland was running the program, who was extremely fantastic, dedicated, wonderful human being who's passed on since then, but really sadly, sadly, but gave us immense support, and including psychological support, because when we were going through the transition, it was rocky. I mean, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a lot of crime and violence, and there was a lot of support from that. So, CUSO really delivered.

There's more story to that, that I won't go into right now, but I was telling Doug, I ended up as the elected by the sort of world cooperant movement to be the first cooperant to serve on the board, which then took me back into Canadian realities, while Canada was shifting to another paradigm again, so not necessarily appreciating what everything CUSO had brought to the table.

Then the issue of Quebec, and the issue, so without being too crass, I think that South Africa was a particularly Anglo-American issue. It's part of the Anglosphere, it's part of British history, and, and, and an English-speaking country, and in some sense, so it was probably more alert. Generally, I found that the social movements in Quebec were much more oriented to Latin America. There was much more solidarity between French speakers and Spanish speakers. Many of our colleagues could speak Spanish, and there was Sandinista support, and El Salvador support, and various other initiatives. However, there was also a lot of cooperation going on in Africa, and including both Anglophone and Francophone Africa. So, we had a lot of colleagues who had lived in Mozambique, in the Lusophone countries, or had lived in, you know, anything, Rwanda, Congo, Senegal, so there was fluidity in the conversations about what we were talking about.

But I don't think was by accident that McGill was the university that was mainly leading the South African discussions. I don't think it ranked at the same level, it didn't mean that it didn't matter, and we did have a number of joint events with UQAM in particular, but like Université de Montréal, I don't remember this being really a hot issue. But it didn't mean that people were not dealing with other social justice issues, but there was a kind of geo-linguistic interest that made McGill particularly attached to this issue,

DOUG MILLER 45:37

Very comprehensive.

AMY KALER 45:41

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

DOUG MILLER 45:43

Well, I was about to pass it to you anyway, Amy. And finally, I mean, if there's more, we can talk more, but I

AMY KALER 45:53

Sure, I mean, I can go on for ages, but I do respect Nigel's time, and it's the end of the work day, and for you it's, it's quite early, so maybe we should wrap up fairly, fairly quickly. I was just sort of bouncing off Nigel's commentary, it's another, and I remember sort of moment, but and I remember the Central American struggles as being very vivid, this, maybe Central America is geographically closer, as Nigel says maybe there's something about sort of sympathies between francophones and people who speak Spanish, and so forth, but I do remember as I was sort of coming to understand the world, I guess, and you know, starting to move a little bit away from that sort of naive liberalism that just says racism is bad and that's all there is to it.

There was a lot of that learning came from what we heard and what we learned about Central America, and Nicaragua, in particular, lots and lots of solidarity and support, a fair bit of romanticization of the Sandinistas, but that was their, not phrasing this terribly well, I remember learning a lot about, sort of, I don't know how the world works from the material that Central American solidarity activists were producing that was very influential, or that sort of enabled me to see that you know what's going on, not just in South Africa, but in the region more generally, is similar.

And I, you know, I have no data to support this or anything at all, but I'm wondering if so the people at McGill and the activists who've gotten pulled into Central American solidarity, it was sort of a natural thing. It was an easy thing to also put some of their energies into anti-apartheid and sort of support for the frontline states work, so just the resonances between those two struggles as they manifested at it, you know, university campus on the other side of the world. And I, there is one question from Gwen, which I told her I'd be sure to ask Nigel, and that is the death of Dulcie September. Do you recall that? Do you have any thoughts about that? Was that significant in any way? So, I'll stop at the moment.

NIGEL CRAWHALL

There’s a whole bunch of questions.

AMY KALER 48:53

Okay, there sure are. I do this for a living.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 49:00

So, you also have to remember that in the midst of all of this the government of Grenada was overthrown militarily, so a very small Caribbean country had elected democratically a progressive government, and they were physically overthrown by a superpower very close to Canada, so which was just a reminder of the hemispheric representation of the Cold War and Cuba, which you know Canadians had a completely different relationship to Cuba than the United States did, and you will also recall that Trudeau and Pierre had the, Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau went on holiday to Havana and did all that stuff, so there was a lot of sort of, I think, thinking.

And also we had just come out of the FLQ crisis and started asking a lot of questions about linguistic and cultural diversity in the Americas, and so I think there was, I think, also. People, we had come out the Vietnam War. We'd come out of the terrible Indo-Chinese war. There had been the Watergate crisis, the collapse of the Nixon government. So that was our education, that was our childhood sort of experience.

And so there was a lot of… I don't want to say cynicism, I don't think it was cynicism, but a lot of questions being asked about power and about how the world was organized, and how many people had got killed in this process, and the idea that maybe that our generation was trying to move towards something that was not about victimizing other countries in the world, but that Canada had to be this peace maker and a peace player, and you know, we were the ones who helped the draft dodgers from the United States settle in Canada. Many of our teachers were Americans who had fled the US, so there was a time of Canada's kind of global leadership on peace building, whatever it else its economic profile was, so I think all those conversations were happening at the same time, and in fact the world was changing under our feet without us necessarily seeing that in multiple ways. So that's part A.

