When 2022 was approaching, we wanted to mark the centenary of Ada Salter becoming Mayor of Bermondsey and Alfred being elected MP. The Salters’ political activism was always rooted in Quaker principles and the ethical socialism of the old ILP (Independent Labour Party). So we envisaged perhaps a conference with political speakers? In fact, nothing like that has happened! Instead, there has been a stream of cultural events throughout the year, with all sorts of people volunteering to arrange all sorts of activities in memory of Ada and Alfred.
How visionary the Salters were – on environment, housing and public health – has become increasingly evident as our world faces climate crisis, worldwide homelessness and global pandemic. Their insights resonated with everyone we spoke to, and people were inspired to do something which would in some way help spread the values and principles of the Salters.
So there have been walks and bike rides, concerts and art exhibitions, films and plays, planting of trees and hedges, school lessons and children’s books, a street mural, tea towels, a podcast, etc. Virtually every month there has been something, and this article gives a brief overview. (For details: www.saltercentenary.org.uk.)
The Salter story for children We foundthere was no teaching material to tell thestory of Ada, Alfred and Joyce to youngsters growing up in the area, despite its fascination and relevance.So Karen Metcalf and Sarah Mason produced a set of school lessons, freely available on the internet, encouraging teachers to take their classes to see the Salter statues and learn about their local history. For pre-school children, Sue and Peter Rogers have written an utterly charming little book, ‘Ada and Alfred’, also available free of charge.
Bike rides were definitely the most unexpected aspect of the centenary year! Bruce Lynn of Southwark Cyclists proposed the ‘Salter sites of Bermondsey’ as a new Saturday morning ride. It was great fun, with Bruce leading the cyclists to each stop where I told them about the Salter story. That took place in June, but had a spin-off in October when one of the participants, John Clements, organised a repeat tour for his Dulwich U3A Bike Group. Meanwhile in August Andy Bates set up a far more ambitious ride: to Fairby Grange in Kent. The London Clarion Cycling Club assembled at Southwark Park and rode to the Salter cottages and statues for introductory talks, before being waved off on their strenuous ride. (An easier visit, by coach, took place in July. See article on page ////.)
Ada’s birthday concert To honour Ada suitably requires performers who share her ethos. Eleanor Thorn of TunedIn London found the perfect pair: celebrated singer-songwriters Silvia Balducci and Adam Beattie, and they together created a moving celebration in the packed City Hope Church. Silvia sang of working conditions and human rights, drawing parallels with the Salters’ Bermondsey, and Adam’s performance culminated with his amazingly appropriate ‘Song ofOne Hundred Years’, making adeeply emotional impact on the audience.
Our Local History Society featured the centenary at two meetings. In July members joined Salter themed walks led by tour guides Oonagh Gay and Sue McCarthy. Then in September we enjoyed a talk by Southwark Archivist Patricia Dark, on living conditions and health in inter-war Bermondsey, including the medical innovations of Dr Salter and his colleagues.
Art exhibition: ‘The Spirit of the Salters Lives On’ (10 September – 9 October) Southwark Park Art Gallery named their designated community room the ‘Salter Space’, and invited us to curate its first exhibition. Contributions flowed in. Local artist Nigel Moyce painted the first ever portraits of the Salters. Eugene Ankomah, artist at the Salmon Youth Centre, told young people about the Salters and they created a collaborative installation. Leanne Werner took photos of environmentalists. Karin Wach included her trauma sketches as a testimony to pacifism. Over the month, the gallery had 747 visitors. (The exhibition handout is on our website.)
Town partnership Friendship has grown between Ada’s two homes: Raunds, the country town where she was born and Bermondsey, where she spent most of her life. We had exchanged visits twice, in 2016 and 2018. For 2022 we invited the Mayor of Raunds, their Brass Band and other residents to join us for celebrations. Sadly two days before the event the Queen died, civic dignitaries were withdrawn from all official duties and the council banned our concert (no jolly music in public places, please). Fortunately the rest of the programme went ahead as planned and everybody had a lovely day.
Alfred’s great-niece Jo Crawshaw and husband Sebastian were with us to greet the Raunds group, which included Amanda Mauro and husband Andy Farrow, current owners of Ada’s Thorpe House. Following a reception by Canon Gary Jenkins at St James’s Church, we walked via the Wilson Grove estate, with a glimpse inside one of Ada’s garden cottages, to the Salter statues on the riverfront.
After a buffet lunch at Cherry Garden Hall, the afternoon was spent in Southwark Park. Gary Magold and Pat Kingwell told us some park history, and we welcomed the installation of a new (historically accurate) information board in the Ada Salter Garden. At the Lakeside Art Gallery we had tea and cakes with a private view of our Salter exhibition. A walk then took us to Sands Film Studios for an early evening performance of ‘Red Flag Over Bermondsey’, Lynn Morris’s striking play depicting Ada’s early years in Bermondsey.
We were delighted that the Town Partnership was thus strengthened during the centenary year. Both sides hope to continue the happy link in future.
School film ‘Ada’ On 3 November 2022 a headline in Southwark News announced: ‘Bermondsey school kids star in film about Salter family to mark centenary celebrations of historic couple’. The report explained how Joyce attended school on the site where Compass School stands today, and this fact sparked off the idea of making a film. Ben May, Head of Drama, said, ‘The film captures the legacy of Ada Salter through the eyes of her daughter, Joyce, as she travels through time witnessing the changing landscape of Bermondsey…. our film celebrates the extraordinary vision and legacy of Ada.’
