12 Solidarity on the Cricket Pitch

Confronting South African Apartheid in Edmonton

Larry Hannant

Landlocked, peaceful, and distant from the front lines of world conflicts raging in the 1960s and 1970s, Alberta could well have allowed a vast field of aloofness to define its attitude toward world affairs. But some Albertans put their hearts and arms into campaigns of international solidarity that linked them with peoples far removed from the province. The US war on Vietnam, for instance, spawned early and energetic resistance. The first teach-in at the University of Alberta to raise awareness about it was held in October 1965, just six months after the University of Michigan had introduced that new tool of education and political engagement. In December 1965, the community-based Edmonton Committee to End the War in Vietnam travelled to Calgary to present a petition against the war to the US consulate there.¹ Demonstrations against the war were held regularly in both Edmonton and Calgary beginning the next year. Other acts of solidarity in the early 1970s took the form of picketers at Alberta supermarkets urging consumers to boycott California grapes to support farm workers there and calls for consumers to avoid coffee produced in Angola, to help end the slave-like treatment of workers in that colony.²

One of the most spectacular cases of international solidarity saw the Free Southern Africa Committee (FSAC) unite a broad array of people in Edmonton and organize a sit-in and mass arrest to protest a scandalous perversion of justice internationally. In September 1976, sixty-one women and men in the city went to jail to take a stand against South Africa’s apartheid system. The arrests were a local contribution to a decades-long world effort to bring an end to that systemic racism and exploitation.

Although well established in the nineteenth century, the South African system of racism known as apartheid became official policy in 1948. Under apartheid, people of South Africa were arbitrarily placed into one racial category—“white,” “black,” or “coloured.” People of mostly European ancestry, defined as White, made up about 10 percent of the population but held virtually all political power. Systemic discriminatory laws were applied against Indigenous Africans (“blacks”) and those of South Asian background who had come as enslaved people or had immigrated through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (“coloureds”). People slotted into those groups who lived in areas not designated for them were forcibly removed, the Blacks to impoverished ghettos known as “townships.”

Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance. The White minority government dealt with the frequent strikes, protests, and acts of rebellion by banning opposition groups and killing or imprisoning anti-apartheid leaders. African National Congress military leader Nelson Mandela, who was also a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, was jailed for twenty-seven years, along with other leaders. Activists who fled abroad were pursued, harassed, and sometimes assassinated.

Apartheid violated every human rights standard so blatantly that the world community condemned it early and often. The UN General Assembly criticized it as contrary to the charter of the United Nations every year from 1952 until 1990. The more exclusive Security Council joined in the censure after 1960. In 1966, the General Assembly labelled apartheid as a crime against humanity, and in 1984 the Security Council endorsed that statement. The 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was written to extend the definition beyond South Africa, to include other states that practised racial discrimination, such as Israel, with its systemic discrimination against Palestinians.³

Despite the rhetorical condemnation of apartheid by the UN and other international organizations, the systemic violation of human rights in South African was long tolerated—indeed, informally supported—by Western governments because apartheid in South Africa served a useful purpose in the Cold War. South Africa advertised itself as a bastion of anti-communism. It promoted itself to Western countries as a barrier to national liberation movements in Africa that were inspired or led by communists and assisted by the USSR or China. Moreover, southern Africa is blessed with abundant and valuable resources—gold, diamonds, and base metals—from which international corporations profit handsomely. South Africa sheltered and perpetuated that exploitation. Thus, racist South Africa benefited from the ongoing support of many Western governments and companies.

With regard to South African apartheid, Canada has taken to seeing itself through a heroic lens. A 2013 Toronto Star article captured that self-congratulatory sentiment, proclaiming that “Canada truly stood tall. It spearheaded a key international committee leading the fight against apartheid.”⁴ But as Yves Engler, the author of Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation, has pointed out, Canada took half measures at best, following a policy motivated by pragmatism, not principle. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker did adopt a progressive stand in 1961, calling for South Africa to be expelled from the Commonwealth. (His initiative, notes John S. Saul, “found only relatively muted echoes within the broader society” in the country.)⁵ Moreover, writes Engler, Diefenbaker was motivated primarily to head off a boycott by Black African nations that threatened to tear apart the Commonwealth. In the 1970s and 1980s, prime ministers Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney gained reputations as being at the forefront of the campaign against apartheid, taking credit for the isolation of South Africa that contributed to apartheid’s collapse in 1990. Yet both prime ministers—along with apparent progressives such as Pierre Trudeau—continued to allow Canadian mining companies to exploit the resources and Black people of the country.⁶

In Canada’s case, popular opposition to South African apartheid from United Church, union, and university activists predated attention by politicians. Diefenbaker, for instance, had received petitions in 1960 from students and union members urging him to act against South Africa.⁷ Grassroots activists would persist in their efforts for another three decades in the face of opposition and apathy from the Canadian government and, at times, mainstream organizations such as the Canadian Labour Congress. Businesspeople and some union leaders persisted in seeing communists lurking behind the freedom struggle in southern Africa.

