Turning Their Backs On Fear: The students of 38 years ago didn’t run to the nearest authority figure tearful and distraught: they padded-up, put on crash helmets, and went out onto the streets; risking pro-tour fists and police batons to do all that they could to end the genuinely and murderously white supremacist regime that was Apartheid South Africa. (Photo by Alan Cumming)
HOW VERY DIFFERENT the university campuses of 2019 are from
the campuses of 1981. Thirty-eight years is a long time. There will be
lecturers and tutors on campus today who weren’t even born in the year the
Springboks came to tour. To those whose job it is to look back into the darker
episodes of our past, New Zealand must seem like another country. Just how much
that other country differed from the New Zealand of today was driven home to me
while listening to RNZ journalist Katie Scotcher’s story on this morning’s
(24/6/19) edition of Morning Report.
At the heart of that story were the feelings of shock,
horror and disgust that gripped a University of Auckland staff member, and her
class, when, just five days after the Christchurch Shootings, a young, Pakeha,
male student gave voice to his profoundly racist beliefs. The staff member in
question was outraged that the University authorities, upon receiving her
complaint against the student’s behaviour, counselled her to say nothing more
concerning the incident until the complaints process had been completed. This,
she asserted, amounted to the university “silencing” a staff member who was
attempting to confront the presence of “white supremacists” on the Auckland
campus.
I couldn’t help wondering how that staff member would react
if she was somehow transported back in time 38 years to the University of Otago
campus of 1981.
Rough-and-ready polling conducted during that year’s
Orientation Week had indicated that while roughly 60 percent of the student
body opposed the forthcoming tour of the Springbok rugby team from Apartheid
South Africa, at least a third of the student body supported the tour.
Determined to organise this large percentage of the student
body, a young post-graduate history student and tutor by the name of
Michael Laws (later to become a controversial National Party, then NZ First,
Member of Parliament, and, later still, an even more controversial talk-back
host and Mayor of Whanganui) formed what he called the “Students Civil Rights
University Movement” (SCRUM). As the months went by, the membership of SCRUM
increased to number hundreds of highly vocal student supporters of the
Springbok Tour.
All-too-aware of the sizeable number of pro-tour students on
campus, I felt obliged, as the editor of the Otago University Students
Association’s newspaper, “Critic”, to invite Laws to submit a weekly opinion
column. He accepted with alacrity, and “Dragonfly” was born. The subject matter
of “Dragonfly” was by no means limited to the Tour, Laws was equally vociferous
on a broad range of social issues – all of them approached from a decidedly
(and, at times, outrageously) right-wing perspective.
Though many of my comrades urged me to do so, I never once
considered what we would today call “de-platforming” Michael Laws. The student
newspaper was paid for by the student body, and a significant part of that body
were staunchly right-wing in their opinions. It was always my view that, in
spite of my personal distaste for conservative students’ opinions, they had a
right to see them represented on the pages of their newspaper. Certainly, they
had no less a right to representation than those students who, like myself,
viewed matters from a radically left-wing perspective.
I can only imagine how the staff member in Katie Scotcher’s
story would have responded to Michael Laws. A champion New Zealand debater, he
would, I suspect, have made a considerably more cogent case for his views than
the rather unfortunate-sounding young man in her class. Indeed, she would have
been required to do what my old history professor, John Omer-Cooper, did when,
in the early months of 1981, he squared-off against Laws, his former student,
in the Main Common Room, in a white-hot debate on whether the Springbok Tour
should proceed.
Omer-Cooper, in front of hundreds of students, won that
debate. Not by silencing Laws, but by simply out-arguing him. The professor had
spent much of his life in southern Africa. He knew of what he spoke – and everybody
in the MCR that day could see that he did.
I have never forgotten the professor’s response to Laws’
crowning accusation that he was abandoning the right thing for the expedient
thing:
“Sometimes, Michael,” the professor said quietly, “the right
thing, and the expedient thing, are the same thing.”
It seems to me, still, even after the passage of 38 years,
that Professor John Omer-Cooper’s command of the evidence; his obvious moral
commitment to the cause of racial equality; and his quiet dignity (in the face
of all the rhetorical slings and arrows Laws could hurl at him) provided that
student audience with a truly magnificent example of what a university was –
and still should be – about.
Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Scotcher’s story was
the staff member’s statement that after the confrontation with the young “white
supremacist” a significant number of her students stopped coming to class. The
contrast between these students’ response to overtly racist behaviour, and the
response of Otago students to the provocations of SCRUM and the violence of the
Police and the “Rugby Thugs” off-campus, is stark. The students of 38 years ago
didn’t run to the nearest authority figure tearful and distraught: they
padded-up, put on crash helmets, and went out onto the streets; risking
pro-tour fists and police batons to do all that they could to end the genuinely
and murderously white supremacist regime that was Apartheid South Africa.
What a pity that the staff member in Scotcher’s story didn’t
present the infamous “Dawn Raids” against Pasifika immigrants (which triggered
the young man’s outburst) as proof of how far this country has come since the
days of Rob Muldoon and his ilk. She could have reminded her students that,
even then, in the 1970s, there were thousands of horrified New Zealanders
prepared to challenge the racist policies of their government.
Because that, in the end, is the point. By joining together
in solidarity with the victims of imperialism and colonialism; by facing down
both the personal and institutional racism that is its toxic legacy; we can
bring it to an end. Public outrage halted the Dawn Raids. Apartheid South
Africa is no more.
The evil of racism, again on the rise, will not be defeated
by hiding from it and issuing complaints, but by confronting it openly and
fearlessly – as tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders did in the aftermath of the
Christchurch tragedy.
In the words of that pioneer of African-American civil
rights, the freed slave, Frederick Douglass:
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate
agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want
rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or
it may be both. But it must be a struggle.”
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 25 June 2019.