The Principal, Marcus Huntley, said, ‘The school is incredibly proud to play its part in the Salter Centenary celebrations. We are committed to ensuring the Salter legacy continues through our history curriculum… including our new Ada Salter-inspired Chess Club…’. Southwark News quoted my reaction: ‘I never dreamt that the sadness of Joyce’s death could inspire such a beautiful little film. To see her come alive and play with kids who would have been her classmates at Keeton’s Road School brought tears to my eyes!’ (See it on YouTube: youtu.be/CkqytP80wZQ)
What a joy it is to have as patron DameJudi Dench, a Quaker and environmentalist like the Salters. After hearing of our exhibition, she wrote to the artists with congratulations and thanks for participating. Nigel, Eugene and the young people at the Salmon Centre were amazed and so thrilled to receive personal letters signed by Judi!
In November Southwark Council are displaying Nigel’s portraits of Ada and Alfred in the atrium of the council offices at Tooley Street to mark their November 1922 elections. Then the centenary celebrations slip over into next year and culminate with a grand finale, when the People’s Company perform John Whelan’s specially written Ada Festival play at Southwark Playhouse on 12, 13 & 14 January 2023.
Throughout the year I kept remembering how historians described the Independent Labour Party, the Salters’ old ILP. It was less of a political party than a way of life, they said: full of fun and fellowship, kindliness, good humour, equality, beauty, peacefulness, human unity, cooperation. During 2022 I had an extraordinary sense that this spirit had come alive again and was moving people in a way that the Salters would have recognised and loved.
With the kind permission of Paul Butler, the Radical Tea Towel Company has taken Ada’s image from the centre of his 2022 mural for Bermondsey and added some of her remarkable achievements, together with her famous saying: ‘The cultivation of beauty should be considered a civic duty’.
The project marks the 100th anniversary of the Salters’ dramatic electoral breakthroughs. Ada became Mayor of Bermondsey – the first woman mayor in London – and Alfred MP, both in November 1922. This inaugurated the series of radical municipal reforms known as the ‘Bermondsey Revolution’.
As Quaker Socialists (though they called themselves Socialist Quakers in those days) and as members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), they dedicated their lives to the poor of Bermondsey. They transformed the grim environment of the appalling slums, demolished them where they could, planted trees and flowers everywhere, filled open spaces with playgrounds, and built innovative council houses still beautiful today. Alfred Salter as a doctor brought free medicine to Bermondsey some decades before the National Health Service, and Ada, on the London County Council, helped introduce housing and environmental improvements (including the Green Belt) across London as a whole.
This project has attracted the support of Dame Judi Dench, a Quaker environmentalist herself, and she has agreed to be its patron. The project’s mission, according to the website, is “to revive the Salter inspiration”. Alfred was a doctor ahead of his time. Ada Salter was a ‘green before the Greens’, says the website: “She knew that contact with nature is vital for mental health. She brought trees, flowers and green space to the inner-city.”
The website aims to be a hub of information about all the Salter centenary events taking place in 2022 including a series of planting initiatives called ‘Beautifying Bermondsey’; a number of specially themed guided walks; a set of online primary school lessons about the Salters; and a new booklet reflecting on the lives and work of Ada and Alfred, to be published by the ILP.
Other events, some in co-operation with Raunds in Northamptonshire (Ada’s home town), include a tree walk, a bike ride, a birthday concert and cricket match, as well as plays, films and a drama festival.
Creating Welcome to counter the hostile environment for people in detention by Anna Pincus and Pious Keku……… Page 1.
So what’s Corrymeela like then…? by David Grundy……… Page 7
QSS Book Group……… Page 10
Recognising all of who we are by Davy Marcella……… Page 11
Ada Salter Community Fund……… Page 15
Credits……… Page 16
Countering the Hostile Environment
On the evening of 22nd November 2021 fifty-one people, from all over the UK and various other parts of the world, took part in the second Salter Seminar which was held on Zoom.
The speakers were Anna Pincus, who is Director of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (GDWG) and Pious Keku who is a trustee of the charity and a former detainee. The aim of the GDWG is to improve the welfare of people being held in indefinite immigration detention in the detention facilities near Gatwick Airport (which are run by the outsourcing company SERCO). The group offers friendship, support and also advocates for the fair treatment of detainees.
The correct name for detention centres is Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). The Gatwick IRC can hold up to 700 people at any one time. There are ten IRCs in various parts of the UK and we were told that approximately 26,000 people are being detained nationwide. The buildings are stark and are built on the category B prison model, with razor wire surrounding them. Anna said that detainees are often traumatised by the buildings and the regime, as they are reminded of past experiences in their countries of origin. Pious Keku said that from the outside they look like warehouses and inside people are kept in small cubicles with sealed windows, so there is no fresh air. It is part of the “hostile environment” policy and Pious described being inside as “terrifying”….
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Joyce Trotman, now 94 years of age, a descendant of slaves held in Guyana, writes as the descendant of great-grandfather, Ben Conright (survivor), and great grandmother, Seebucka Trotman (daughter of survivors), and on behalf of all descendants of the British holocaust known as Chattel Slavery.
Which Government department decided that a visit by William and Catherine to the territories of the Caribbean was a good idea for the Queen`s Platinum Jubilee?
Were visas required for them to enter those territories?
Any Commonwealth member of the Caribbean would need a visa to enter the United Kingdom, once known as the Mother Country.
Were they reminded that the people they were going to visit are descendants of the survivors of three centuries of the British holocaust known as Chattel Slavery?