Early grassroots work was done by Garth Legge at the Africa Desk of the United Church of Canada and Cranford Pratt at the University of Toronto, who took up their solidarity work in the 1960s. In 1970, they and two other activists wrote “The Black Paper: An Alternative Policy for Canada Towards Southern Africa,” a response to a recently released Trudeau government white paper on the issue.⁸ And beginning in the 1960s, in Canada and abroad, grassroots activists took up a long-standing device of the weak to bring to heel powerful criminals, cheats, and scoundrels—the boycott. Boycotting consumer products, along with shunning South Africa economically, culturally, academically, and in sports, became a weapon in the hands of principled activists to isolate and weaken the country’s unyielding White-supremacist regime.

By the early 1970s, social justice advocates in several places in Canada were stepping up their involvement, and in 1976 in Edmonton dozens of people took a stand not just against racial discrimination in South Africa but also against the Canadian businesses that were profiting from the system of racial segregation and attempting to disguise its noxious reality.

The spirit of protest was strengthened in Alberta and across the country as a result of the South African state suppression in 1976 of student protests against the government’s requirement that most education be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the White minority. A mass march of fifteen thousand students on 16 June at Soweto, a Black township attached to Johannesburg, was met by a barrage of police bullets that immediately killed two boys. Continued protest that day and the next saw the death toll climb, by some estimates to seven hundred, in Soweto and nationally. The killing of schoolchildren confirmed for the world that the South African government had no compunctions about using utter savagery in its bid to suppress popular opposition.

In Edmonton, what heightened the stakes further still was a rising concern among the elite about the fate of the Commonwealth Games, scheduled to be held in the city in August 1978. After almost two decades of international activism aimed at South African apartheid, sports had taken a front-row place in the campaign. Those who wanted to undermine the ban on recognizing and doing business with a racist regime used sports as a wedge. What harm could come from playing games with South African athletes? White South Africans might even learn tolerance by competing with international Black athletes. But principled activists were having none of it, and both individuals and countries kept up the pressure through institutions such as the International Olympic Committee and the Commonwealth.

During the July 1976 Olympic Games in Montréal, sports was almost overtaken by politics as the chief preoccupation of politicians and the media. A South African team was not in Montréal, since the International Olympic Committee had disbarred the country in 1970. But twenty-nine African countries (along with Iraq and Guyana) boycotted the games as a statement against the fact that participating nation New Zealand retained sporting ties with South Africa. Yet Edmonton Commonwealth Games president Dr. Maury Van Vliet continued to exude confidence that the 1978 games would proceed smoothly. However, a Globe and Mail headline that fall pointed to danger: “Edmonton’s games next target of Ganga’s boycott plans?” Complete with a photo of a glowering Jean-Claude Ganga—the secretary general of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, which had organized the Montréal boycott—the article foresaw headaches stemming from the South Africa issue.⁹ At a city hall rally in early September 1976, Cecil Abrahams, vice-president of the Canadian branch of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Games Committee, laid out the issue bluntly: if New Zealand was not barred, Edmonton’s Commonwealth Games would not go on.¹⁰

To raise the stakes further, in the spring and summer of 1976, what was promoted as a multiracial cricket team from South Africa was scheduled to tour Canada. The Edmonton Cricket League, led by president Geoff Williams, invited the team to play in Edmonton. The team was sponsored by South African industrialist Harry Oppenheimer, whose Anglo American/Consolidated Diamond Mines was the largest employer of Black labour in the country. He and other members of the family were keen cricket enthusiasts, funding South African teams and cricket pitches. An Edmontonian with close ties to the city’s cricket community wrote to the Edmonton Journal to assert that the match should proceed because it was an effort by Oppenheimer to undermine South African apartheid. Oppenheimer “is undoubtedly a thorn in the side of the [South African] government. By sponsoring multi-racial sporting teams, he is demonstrating, albeit in a small way, that the different ethnic groups in South Africa can work together harmoniously and on an equal footing.”¹¹ Seeing the impending match as a precursor to what could become a major battle over the 1978 games, Edmontonians suddenly found themselves paying new attention to a sport that almost none of them had ever played or watched.