Dulcie September. I mean, I was… I, since I came to Paris, I have spent a lot more time understanding Dulcie September's journey, her experience, her assassination, though her, she was like the most important person to mobilize French solidarity, because France had not been tuned into that. France was much more tied into its own historic relationship with Francophone Africa, but, but people here in France did connect to the South African story, Dulcie September was somebody who they welcomed, who they, was an important spokesperson and character and interpreter of the story, and her assassination was quite shocking to the to the French government and the French public, and I think it stimulated a lot of solidarity.

Again, France really was much more caught up in, you know, what had happened in the Indochina War and what happened in Madagascar and the decolonization of Africa. They had a lot of other issues on their agenda, also their own extraterritorial situation, but Dulcie September was a hero for South Africa, somebody who had had a quite a tough life and a lot of isolation, but it really done an amazing job, and then and then assassinated.

And so but there were other things going on, so also just to say, I remember most vividly Albie Sachs being blown up in, in Maputo, while I was in Harare, plus there'd been all these terrible killings in Gaborone as well. So, when I lived in Harare, we knew that anybody associated with the anti-apartheid movement was potentially going to be a victim, you know, the, I mean, the regime, and of course, Father Lapsley was blown up not far from where I lived, you know, and that was while I was there, and I got to meet him later, you know, I didn't, I didn't know him in Harare, but, but you know, I met him in extraordinary man, I met him a number of times, and I, you know, I've got to meet Archbishop Tutu. So, but it was there, was a lot going on, and there were many heroes, and many people who fell. And then, and then also the transition, you know, to go into a democracy.

And I think the maybe the closing comment is about, you know, having lived in Zimbabwe, having watched Zimbabwe's own struggles with sustaining its democracy and accountability and inclusiveness, all of us from Zimbabwe were like to the South Africans, like, don't be too starry-eyed, folks, you know, power is power, and you, you think it's all going to be an easy road, but actually that's not what most other countries experience, so you know, brace yourself for the other part when, for the other shoe to drop, and South Africans were like, we will be the true revolution, everything will be fine.

DOUG MILLER

Right.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 54:19

See how that works for you, so and eventually the other shoe dropped, and they had to deal with all of that, but there was a time, I mean, I, my great memories are also being at the United Nations, and listening to incredible South African diplomats speak up about the world we live in, about what human dignity is, you know, why we must be bold in a multilateral system. So those were heady years.

DOUG MILLER 54:49

Boy, you almost sound like you put the conclusion right there. Beautiful, beautiful statement. I do. Nigel, one last reflection that you have globally about yourself personally, what you feel you contributed and gained, and how it changed you.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 55:11

Everything changed me. I mean, I think this is like very personal, but like I, when I made the decision to leave Canada, it felt like a big thing, you know. It was like it was like leaving that world that had been constructed, that believed itself to be the best and better than everybody else, and the norm, and all of that, and going to discover an entire other world for which I had a heritage within there, but good and bad, but discovering how extraordinary Africa is, how diverse it is, how problem-solving it is, how gracious it is, how welcoming it is, and you know, after everything that the African continent has been through, that people, it's an incredibly dynamic continent.

I always found that South Africa was always the most complicated of all. I mean, South Africa has a really tough heritage, but people do stuff with it, and it's a very creative country, and I think even after having been the democratic system, having taken quite a few knocks, somehow people still really understand what democracy is, and I think that was the last point, is I think that South Africans can tell you more about race, identity, equality, and democracy than the average North America, and I think there's a great opportunity for learning and dialogue there. I think there are Canadians who are very invested in democracy and equality and transformation, but there's constantly so much that Canada and South Africa can share and learn from each other, and that's why it's very exciting that you're doing the podcasting, collecting information. It's a, it's an opportunity for this, not just north-south dialogue, but dialogue that reaches back into the whole concept of the colonization and the regaining of autonomy, and what it is to, to reconcile with the past and create a different kind of future, a more dignified future for everybody, and that conversation hasn't finished. That conversation still going on.

DOUG MILLER 57:29

Wow, I don't think we need to go much further than that. Amy, how do you feel?

AMY KALER 57:34

It's been fascinating, and it's always good to hear, you know, Nigel has a way of synthesizing enormous amounts of information and being both clear and, and very kind of inspiring with it, so, and I think that was on display here. So, yeah. Wonderful interview.

DOUG MILLER 57:59

Well, thank you. Friday afternoon, I'll turn the recording off, but I do want to on the recording. Thank you so, so much for participating and sharing with us. Very exciting, very, the learning is, as Amy says, was tremendous. Thank you.

NIGEL CRAWHALL 58:16

Maybe, while you're still recording, just to say, obviously, these are my views and my opinion, they do not represent any institution, and they certainly don't represent my employer, but hopefully my employer agrees with some of those values. Just to be clear, it's a personal reflection. And thank you for taking the time. I think it's a great project. I'm really proud of the two of you that you're doing it.

DOUG MILLER 58:38

Thanks again.