That the word ‘chattel’ accurately describes the particular system of British slavery in which these people’s ancestors were branded as beasts of burden: the letters DY on human beings enslaved by the then Duke of York (David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History), the letter S on those enslaved by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, absentee enslaver in Barbados (Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains, pp 62- 68).
Punishments of enslaved Africans included whipping, burning, shackling, mutilation, hanging, beating, rape, imprisonment, murder. Were the royal visitors reminded that the chief and earliest perpetrators of this crime against humanity were the royal ancestors of William, members of the royal houses of Tudor and Stuart, important members of the Church of England? And that, in exchange for granting freedom to the enslaved Africans the British enslavers were given substantial compensation for the loss of their human property?
Were they reminded of the 1831 uprising of the enslaved Africans of Jamaica (Hochschild, pp. 340) and the 1832 uprising of enslaved Africans in Demerara (Thomas Harding, White Debt), both of which were brutally put down by the British authorities? Some hanged, some shot down, some sent to England for transportation to Australia (Kenneth Joyce Robertson, The Four Pillars: A Genealogical Journey).
Were they told that the various shades of brown skin colour among Caribbean people, the fact that they have English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish surnames, that their religion is, for the most part, Christian, the Creolese and Patois languages they speak, now provide material for academic studies in university Departments of Linguistics? All this would have been essential preparation for such a visit.
I admire the zeal, sincerity and commitment that William brings to the conservation of endangered animals in Africa. He could now show that same commitment on behalf of the mixed-race (European-African) human beings of the Caribbean who under the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 are deprived of the right of entry and abode in a country that was built on the labour of their black African ancestors. In addition, he could urge the perpetrators of the Windrush scandal to pay full compensation, not just apologise, to those who were subjected to this gross injustice.
Recently I wrote on this same issue to William’s father, in his capacity as Patron of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, quoting the words of Maria Ressa, 2021 Nobel Laureate: ‘Nothing is possible without the facts.’ I now say to William, as I said to his father: ‘Action is possible, now that the facts are known’. No more condescending diplomatic mouthings about ‘that appalling atrocity’, no more ‘profound sorrow’, etc, etc, etc! Words, words, words.
The time to act is overdue. The patronage that his father is endowing on the descendants of the German Holocaust survivors, William could now likewise endow on the descendants of the British holocaust survivors. This would be an appropriate Thank You for the hospitality that he and Catherine enjoyed during their visit.
This article is taken from the website of the ILP (Independent Labour Publications), which celebrates the history of the pre-1945 Independent Labour Party (also ILP), political home not only of Keir Hardie but also of many Quaker Socialists, including Ada and Alfred Salter.
Teas, Talks and Trees: Southwark Gets Set to Celebrate the Salters’ Centenary
The lives and achievements of ILPers and ethical socialist pioneers Ada and Alfred Salter are to be celebrated with a year-long series of events in south-east London where the Salters led their ‘Bermondsey Revolution’ in the early decades of the 20th century.
The Salter Centenary Project will mark the 100th anniversary of Alfred Salter’s election as a Labour MP in November 1922 when Ada also made history by becoming mayor of Bermondsey, making her the first woman mayor in London and the first Labour woman mayor in Britain.
The brainchild of Sheila and Graham Taylor, whose acclaimed biography of Ada Salter was published in 2016, the project has won cross-party backing from Southwark Council and is supported by the Quaker Socialist Society and the ILP, plus many other local and national organisations.
Graham’s book, Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism, helped to resurrect the memory of Ada and her impact on the community around her, including her ‘beautification’ of London slums with trees, flowers and music; her children’s playgrounds and model housing; and her defence of dockers and factory workers from dreadful pay and conditions. She also fought against conscription and spent a lifetime struggling for women’s equality and world peace.
Graham’s book described in detail how she worked selflessly over decades for the people of Bermondsey and London alongside her equally dedicated husband, a noted MP and innovative doctor, whose work for the poor prefigured the National Health Service.
The project’s ambitious programme kicks off on 10 January, when Graham leads a Quaker Socialist Society online discussion of his book. That will be followed by an imaginative series of events designed to remember the Salters’ remarkable legacy in putting ethical socialist ideas into practice in a local setting, while highlighting their continuing relevance today.
“Our aim is not just to celebrate what the Salters did a hundred years ago,” explains Sheila, who is coordinating the project, “but to connect their concerns with the issues of today, ones that remain highly relevant and vital, not only locally, but nationally and globally too.”
Three themes
Based around three themes of environmentalism, housing and public health – areas where the Salters’ groundbreaking ideas made a major difference to working people’s lives a century ago – the plans encompass everything from talks to walks, bike rides to theatre events, including cricket matches, picnics, pamphlets, tea parties and tree-planting initiatives.
Alfred’s birthday on Sunday 19 June will be marked by a cycle ride from Southwark to Fairby Grange, the 17th century farmhouse (now care home) run by the Salters as a plant nursery and convalescent centre for the Bermondsey poor, while Ada’s birthday on 16 July will be celebrated by an evening of women’s stand-up comedy.
Southwark Council will host a ‘civic day’ in honour of the Salters on Saturday 10 September when representatives of Ada’s hometown of Raunds will be guests of honour along with the Raunds Temperance Band and members of the town’s local history society.
Events that day include the opening of a children’s orchard, a bandstand concert in Southwark Park, a tea party in Ada’s Wilson Grove Estate (where she built model public housing), speeches at the Salter statues on the banks of the Thames, and a performance of the play ‘Red Flag Over Bermondsey’ at Sands Film Studios.