Activism in Edmonton in support of the anti-apartheid struggle had already begun to emerge in November 1973, when Ralph Mason of the Calgary Angola Boycott Committee visited to describe the history of the colonization of southern Africa and outline the growing military effort by South Africa to suppress the national liberation struggles determined to free people in the region from Portuguese control.¹² (Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies until 1975.) The public meeting concluded with a call for further organizational work among “anyone interested in helping to end Albertan and Canadian support for the apartheid policies practiced in Southern African countries.”¹³ By March 1974, the Edmonton FSAC was formed and had begun to engage in work to help raise awareness of the problem and end it.

When the Oppenheimer cricket team tour was announced, teams in several Canadian cities refused to take the bait, but Williams, president of the Edmonton Cricket League, rejected the boycott, saying “politics and sports shouldn’t mix.”¹⁴ The 3 July match would go ahead, he vowed. But together with the African Association of Alberta, the FSAC mounted a concerted campaign to halt the event. The FSAC conducted research into Oppenheimer’s fortune, showing that his profits “are used to subsidize these tours abroad, [while] at home in South Africa he and others with similar interests are supporting a regime which systematically exploits and oppresses the Black majority.” The cricket team was nothing but a “private showcase acting as a publicity agent” for the South African government.¹⁵

City council was divided on the issue, with Mayor Terry Cavanaugh opting to shift attention to the federal government, saying that it had a responsibility to determine if the team could visit. Councillor David Leadbeater put forward a motion to block the team from using city facilities, but a majority on council defeated it. Edmontonians, and particularly cricket players, eagerly took up the issue. The city’s police superintendent, W. H. Stewart, advised his superior on 28 June that a “number of blacks, the names of whom I shall have in a day or two, who play for the Victoria Cricket Club [in Edmonton], are opposing the visit and are believed collaborating with the Free Southern Africa Committee.”¹⁶ In fact, the game was rejected by eight local cricket teams, as well as by Commonwealth Games president Van Vliet and at least two Edmonton Journal columnists. Members and supporters of the FSAC vowed to hold a sit-in on the pitch. On 30 June, Williams conceded. The South African team would tour eastern Canada instead.¹⁷ In a victory demonstration, the FSAC thanked the people of Edmonton for “a fantastic public reaction” and vowed to continue their solidary actions. The committee’s resolve would soon be tested.

Late in the summer, the contest was ramped up again, with a new cricket team sent on a tour of Canada. This time there was a significant difference—the team included no South Africans. It was a creation of Derrick Robins, an English multimillionaire and sports promoter who lived part time in South Africa. Robins sponsored cricket tours of a number of countries using teams made up of international players but not South Africans. Called the Derrick Robins’ XI teams, they comprised mostly English cricketers who toured South Africa and other countries several times through the early and mid-1970s. In the early fall of 1976, a Robins’ XI team was slated to tour Canada.

The fact that this Robins’ XI squad included both Blacks and Whites, none of them South Africans, complicated the issue in the minds of some people. The public was never informed as to whether any team members had ever played in South Africa, although the FSAC said that several had. Internal police reports confirmed the number as five of the fifteen players.¹⁸

In advance of the cricket match on 18 September, police worked out elaborate plans to stymie protest. Plainclothes detectives attended a 15 September FSAC rally, where civil disobedience was discussed, and the next day the force plotted its moves. The deputy chief of police and four other senior officers were briefed by members of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence unit about demonstrations against the South African cricket team held in Toronto the previous July. “We were also advised as to the usual modus operandi of the F.S.A.C. members and informed of their willingness to use violent means to achieve their ends,” noted Staff Sergeant F. Topp.¹⁹ Police leaders also called together Robins and the cricket team, with Robins expressing frustration at “why his group has been singled out by the F.S.A.C. and particularly on their Edmonton stop.” Topp went on to say that Robins “was then informed of the possible value of the Edmonton demonstration to the F.S.A.C. in light of the upcoming Commonwealth Games.” Finally, on the morning of the match, the police squads slated to make the arrests were assembled and advised of “the absolute necessity of proper and lawful behavior in the face of the anticipated professional baiting.” Police clearly anticipated a violent clash with hardened agitators on the cricket pitch.

