Reviving the Dutch Anti-apartheid movement 1970

Dr Ton Korver, co-founder of the student goup PLUTO, precursor to reviving the 

Dutch Anti Apartheid Movement

         REVIVING THE DUTCH ANTI APARTHEID MOVEMENT 1971

     “Schuitema founded the AABN and Schuitema was the AABN”, say the people who in that period worked with him”. Sietse Bosgra 2005. (2)

     As explained above, my becoming involved with the Dutch Anti Apartheid Movement was not planned but came by default. After Security Police harassment I experienced in South Africa because of a peripheral activity linked to the Christian Institute, I was determined to study hard and recoup the time lost on the mines. In South Africa I had my mind fixed on getting involved with Reverend Beyers Naude once I was through with my mine engineering training. As bad luck had it, I felt myself driven into a corner with a failed marriage and ostracized in the Klerksdorp mining community because of the work I was doing for the elderly blacks at risk of being “endorsed out” of South Africa. I scuttled out of South Africa on the spur of the moment after being picked up by the Security Police on the way back from the farm project. While cutting, running and dumping everything was a reckless move it was not ill-considered move. I had all along felt that mining was not cut out for me. Working underground as a supervisor showed the daily cruelty that underpinned the concentration camp life of the workers on the surface. To be ignorant of these things going on as a child was bliss; to become actually involved with the bloodiness of it all hands on a different thing altogether. It made me think, sympathize and make connections to the suffering caused by vagaries of economic life.   

     Reading economics out of sheer concern for my own life in particular and society in general was sparked while training on the mines. It gave me a sense of proportion in the scale and magnitude of the drama that unfolds daily underground as the moral side of the huge mountains of rock accumulated on the surface. The mystery of gold taken out of the ground thousands of meters down below the surface, to be buried in Fort Knox certainly was a spark of thought that later assumed the momentum of a steam engine and came on track once I could live out the action plan as it unfolded in the Anti Apartheid Movement.

     So the degree from the University of Amsterdam was the prize I was looking for to compensate for time, effort not lost as much as it left me with a need to understand the lost discovered human concern. I had one thing that drove me from day to day. In the mornings the moment the University library doors opened I was in, had a bun, pint of milk, and the last one out late at night when the doors closed. I was reading furiously everything about everything, scouring encyclopedias and leaving traces in books as the mental journal progressed with the goal to return to South Africa as soon as I had my Doktoraal degree. 

     However, the letter writing altercation with Eschel Rhoodie of the South African Embassy in The Hague deflected this plan. Initially I had kept aloof from radical student activities and politics. But then word was that I had been victimized for the letters of truth I was overwhelmed by support from my fellow students and was soon in at the deep end. To avoid eviction because my resident permit to stay studying in Amsterdam was in jeopardy and the Dutch authorities baffled by the South African action to withdraw my passport, the students rallied around me. And so I rallied and became a part of the action.  I was in with gusto seeing that I was thrown in at the deep end of statelessness in any case.  

     But even so I kept very much to the student movement activities within the University and did not venture beyond that. I also found that even trying to engage with discussion with the then existing Anti Apartheid Movement in the Netherlands, under the title of Comité Zuid Afrika, landed me with a serious credibility problem. During the late 1960s people like Beyers Naude stood out as unique as there was virtually no sign of any resistance during the period. There was nothing for concerned people to relate to relate to in South Africa, especially for white activists, and memory of the early 1960s receded into the dark of a forgotten past. Under these circumstances anyone white who popped up abroad was automatically assumed to be a spy. Besides the threadbare validation I had from Beyers Naude and his friends in Holland, Anti Apartheid related organizations and activists looked at newcomers with great suspicion.

     But with the rallying of students around me as a person made stateless overnight for merely expressing an opinion, meant a base and action handed to me on a plate. I had serious qualms because I knew what I was letting myself into and that any return to South Africa was a far off possibility to say the least. I had sleepless nights and I knew what I was letting myself into. Before I was dumped in at the deep end I regarded the station of exile something like a prison term, something very terrible with only the gallows at the end it one took the fight against the government of one’s own country seriously.

     In some of the quotes above validating my key role in sparking off a new generation of Anti Apartheid Movement work from the Netherlands, a few authors noted my “obsession” and total dedication to the AABN. This obsession was due to my realizing that committing to the struggle was no part time hobby, but had become the sole purpose of my life. This posture of total dedication attracted a likewise dedicated group of activists. Being totally committee I expected nothing less from those who joined with me in the effort. There was a lot of attention focused on me by colleague students who wanted to know what had happened to me; what was going on in South Africa; and what had to be done. The action sparked spontaneously and almost immediately I was running a weekly meeting among a cadre group of students who were active members of the Aktiegroep Ekonomen. This Aktiegroep was no ordinary group; it included first year students, right through to Doktoraal students who intended setting up an alternative economics faculty at the University based on Marxist texts. I joined a stream of action and conscious of a full-scale revolution within our grasp. If the student revolt was spectacular, the Dutch students achievement was less intrusive but made The Economist comment a few years later that no other country in Europe had experience collapsing of establishments more than in the Netherlands.     