Plans are also in train for a week-long celebration of Ada’s life at Southwark Playhouse in October, including three performances of a new drama in the 300-seat venue.
Organiser John Whelan, director of the People’s Company community theatre group, says the festival aims to “animate Ada’s life and commitment to the people of Bermondsey through a newly devised play, workshops, talks and art-based responses to this important part of our local history”.
Other activities to mark the year include 100 new street trees planted around the borough, primary school history lessons on the Salters, and a touring exhibition devised by the Southwark Local Studies Library. A new website dedicated to the Salter Centenary Project is due to be unveiled early in 2022.
[See the Independent Labour Publications website. Recommended.]
“I didn’t know such things could happen in this country”, was one appalled reaction to watching the attached video about the ‘indefinite’ detention of Gatwick detainees. The video shows this year’s Salter Seminar, presented to the Quaker Socialist Society on Zoom at the end of November 2021 by Anna Pincus.
[This series is part of the campaign to end the practice of indefinite detention in the UK]
The title of the seminar was: “Creating welcome to counter the hostile environment for people in detention“. Anna is Director of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, a group which aims to improve the welfare and well being of people held in indefinite immigration detention at the facilities near Gatwick Airport run by SERCO. Anna’s group offers friendship and support to the detainees, some of whom are detained for years, and also tries to secure fair treatment.
The Committee of the Quaker Socialist Society has issued this statement, prepared by Laurence Hall: “Quaker Socialists have always sought to live our faith by witnessing to and struggling against exploitation and inequality.
Insecure contracts, heavy workloads, low and decreasing pay, poor pensions and sizeable inequalities of race, gender & class that so define much of our economy are just such injustices we as Quakers are called to resist.
Our spiritual testimonies of equality, peace, simplicity and integrity demand that we stand in solidarity with one of the few British trade unions taking national sector-wide strike action against the horrors of precarious work that so badly affect their workplaces. Therefore, we the committee of the Quaker Socialist Society stand in solidarity with the members of the University & College Union in their national strike on 1st, 2nd and 3rd December 2021.
We Must Keep the Memory of British Chattel Slavery Alive
Inspired by the sympathetic foreword written by H.R.H Prince of Wales to the book Lily’s Promise, I write in this October’s Black History Month in memory of (and on behalf of) all those survivors of British chattel slavery generally in the Caribbean, but also specifically in British Guiana (now Guyana), of my great grandmother, Seebucka Trotman, daughter of freed slaves, and my great-great-grandfather, freed slave, Ben Conwright. Ten years after slavery was abolished, Ben Conwright joined with about 40 other freed slaves, pooled their savings and bought the old Dutch plantation of Williamsburg on 5th May, 1848. They renamed it Golden Grove, the home of my Trotman forebears.
The following is Prince Charles’ observation on the German holocaust: “It was the greatest crime of man against man, during which humanity showed itself capable of incomparable inhumanity on an incomprehensible scale…” This could also be said about the British slave trade and the system of chattel slavery. In the case of the enslaved Africans, complete cancellation of identity: branded with hot irons as is done with cattle, with either the name or initials of the plantation proprietor, to confirm ownership (DY for those ‘owned’ by James Stuart, Duke of York, S for the Church of England absentee landlords of sugar-cane plantations in Barbados); African first names and surnames replaced by European ones; African religion replaced by the Christian religion under the scheme of Amelioration; deprived of native language with the necessity of creating a patois or a creolese; African women raped by white plantation owners (hence the mixed race Caribbean people with skin colours of various shades of brown, devoid of family life); labour on the sugar-cane plantations in inhuman conditions; brutal beatings, cruel forms of punishments; right of the plantation owner to commit murder with impunity. “… a permanent reminder of the depths to which humankind can sink and the evil it can impart on a fellow human being,“
Observance of Commonwealth Day takes place on the second Monday in March each year. In attendance is the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth supported by the full panoply of the Church of England clergy. The High Commissioners of the countries that are members of the Commonwealth are welcomed into the Abbey holding high their colourful flags of independence. Historically, this represents the end of the process that began with free Africans captured in Africa, converted into human cargo, transported in inhuman conditions across the Atlantic to the Caribbean Islands and British Guiana, through the slave trade, chattel slavery, apprenticeship (the semi-state of slavery); then graduation to the condition of a colonist, still under the power of the British government; and ending with independence.
On this day it is never mentioned that it all began with the trade in humans starting under the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, and continuing under the Stuarts, the Hanoverians, and Victoria, but fortunately the Observance of Commonwealth Day and of October’s Black and White History Month both constitute the “recognition that the responsibility of memory is slowly but surely passing from survivors to our generation and to future generations yet unborn“.
Like Prince Charles “I have seen the impact of survivors’ words and their sheer presence have had on others, in schools, communities, and organisations across our country and around the world” – in the NHS, the Services, carnival, cuisine, music, colour, academia, art, sport, television, theatre, education; Sir Sridath Rampal, Beryl Answick-Gilroy, Sir Herman Ouseley, Baroness Amos, Frank Bowling RA, Alift Harewood MBE, Thelma Lewis MBE, Gafton Shepherd MBE, Norman Beaton, Sir Trevor MacDonald, Moira Stuart, Baroness Scotland, Rudolph Walker (all except for Sir Sridath with European surnames – and now you know why) are some of the names that come to mind. These and all the multitude of mixed-race British Caribbean people under the umbrella title of the Windrush Generation, physical reminders of British chattel slavery, have “rebuilt their lives in the United Kingdom after the Second World War and contributed enormously to the fabric of our nation.“
During this Black and White/British and African History month, while the usual good wishes are sincerely exchanged, there are two elephants in the room: (1) the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act instituted under a Conservative government which by Act of Parliament with royal assent converted loyal Commonwealth citizens into foreigners deprived of the right to visit or to reside in this country built on the labours of their African ancestors under chattel slavery, described as cruel and racist by Hugh Gaitskell, the then leader of the Labour opposition. The pledge of Denis Healey, then Labour’s spokesperson on colonial issues, to repeal the Act if elected, was ignored. Harold Wilson upheld it: “We do not contest the need for control of immigration into this country”, he said.