What they got was an energetic but moderate demonstration by a fair cross-section of Edmonton society—university professors and students, church members, young political activists, and members of the international community, particularly Guyanese who were both active cricket players and strongly anti-apartheid. When the match began at 11:00 a.m., about seventy protesters circled the field carrying signs and shouting slogans against racist South Africa and urging the local Edmonton team to leave the pitch. “Let Robins play with himself!” they called out. Some protesters carried signs covered with aluminum foil, which was used to redirect sunlight into the faces of the players.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m., as was customary, the cricketers took a tea break. The demonstrators promptly occupied the empty pitch, sat, and had a tea break of their own. Police recorded the presence of Councillor Leadbeater in the crowd. When the players returned, it was evident that no game was going to occur. Police called on Williams to advise the protesters to vacate the field. The city’s cricket league president was happy to oblige because, as he told the media, the protest was “absolutely ridiculous.”²⁰

With arrest imminent, a few demonstrators chose to leave the field, but over sixty remained. The police began their arrests, in some cases harshly pulling people away from the linked-arms group. Photos in the Edmonton Journal reveal both some rough handling, about which the demonstrators complained, and relatively benign arrests in which demonstrators were carefully carried to police vans.

In less than an hour, sixty-one people—twenty-two of them women—were charged with assault by trespass and obstructing police officers. Criminal records were checked. Ironically, none of the “professionals” who were said to be ready to “use violent means to achieve their ends” had police records. They were told their bail conditions included not returning to picket the next day’s rematch. The group, who quickly became known as the Edmonton 61, were processed only slowly, released through the night and into the early morning. Almost certainly without being conscious of its significance, police opted to make the last person to be freed a Communist Party activist with an iconic name—Joe Hill. So as the night wore on, the Edmonton 61 choir joyously serenaded their former jailors with the famous song that begins “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.”²¹

Some of the arrested protesters were clearly new at this game. One produced as proof of identification a Texaco credit card, with a number that the police dutifully recorded.²² But despite their elaborate plans for the operation, police were not well prepared for a mass arrest. Kimball Cariou, one of the arrestees, recalls that the prisoners, having been taken into custody about mid-afternoon, were hungry by evening. Frequent calls for food produced nothing; only well into the evening were they given some cold hot dogs. Yet police were ready to oblige when asked for cigarettes—and, oddly, given that the cells were filled with what were regarded as violent agitators, police nonetheless supplied matches.²³ Entering not guilty pleas, the arrested sixty-one were barred from appearing the next day at Victoria Park. Still, some one hundred demonstrators arrived to oppose the process; there were no further arrests.

In total, ninety-two police officers were devoted to anti-protest duty over the course of four days, and the city spent almost twelve thousand dollars on the operation, not including the cost of later court appearances.²⁴ In their accounts, police went to great lengths to challenge the media reports, including national television images, that the demonstrators had been manhandled and that Black people arrested had suffered particular abuse. (For example, FSAC member Andra Thakur, of Guyanese origin, charged that police had told him he should go home if he wanted to protest apartheid.)²⁵ Police also made efforts to contend that the demonstrators had been given adequate warning about the consequences of remaining on the pitch, an issue that would figure prominently in the subsequent trials.²⁶

A number of individuals and organizations—among them the Alberta Federation of Labour president, Reg Basken, as well as the Edmonton Labour Council, the Alberta New Democratic Party, and the provincial branch of the Communist Party—called for the charges to be dropped. Police received some public complaints about the arrests alongside messages in support of their actions. One business owner, for example, in a letter to police, wrote, “More power to you. Don’t let the criticism of the fickle public deter you.”²⁷

Just a week after the arrests, trials of the Edmonton 61 began. Considering its political foundation, the elaborate process, and significant costs of the police operation, the trials hinged on a legal technicality rather than politics. Had police given adequate warning to protesters about the consequences of remaining on the pitch and sufficient opportunity for them to leave before making the arrests? In December, assessing the case against the first eighteen brought to trial, Judge James Dimos found them not guilty because, he ruled, police had not adequately warned the protesters to clear the field before they were arrested. On 11 January, charges against the others were dropped.²⁸