     Once the show was on the road at the University of Amsterdam, and once I had accessed the Dutch alien passport, I decided to pay London a visit to introduce myself to people in the solidarity and liberation movements. I had a few people in mind to try to look up. Innocently my first query to locate David de Keller at the offices of the Anti Apartheid Movement ended in my being told to get lost. I had met and worked with David at the UCT. But I soon realized I realized that the South African movements were heavily on the defensive against spies and infiltrators for obvious reasons.

     I then paid visit to the offices of the SACP in Goodge Street. By good fortune I was able to sit down with Comrade Mike Harmel for an extended discussion. This was a special experience. At that point in my life where I was at a crossroads of a major moral conviction the meeting with Harmel was one of those seldom-occurring incidences that make a lasting impact. With Harmel I was validated not for what others had to say in favor of or against me, but what I had to say for myself. After I shared with Harmel my situation as it developed in South African and ended with my enrollment at the University of Amsterdam, he explained to me that given the circumstance in South Africa where the SACP had made itself invisible, it could not risk taking on new members. The SACP was therefore not open to recruiting among exiles.               

     However, he was very impressed with my involvement with the student movement in Amsterdam and advised to make contact with the CZA and the Dutch Communist Party in Amsterdam. He explained to me that this was the way South African exiles were operating in London. All exiles were expected to be part of the British Anti Apartheid Movement, and all South African Communists become members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and functioned members in an own branch.

     On my return to Amsterdam I followed his recommendation. However with the first contact was made with the CZA, as leader and with a dispatch of my organized student group, we were treated with great suspicion. This was no suspicion against me specifically, but the Dutch Comité Zuid Afrika at that time would have no truck with the “mob of that leftist University”. Joining the Dutch Communist Party was no option as it excluded membership to foreigners, and especially active exiles from no matter where.

     With regard to my becoming involved I wish to leave the following quotes from writings of recognized authorities on the subject matter. I need not blow my own trumpet as to whether or not I founded the Dutch Anti Apartheid, as at this stage history can speak for itself. In the notes below there are some viewpoints, which I do not share, but the facts are not uncontested:

·         I did not “found” the Dutch Anti Apartheid Movement, but revived an existing structure leaving the overall history of the Anti Apartheid Movement in the Netherlands not only intact, but enriched;

·         This was a significant achievement as there was a dissipation of energy after successive impulses from the Treason Trial and the Sharpeville massacre. In 1970 the CZA was a lame duck organization. 

·         Among radicals the Anti Apartheid Movement did not find much favor and was often looked at as a civil rights organization on par with that of the Southern States of the US. With the radical influx from the “leftist” as well as the Protestant Universities in Amsterdam the AABN was brought into the mainstream thrust of the radical student movement; it set the Dutch movement on a course on par with the Vietnam Movement. (See Luirink).

     The following citations confirm or amplify what has been written so far:

               

     In the Netherlands, the first organization set up was the Comite Zuid-Afrika, which was founded in 1960 by a fairly broadly based group of people drawn from different political parties. In the Netherlands, the Comite Zuid-Afrika (CZA) had originally favored dialogue with the South African Government and with the whites in South Africa, but in the light of its experience in trying to put its ideas into practice, it came to take a position in line with the policies of the liberation movements - that is, of disengagement. Meanwhile, it retained its humanitarian objects. Because some individuals within the organization preferred to concentrate on one or another aspect of the work, the CZA divided itself into two bodies: the Defense and Aid Fund Netherlands concentrates on fund-raising and the Anti-Apartheid Beweging Nederland operates on the political and activist level”. (Kadar Asmal, 1974)

     “The initiator and key-man in the Anti Apartheids Beweging Nederland was Berend Schuitema, a white and fanatical anti-apartheid South African student in exile. He was already since spring 1970 in contact with CZA. One of the most important points of discussion between the new activists and the old guard was the need for “radical campaigns and the fear of the CZA board that this would alienate its members. Finally on 13/11/71 the Anti Apartheids Beweging Nederland (AABN) replaced the CZA”. (Sietse Bosgra, 2005)

     “In the Scandinavian countries, it had become difficult to recruit voluntary workers for anti-apartheid campaigns while there was an upsurge of interest in territories under Portuguese domination where liberation movements were scoring real successes in the military struggle”. (Sven Skomand, Danish M.P., 2005).   

     “The ‘motivated and fanatical newcomers’, who tried in vain to reactivate CZA, were students from both Amsterdam universities. The group had organized a demonstration in front of the South African embassy against the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Republic, they organized an exhibition on fascism in South Africa in the Anna Frank House, they disturbed a match against a visiting South African Springbok polo team with smoke and paint bombs” (Sietse Bosgra, 2005).

     “In 1971 Schuitema founded his own organization and called it the Dutch Anti Apartheid Movement (AABN).  The group soon established a prominence in the Dutch press by disrupting sports events in which South African teams participated. There were also sensational exposures of Dutch firms trading with the illegal Rhodesian regime, which were carried extensively in the international press. It was Schuitema's driving force and total dedication to the work of the AABN, of which he was founding General Secretary, which won it the respect of the radical student movement as well as the Broad Solidarity Movement for Vietnam”. (Bart Luirink, 1993)