(2) The betrayal of the Windrush Generation languishing in a hostile environment. There is a warm welcome for the people from Hong Kong and Afghanistan, refugees and migrants, to this country founded on the blood, sweat and tears of our African ancestors as they laboured on the various British owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean so that those in Great Britain could have a teaspoon of sugar to sweeten their tea.
“Nothing is possible without the facts”, Maria Ressa, the 2021 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize reminds us. In our case the facts are clear, the evidence is obvious, no time for selective amnesia. The facts tell us that our joint history is connected with the production of sugar, now patented as Demerara sugar. If we are talking colour, black history and white history meet in a packet of brown Demerara sugar. As members of a common heritage, I think the time has come for us to meet and find a way to live together in harmony as we “recommit ourselves to the beliefs of tolerance and respect, and the central idea… that we are all, irrespective of race, colour, class or creed, created in the image of God“.
October, 2021.
Joyce Trotman is the author of Thomas Clarkson: My Saint (2014), and a member of Croydon Quaker Meeting.
Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come. that your carriage and life may preach among all people, and to them.
then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering to God in everyone. Whereby in them you may be a blessing and make the witness of God in them to bless you.
—George Fox, 1656
It is a great honour for me to give the 2021 Salter Lecture on “Quaker values in South Africa’s struggle” at the Britain Yearly Meeting. I thank the Quaker Socialist Society for celebrating the amazing lives of Ada and Alfred Salter. I had been looking forward to joining you in person last year, but a year later, we are meeting online, due to the COVID 19 pandemic. I bring you greetings from the Quaker Community of Southern Africa Yearly Meeting, which is also meeting virtually at this time.
Ada Salter’s life of activism and political engagement fascinates me, as it speaks of a deep commitment to transformative public service. Born a Methodist and of liberal background, she embraced radical and pacifist views in her youth. She not only opposed wars, she also campaigned for women’s suffrage, social justice and workers’ rights. I was fascinated that the Salters succeeded in bringing politics and health together in the service of all.
When thinking about this talk, I went back and forth in time, looking at my own role as a social activist in the national liberation movement to end apartheid and in my role as a politician in a free South Africa. Even though I was not born a Quaker, the Quaker testimonies to peace alongside justice, equality, simplicity, integrity, community, and stewardship of the earth have had a tremendous influence on the decisions I took.
Quaker Testimonies
Quakers believe in living life in the spirit of love and truth and peace, reaching for the best in oneself and answering “that of God” in everyone. Quaker testimonies or spiritual insights unite us worldwide and are expressions of the commitment to put those beliefs into practice.
The Peace Testimony has evolved over three hundred and fifty years in response to a changing world. Quakers have been faithful throughout in maintaining a corporate witness against all war and violence.
However, in our personal lives we have continually to wrestle with the difficulty of finding ways to reconcile our faith with practical ways of living it out in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that we have not always all reached the same conclusions when dealing with the daunting complexities and moral dilemmas of society and its government.
Growing up in SA and the Values that Shaped my Activism
I was raised on the African values of ubuntu – a person is a person through others. In ‘Guns and Gandhi in Africa’, by Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer, Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes in the Foreword about ubuntu as the essence of what it means to be human as a source for compassion and that idea that “my humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be truly human together.” This is the fundamental principle for non-violent struggle.
The value of ubuntu aligns with the Quaker value of seeing that of God in the other. When Africans were converted to Christianity, some of these values were lost, together with a whole lot of other precious attributes that defined what it means to be an African. Despite this, great African leaders like Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere developed education for their newly independent countries based on philosophy as represented by Ujamaa (Swahili for familyhood).
Education in this context is designed to make all citizens of Africa self-reliant. Self- reliance is portrayed in economics, politics, and social cultures. A self-reliant person does not exploit other people and at the same time they are not exploitable. Ujamaa is about African socialism, a belief in sharing economic resources in a traditional African way, as distinct from classical socialism.
The Black Consciousness (BC) Movement slogan: ‘People Shall Share’ was an attempt to entrench and promote African Socialism while also addressing internalised racism and restoring a positive image of what it means to be black.
I was introduced to black consciousness as a student when I attended a Youth Camp organised by Steve Biko and others at the Mahatma Gandhi Settlement in Phoenix, just outside Durban.
They had chosen one of Gandhi ashrams for raising the awareness of young people like me about the importance of social awareness and non-violence. Gandhi developed the philosophy of Satyagraha, which influenced the national liberation struggle in South Africa, India and beyond.
During the Camp, we visited the local village, to conduct a community survey and learn about people’s living conditions and basic needs. These Black Consciousness ideas of self-reliance are built into the Gandhian philosophy of Satyagraha or “soul force.”
The thread which ties spiritual and social liberation together as inseparable forces is tightly and colourfully woven through Ubuntu and Ujamaa, from Black Consciousness to Satyagraha, from letting one’s life speak to the work of Ada Salter to my childhood to our virtual togetherness here today.
