SPECIAL FEATURE
l Irish contingent given rousing welcome l Praise for Mandate for funding trip
DUNNES STORES STRIKERS IN FAREWELL TO MADIBA Former Mandate official Brendan Archbold who helped co-ordinate the 1984 anti-Apartheid dispute at Dunnes Stores accompanied veterans of the historic dispute to Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Here is his account...
4
invited to speak and her contribution was greeted by loud cries of ‘Viva, Viva. Viva the Dunnes Stores Workers’. The COSATU event was scheduled to run from 10.30am to 2.30pm but, like everything in Africa, it overran by a couple of hours. The main reason for the overrun was the uniquely South African practice of interrupting the proceedings every five minutes with outbursts of song and dance. And I don’t mean just any old song and dance. Africa in general and South Africa in particular is blessed with a rich tradition of the most amazing and harmonic singing ever heard. This particular service constantly swung between passionate contributions to the memory of Nelson Mandela and a concert-like rendition of traditional African song. I couldn’t help thinking that a similar service
Picture: South AfricaThe Good News (CC BY 2.0)
MY LAST visit to Soweto was in 1994 when I spent six weeks travelling between Johannesburg and Pretoria as part of a 300-strong european Union observer team monitoring the first ever democratic elections in South Africa. I was back in Soweto again on December 12, 2013 with the full complement of the Dunnes Stores Strikers against Apartheid for the funeral of Nelson Mandela. Soweto looked a little more prosperous this time round as our group strolled in the bright sunshine from the Hector Peterson Memorial and Museum on Khumalo Street to the former home of Nelson Mandela on Vilakazi Street in Orlando West. The place was teeming with local inhabitants, tourists and many, mostly young, white South Africans who had come to say a final farewell to their beloved former President, or ‘Madiba’ as they call him in South Africa. There was none of the tension I experienced back in 1994 and all present seemed determined to celebrate the life of Mandela as opposed to mourning his passing. The next day we returned to Soweto, this time to a memorial service organised by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and held in the Regina Mundi Catholic Church. This particular church played a very significant part in the South African liberation struggle and it was often the target for police raids. Indeed it was not unknown for police to pursue anti-Apartheid activists into the church and even open fire on them while inside. If the day before’s events seemed like a celebration, the COSATU service was an out-and-out hooley. The church was packed with a host of South African trade union delegations and the Dunnes Strikers were given a rousing welcome. Shop Steward Karen Gearon was
The Dunnes Strikers with South African friends during their recent visit
back home in Dublin might just tempt a few of us old atheists back to the fold. Three of the strikers – Mary Manning, Karen Gearon and Liz Deasy – travelled ahead of the main group and formed part of the official Irish government delegation at the main event in the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg. The Irish delegation was led by President Michael D. Higgins and Tanaiste eamon Gilmore. With the late arrival of Cathryn O’Reilly, the full contingent of the Dunnes strikers was united for the first time in many years at the COSATU service in Soweto on December 13. It was fitting that the strikers were finally together as a group in Soweto, a location that was in many ways at the heartbeat of the South African struggle. What started out on July 19,
1984, in Dublin’s Henry Street seemed to us to have reached its logical conclusion in Soweto in 2013 as we paid our own small tribute to the memory of Nelson Mandela. After finally tearing ourselves away from the COSATU memorial service, we negotiated our way through the heavy Johannesburg traffic to the suburb of Houghton and the Nelson Mandela Memory Centre. The occasion was an evening of poetry, song and personal tributes to Mandela. Karen Gearon was once again called upon to speak and, as always, she was a superb ambassador for the strikers and the union. Those of us who were lucky enough to be in Houghton that night heard a very moving – and sometimes humorous – contribution from Ahmed Kathrada, a South African Indian who spent 26 years in prison, most of it on Robben Island with SHOPFLOOR
y February 2014