Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

The House will want to join me in paying tribute to the hon. Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis) for his speech. If he will let me say something slightly less serious, I hope that the Labour party will go on enjoying that banner from now until kingdom come.

Today’s speeches make up a tapestry. Nelson Mandela was one of the first people I knew who argued for a non-racial South Africa—not a multiracial one, but a non-racial one. I ask this question as a challenge to us in this country: when will the colour of my skin be as important as, but no more important than, the colour of my eyes and the colour of my hair? We have not got that far yet.

By chance, I was young and in South Africa when the National party won the 1948 election. I was there at the opening of the Voortrekker monument. I had returned to this country when Smuts died.

I have a memory from 2002, during the Queen’s 50th anniversary on the throne, of going to the chapel at St James’s palace, where the tree with 54 leaves representing the Commonwealth members was unveiled. There, we saw the sight of Margaret Thatcher two places away from Nelson Mandela. It was one of those things that brings life in a full circle.

Margaret Thatcher has been wrongly quoted as saying that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. She may have said that the ANC was a terrorist organisation. Given that it was involved in sabotage, although it tried to avoid the loss of life, that was accurate. If one reads the book by Lord Renwick or his article in The Daily Telegraph today, one will see that her instruction to her diplomats was to try to get matters resolved. She certainly would not have sent Robin Renwick to South Africa as our ambassador if she had been supporting apartheid.

My father served as our ambassador to South Africa in the early 1970s. The only doubt about his taking the appointment came when the Prime Minister asked the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, “Is Jim Bottomley so much against apartheid that he will be no use as an ambassador?” Shortly after that, my mother arranged for Sam Moseneke, the principal of one of the big schools in Atteridgeville, to come and stay in our house with three of his colleagues. They said, “Do you know, where we are from, we would not be allowed to stay in your house?”

One of the groups that helped to make a difference was the churches, or at least some people in the churches. I pay tribute to Trevor Huddleston, who was a colleague of my tutor, Harry Williams, in the Community of the Resurrection. Having been picked as a novitiate to succeed his predecessor in Sophiatown, he was observed by a young man, aged about 14, lifting his hat as a mark of respect to that young man’s mother. The young man was Desmond Tutu, who went on to make his great contribution to the movement before the transition to one person, one vote, and after that to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Oom Bey, or Beyers Naude, of the Dutch Reformed Church said that people had a greater duty to God than to man. He refused to backtrack when the Dutch Reformed Church declared that his view of apartheid was wrong. There are others whom I could name.

We have to understand that a minority of people in this country took an active part in trying to challenge what appeared to be accepted. This year, there have been three deaths, which have not been noted by most people, two of former Members of the House of Commons and one of a former Member of the House of Lords. The former MPs were Charles Longbottom, who was the MP for York, and Barney Hayhoe, who was the MP for Isleworth. Both were trustees of the Ariel Foundation, together with Maurice Foley and Dennis Grennan, who had been a president of the National Union of Students. Some argue that it was funded by tobacco money, others by the CIA, but what is known for certain is that it funded education in this country for many potential African leaders, from Kenya through to Southern Rhodesia. Such people were prepared to stand against the prevailing wisdom.

Occasionally, South African ambassadors—I would particularly mention Dawie de Villiers, the rugby player—would invite Members of the House of Commons, including Conservatives, to come and meet visiting South African politicians. I remember Ronnie Bell saying, I think unwisely—maybe it was a joke—that South Africa should not extend the franchise as it had not proved to be a very good idea in this country.

What was more important was the ability to explain to some of the more verkrampte members of South Africa’s political elite that they could not pretend that they were protecting southern Africa from communism. Every person in Africa knew that communism meant that people could live only where the authorities said they could live, that they could take only the jobs that the authorities said that they could take and that they did not have an effective vote. Why would any African, especially a black African, want to go communist? One answer, I suppose, is that the communists in South Africa were one of the groups that were fighting with Nelson Mandela to try to overturn the apartheid system.

The third person I want to mention who died this year was a man called Robin Plunket, the 8th baron Plunket. He followed David Stirling, who created the Special Air Service in 1941 and the Capricorn Africa Society in 1949. Robin Plunket, with his wife Jennifer, went on to support the society from this country before going out to Southern Rhodesia in, I think, 1957. For 50 years he developed employment in timber growing, milling and the like. His advice was important for many of our diplomats and Ministers. Such quiet people helped to establish a basis of trust that I hope will continue.

The last point that I want to make about Nelson Mandela—leaving aside the anecdotes about how lucky we were to meet him, rather than the other way around—is about democracy within the ANC. When Mandela’s successor was voted out of the party leadership by a democratic vote of the party, the person who succeeded him then waited until the presidential election to become President. As far as I know, the ANC is probably the only African political party in which that would happen. In a way, that type of democracy should be better known and more often copied.

On Europe’s responsibility, the tragedy for Africa, if our longest-standing ally does not mind me saying so, is that if the Portuguese had let go of their colonies in the 1960s, the French, Belgians and British might have done better. Countries from central Africa down to South Africa might not all have been western-style democracies, but they would have been much more western-leaning and much more tolerant of people in their own midst, and economic development would have been greater.

I almost started by mentioning Trevor Huddleston, and I end with his “Prayer for Africa”:

“God Bless Africa;

Guard her children;

Guide her leaders

And give her peace.”