Growing up as a child in an African village, I was taught to greet everyone, including strangers. In isiZulu, when two people meet, they stop and say “Sanibona” meaning, “We see you.” Often followed by “Ninjani?” – How are you?”, greetings are in plural form to indicate we are not meeting as individuals but as representatives of our families and communities. My family greets your family, my community greets your community.
I saw a re-awakening of this tradition in Philadelphia during the COVID 19 lockdown, when strangers started to greet one another. Previously I had seen people walking past, wearing headphones, and not bothering to greet.
A senior citizen in the community where I grew up often reminds me, with a broad smile, of how much she appreciated the gesture when I used to take her tea, when she was tilling her fields in the village. I am sure this would have been on instruction from my grandmother. We probably got paid back in kindness and madumbes (yams).
And as the cry that Black Lives Matter went up around the US and the world considering the murder of George Floyd, the echoes brought me back to Sanibona: We can be certain that our lives matter when we are able to truly see one another.
Raised as a Christian, I realised I made my grandmother uncomfortable when I asked why she had abandoned African spiritual beliefs. I now know that she too was struggling with these questions, even though she was grateful for the education she had received from the missionaries.
In my adulthood, I am grateful to my grandmother, my mother, my teachers, the women in the Natal Organisation of Women and fellow activists in the struggle for freedom, who taught me resilience and the values of ubuntu – we are human because of others.
When I was in solitary confinement, I often had vivid dreams of my grandmother who had died a few months before. I believe her spirit was present in my mind, at that difficult time. I drew immense strength from the power of struggle songs. Often sung in rallies and protest marches, they had the power to instil amazing courage and fearlessness. Even though I was alone I felt a sense of being connected to my comrades through singing struggle songs.
I was attracted to Quakers through my interaction with a small Quaker community in Durban in the early eighties. In 1983 I had been part of establishing the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW), which joined the United Democratic Front (UDF). The UDF was formed as a broad coalition of civic organisations established in August 1983 to oppose the Whites-only referendum for a new constitution that created a tri-cameral parliament for Whites, Indians and Coloureds, while excluding the black African majority.
NOW worked closely with the youth and we were concerned that the youth was getting militarised in their response to state violence. Our own strategy was to organise marches, peaceful protests, and night vigils. During one of our night vigils we invited Richard Steele, a Quaker and Conscientious Objector to address a night vigil as part of promoting non-violent forms of resistance. When he had been called up on 4 July 1979 to serve in the whites only South African Defence Force, Steele had written a letter explaining that he would be unable to report for duty due to him being a pacifist. When he was called again the following year, he refused to serve, and was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
While in prison, he began to question his long-time congregation, the Baptists. He read about Mahatma Gandhi and came to respect his teachings. After his release, Steele travelled the world, learning and seeking a more integrated spirituality. On his return he served as caretaker of the Gandhi Centre in Durban and became a Quaker. He, his wife, Anita Kromberg, Jeremy Routledge and others, were active in the End Conscription Campaign and the Conscientious Objector Support Group.
Jeremy was also an active member of the National Education Union of South Africa (NEUSA) – a non-racial teachers’ union. He, Richard, Anita and other young whites had joined the struggle to end apartheid, mobilising against militarism, and in solidarity with the oppressed black majority. As Quakers, they actively participated in campaigns in support of detainees and exposing and opposing state sponsored “black on black” violence. Jeremy was also active in the Detainees Support Group.
Jeremy Routledge and I found love across the colour line, following our detention without trial. Jeremy was detained for a month during the national state of emergency in 1986. I was detained for just under a year in 1987, under the Internal Security Act, which gave the apartheid state powers to detain activists indefinitely without trial. We were married in January 1989 in a blended African traditional, Christian and Quaker ceremony, attended by friends, relatives, comrades and the local community.
The wedding took place in the rural village where I was born, and the African traditional part of the ceremony included ilobolo, an exchange of gifts that united our two families and our peoples. To this day, Jeremy is loved and regarded as umkhwenyana or son-in-law by the whole village. Our children are their children.
The backdrop to this was that the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which prohibited marriage or a sexual relationship between White people and people of other race groups had been repealed (1985) while the Group Areas Act was still in place, and we were not allowed to live under one roof in a white designated area.
Despite our different racial backgrounds, Jeremy and I had found we had much in common. We both had a parent who was a teacher, and we had both studied science; had grown up in rural KwaZulu Natal and we shared a concern to end racial injustice. We had become activists, mobilizing our communities and reaching across the artificial boundaries created by apartheid.
Quakers believe we should let our work speak for us. These Friends, who were mostly white, connected their spiritual lives with political action, their connection to humanity and the God in all people, with their opposition to violence in the form of racist policy and militarized defence.
They recognized that for them to be free, they needed to give up white privilege and join the struggle for a non-racial, democratic and equal society. All these actions connected with the African Values at the heart of my upbringing.
On Non-violence and Armed Struggle
The question of whether to support the ANC in the struggle to end Apartheid caused intense debate among Quakers globally. Since the adoption of armed struggle in December 1961, the ANC’s strategy had moved from a totally non- violent struggle to one that incorporated violence, particularly under pressure from its youth wing, of which Mandela was part.
The 1960s marked an important watershed in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. The aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960 in a firing by the police that lasted for approximately two minutes, leaving 69 unarmed protesters dead and, according to the official inquest, 180 people seriously wounded. This killing of unarmed peaceful protestors signalled the beginning of a far more brutal and intensive phase of state repression that would crush internal resistance in the space of a few years.
