And because of my involvement with Southern Africa I was given responsibility for the new policy mandate which included, for the first time, NUS support for the ANC and other Southern African liberation movements. Although I was perceived by many in those days as being some what to the left of the CP, Jack insisted I should be on the IPG instead of Dave.
However Dave was in the CPGB,2 and Jack Straw, then NUS President, did not want any CP members on the IPG. Amongst the newly elected EC members it was expected that Dave Wynn, who had proved to be a charismatic and popular President of Manchester University Students` Union would be the obvious choice. Southern African campaigning was the responsibility of one of the members of an International Policy Group (IPG) - a sort of sub-committee of the Executive Committee but with considerable powers to decide on international matters. Towards the end of my term as President, in April 1970, I was elected to the Executive Committee of the NUS1 and by a twist of fate became responsible for the NUS`s work on Southern Africa over the following three years. As President of the Guild of Undergraduates I inevitably played a key role in many of these campaigns. There were also major protests throughout the year over the Birmingham University`s role in awarding medical degrees at the University of Rhodesia at Salisbury, as Harare was then called. So when the opportunity arose, students at Birmingham responded in their hundreds, especially by joining the demonstrations against the Springboks rugby team at nearby fixtures and in a campaign against the university`s investments in companies linked to South Africa. The mood for the year had been set in an eloquent speech by Stuart Hall, then at the University`s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, to new students at the beginning of the term when he challenged them to take a stand against racism and apartheid. On the very first day of the new academic year I was arrested for leading a protest against Enoch Powell who had been invited to talk at the Grammar School next to the university campus. But it was also the height of the student militancy of the 60s. Racism in the west Midlands was on the offensive having been clothed in apparent respectability by Enoch Powell`s ‘rivers of blood` speech. I was President of the Guild of Undergraduates at Birmingham University during 1969-70 and I found myself thrust into a whole range of anti-apartheid and anti-racist campaigning. It was only after I graduated - four years later- that I really became involved in anti-apartheid campaigning. I arrived as a very naïve English schoolboy but over the months that I was in Zimbabwe I began to understand and sympathise with the cause of African nationalism.
The area was a ZAPU stronghold and Joshua Nkomo, then detained by the Smith regime, had taught at a local school. The school was on a mission settlement some twenty miles from Plumtree and close to the border of what was then British Bechuanaland Protectorate. In 1966, in the wake of UDI, I spent two terms teaching as a volunteer at an African Secondary School run by the London Missionary Society called Dombodema before starting a Physics course at Birmingham University. I am even unclear as to precisely when I became aware of the existence of Nelson Mandela.
Although a regular reader of the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman at the time, I have no recollection of either his arrest nor indeed of the Rivonia Trial and I certainly had no idea at all of the extent to which his imprisonment would come to influence my life. I would have been fourteen years old when Nelson Mandela was first arrested for leaving South Africa ‘illegally`.