South African Quakers had challenged the abuse of race and power. However, the question of support for the ANC caused debate among Friends. I became aware of these debates during a Southern Africa Yearly Meeting I attended in 1988 in Botswana.
A representative of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) challenged Friends about their ambivalence, and this raised a heated debate in the Meeting, whose main objection was the ANC’s association with the South African Communist Party and its embrace of armed struggle.
Hendrik van der Merwe was a South African Quaker, academic and peacemaker who grew up in a conservative rural, Calvinist Afrikaner community in the Western Cape. He was actively involved as a mediator in South Africa, meeting with leaders from the ruling National Party and homelands, the exiled and imprisoned leaders of the banned African National Congress (ANC), and the internal resistance led by United Democratic Front.
In aligning with the oppressed, HW gained their trust while continuing to put pressure on the powerful. HW explained that when forced to choose a side in a conflict, he would choose the side of the powerless or the oppressed. This explained to me that Quakers can be pragmatic yet principled when faced with complex decisions.
I had not begun to challenge the ANC’s adoption of armed struggle, as one of the four pillars of the anti-apartheid struggle. I felt the ANC had made this decision as a last resort, in response to a massive onslaught on an unarmed resistance, as illustrated by the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.
A way to think about this is that, firstly, my support for members of MK was informed by a belief that the system of Apartheid was cruel and unjust, and that we were fighting an illegitimate regime. I had not begun to question whether or not the means justify the end.
Secondly, the armed struggle was only a tiny part of the pillars of the liberation struggle and that the defeat of Apartheid was due largely to the other pillars: underground organisation, mass mobilisation and international solidarity. Archie Gumede, a stalwart of the liberation struggle and former chairperson of the UDF stated that, “The armed struggle did have some effect in showing that people could resist oppression. It boosted morale” (p163 ‘Guns and Gandhi’).
My position began to shift after engaging with Quakers in my small meeting in Durban. However, violence had broken out in our townships, led by armed Zulu warriors recruited by and aligned to Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.
During one of the attacks, someone had fired a gun into the air, which caused the warriors to disperse. This caused debate among us about whether the use of violence to counter violence was ever justified. There was reason to think, if the Police were not protecting us, we would have to protect ourselves, especially following the advent of state sponsored “black on black” violent attacks.
I now fully embrace non-violence as a method of struggle, as both the means and the end. Today, as a Quaker, I support the peace testimony in full as I look at the aftermath of Apartheid and colonial violence in South Africa. The deep-seated culture of violence is proving difficult to uproot, confirming the adage that violence breeds violence and that we should continue to oppose all wars and preparation for war. However, while always anti-military, our nonviolence must be ever-more militant, supporting revolutionary change in the face of oppression, through mass unarmed civil resistance and non-military means.
A Quaker and Deputy Minister of Defence?
My appointment as Deputy Minister of Defence in 1999 came as a total surprise and I wrestled with this issue, which questioned by pacifist beliefs and caused debate among Quakers and the media. The Christian Science Monitor commented that it was either “a stroke of brilliance or a monumental gaffe.”
When I got the call from the Secretary General of the ANC, on behalf of President Mbeki, I told him he had called the wrong number. When he insisted, he had the right number, I told him I would need time to think about it. He gave me half an hour! I was alone in the house and the first thing I did was go on my knees to pray for guidance.
People have asked me why I chose politics as a career. My answer is that I did not choose politics, politics chose me. By that I mean, it was impossible to ignore the injustice around me and not be involved. My entry into politics was through the national liberation struggle.
Growing up in rural Apartheid South Africa, I did not even begin to dream of becoming a Member of Parliament. In any case, this was not even possible at the time. Blacks were not allowed to vote, let alone to be voted into positions of power.
There were good reasons for feeling that it would be right to accept the challenge as South Africa’s first female pacifist deputy Minister of Defence.
I found support among Quakers who debated the issue at our Yearly Meeting in 2000. We adopted a Statement on Peace in Africa, an outcome and testimony to the Quaker process of consensus building.
South Africa and the world had witnessed a miracle, something I had never dreamed would happen in my lifetime.
We had seen Mandela walking out of prison and start negotiations to end apartheid.
South Africa had installed our first democratically elected non-racial, non- sexist parliament with Mandela as our President.
As a newly elected Member of Parliament, I had sat across from my former enemies in the Parliamentary Chamber and had witnessed a military fly past in the colours of our new flag salute Mandela at the inauguration, where I had seen global leaders who came to witness this amazing change.
Our country had been welcomed back into the global community as an important player in the effort to achieve global peace.
This was a time of change and optimism both locally and globally.
Under the new Constitution, the policy and defence posture began to undergo radical transformation from state security to an all-encompassing condition, in which individual citizens:
live in freedom, peace, and safety.
participate fully in the process of governance.
enjoy the protection of fundamental rights; have access to resources and
the necessities of life.
and an environment which is not detrimental to their health and well-
being.
I have a dog-eared signed copy of the Human Security Now Report that our former Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr Frene Ginwala gave me. She was democratic South Africa’s first woman Speaker and was one of the 12-person Commission on Human Security that produced the UN Report in 2003.
The report describes the concept of human security as freedom from want and freedom from fear. This is the concept of security South Africa had embraced, and which made it easy for me to relate to my role in the Ministry of Defence. We had argued that it was important to increase the participation of women in all the Peace and Security structures and processes, and at all levels of decision making.
We stressed the importance of their presence in sufficient numbers to form a critical mass – at least a third – to make a difference. As MP’s and as part of the women’s movement, we had established strong connections with feminists outside of Parliament, who helped shape national policy and legislation. I could therefore draw on a large pool of activists who were more than willing to help me develop programmes aimed at transforming the role of the military in a democracy.
I became aware of the work of Sydney Bailey at the United Nations when his widow sent me a copy of his book: ‘Peace is a Process’ published by the Quaker Home Service and Woodbrooke College in 1993. This assured me of the important role Quakers can play in influencing high level diplomacy. Bailey was a conscientious objector during World War II, spending several years in the Friends Ambulance Service.
Through the opportunities afforded me in the new South Africa we had fought for, the core beliefs which always guided me, and my new experiences from leading fellow Parliamentarians, UN experts, and Quaker-informed diplomacy, my work as a Deputy Minister of Defence while attending Quaker meeting opened a world not of conflict or contradiction but of challenging questions about creative nation-building.
Speaking Truth to Power
As Deputy Minister of Health during the HIV and AIDS crisis in South Africa, I drew strength from the call to speak truth to power. I was saddened to see people dying needlessly from AIDS when they were refused treatment in our public health facilities. I could not understand the refusal by my government to deny HIV positive pregnant women access to Nevirapine to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child.
When I heard about babies dying at Frere Hospital in the Eastern Cape and went on an unannounced visit to investigate the cause. This angered the Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang who was promoting only the use of nutrition and traditional remedies instead of the scientific approach to the treatment of people with AIDS. I took the decision to speak publicly in support of science based interventions and this led to my dismissal by the President, after several warnings for me to say only what the Minister of Health was saying.
In speaking truth to power my aim was not to embarrass the President but to take a principled stand on the side of the powerless, the people who were dying needlessly because they were being denied life-prolonging medicines by their own government. Though I was famously fired from the position as Deputy Minister of Health, in an act which still casts more criticism on the President who fired me than on my own forthright acts, my Quaker orientation helped make it clear on what side of the principled/pragmatic poll I should fall.
Friends have never been diffident about offering advice to rulers about how to achieve peace. I am inspired by the Quaker Mission to Tsar Nicholas in 1854 in the hope to avert the Crimean War. A panel from the Quaker Tapestry by Mary Mason and family illustrates this Quaker effort to prevent war. The inscription on the tapestry says, “O Mighty Prince, may the miseries and devastation of war be averted. Speak Truth to Power.”
Looking at the compromise in diplomatic work, Sidney Bailey answers the question of how we can distinguish between a concession of marginal importance, a sacrifice of vital national interest, and a violation of personal conscience. He says, “Friends often ask for an enhancement of the moral element in international decision making, and they are quite right to do so.
At the same time, we should recognise that for the harassed foreign minister or ambassador, the distinction between the pragmatic and the ethical is often blurred…Our commitment to peace and justice should be infectious, so that we inspire others to share in the process.”
I was inspired by Audre Lorde, an American writer who dedicated her life and her work to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, heterosexism, and homophobia serves as inspiration. She says:
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision Then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle – A lifetime of Activism
I have learned that freedom is a constant struggle and that every generation must play their part in defending the gains made by those before it. Recently, I was thinking about my role as an activist and Psalms 121, which I had learned to recite as a child, came to me. I thought of an activist as someone who stands up for others, who is willing to sacrifice his or her own freedom to help others gain theirs. I thought of Mandela who said we are not free until all are free.
So, when I left formal party politics in 2009, after serving for 15 years, I had not abandoned my role as a catalyst for change. I feel strongly that wide ranging basic rights in the Constitution MUST be given expression in people’s lives, which includes mobilising them to become active citizens, participating in elections and in between elections, through public participation.
Jeremy and I established Embrace Dignity, a non-profit abolitionist feminist organisation that seeks to challenge gendered power inequalities that continue to oppress women, girls, and other marginalised people through the system of prostitution, sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, and patriarchy. We are campaigning for the abolitionist Equality Model Law pioneered in Sweden and adopted by a growing number of countries. Our aim is to restore the rights of women and girls to equality, life, dignity, human security and psychological integrity, rights our Constitution has promised to all South Africans.
What are the most pressing issues facing us and the world today, and how should we respond as Quakers? How do we ensure social, economic and climate justice for all? How do we respond to the call for reparations for colonization, slavery, and apartheid – as well as the intergenerational trauma that these systems of oppression have caused?
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust issued a statement on 15 April 2021, acknowledging “that the roots of the trusts’ wealth stems from “slavery, colonialism and white supremacy.” In the statement the Trust stated that “The Rowntree Company purchased cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved people while the company itself benefitted from the system of colonial indenture.”
The statement says, “Wilson Rowntree, the South African subsidiary of the Rowntree Company, was also responsible for highly oppressive and exploitative practices during the apartheid era.”
Additionally, how do we respond to the #Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo campaigns? How do we ensure a just peace in Palestine, Ethiopia, and Myanmar, to name but a few places of violent conflict? As the saying goes, “We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children.”
How do we contribute to righting the wrongs of the past? The Statement issued by the Joseph Rowntree Trust opens an opportunity for British Quakers to partner with the Southern African Quaker Community in our effort to end poverty through the work of our Yearly Meeting.
Thank you for listening. I hope I have inspired you to continue the good work you are doing to make the world better than you found it.
Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge giving the Salter Lecture from her home studio. Photo by Jeremy Madlala-Routledge
Quaker Socialist Society 
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