Beating the charges was an encouraging victory that generated much attention to the issue of South African apartheid and spurred on the FSAC’s other activity. In 1976, the committee, with considerable work by Ken Luckhardt and Brenda Wall, produced a groundbreaking study of the important business links between Canada and both South Africa and the former Portuguese colonies in southern Africa that lived under the thumb of South Africa. The main connection, the FSAC revealed, was mining corporations that drew great profit from their operations in the region and wanted to maintain their advantageous business connections. The FSAC published a booklet called Millions Against Millions that documented the business links. These included companies originating in Canada, such as farm implement manufacturer Massey-Ferguson, Alcan Aluminum, and Falconbridge, and those with roots in South Africa, such as Oppenheimer’s Anglo American/Consolidated Diamond Mines, which, in the 1960s, had bought a stake in Canada’s oil, gas, and mining sector.²⁹ “We were the first in Canada to look at Canadian investment in South Africa,” recalls Luckhardt.³⁰ Following up on this initiative, Luckhardt and Wall, his partner, moved in 1977 to London, where they worked full time on the issue of apartheid in South Africa. In 1980, they published Organize or Starve! A History of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, the official history of SACTU.

The FSAC, meanwhile, turned its attention to boycotts on the U of A campus and in the city. The group focused on two products made by a company with South African ownership: Carling O’Keefe beer and Rothmans tobacco. But its bid to convince the U of A student council to refuse to sell the two products failed in March 1977, although council did pass a motion urging individual students to act with conscience when it came to South African products. This snub to international solidarity by the student council reflected its decision the previous September not to support those arrested at the Victoria Park cricket pitch. The FSAC, however, kept up the campaign by encouraging individual students and consumers in the city to boycott those and other products associated with apartheid.³¹

The FSAC also engaged in guerrilla theatre actions in shopping centres, as part of the campaign to alert consumers to conditions in South Africa and help them identify South African products to shun. One protest, against a De Beers diamond display, involved a fashionably dressed woman, secretly part of the action, approaching a group of boycott picketers. She then took out a chain, looped it around a Black male protester, and demanded that he fall to his knees and start working, digging diamonds. Police arrived and made an arrest—not of the woman but of the Black man.³²

The Edmonton protest and the prospect of a boycott of the Edmonton Commonwealth Games helped to intensify the pressure on South Africa. A potential games boycott was avoided when Commonwealth members agreed in June 1977 “to discourage contact or competition by their nationals” with South Africa. Effectively, the main holdout to that point, New Zealand, had been brought into the growing international boycott.³³

By the 1980s, international pressure from activists was combining with mass protest and insurgent strikes inside South Africa’s government to exert intense pressure on the White racist state. A six-month military battle in Angola pitting Cuban forces and allied southern African liberation forces against the South Africa army and its proxies in 1987–88 stymied the South African military bid to dominate its northern neighbours and impose its system on the wider region. Dramatic change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe beginning in 1989 also had repercussions in southern Africa. With the speedy unravelling of the Soviet bloc of states, the Western preoccupation with communism as a world threat began to fade. Western leaders now found it expedient to scorn their former friend, racist South Africa. In 1989, newly elected US president George H. W. Bush announced a commitment to fully enforce US sanctions against South Africa, which his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had refused to do. The next year, South African president F. W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison, launching the process of introducing democracy and dismantling apartheid.

Activism aimed at overturning apartheid in South Africa was one of the most sustained examples of worldwide solidarity in defence of human rights in the twentieth century. The fact that Albertans, located fifteen thousand kilometres from the site of the injustice, worked for many years and suffered privation and arrest to support human rights principles illustrates the strength and commitment to international solidarity within the province. International solidarity affirmed itself in Alberta and showed not just its relevance but also its capacity to help create enduring and positive change in the world.

Examining the legacy of what has come to be called the New Left, this Alberta example of international solidarity points to a broader pattern characteristic of that time and cohort. One of the enduring impacts of the New Left was its engagement in struggle in support of distant people who were fighting to change their lives. It is true that New Leftists took up causes as a result of being inspired by the determination and dedication of those international militants—the Vietnamese and South Africans being only two of many courageous peoples. But that response was a new phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s. National liberation struggles also raged in the 1950s, and although people in Alberta and beyond were alert and sympathetic to them, the prevailing reaction was at best charity. Laudable as it is, charity differs profoundly from international solidarity activism. Each involves some sacrifice, but solidarity—as Edmontonians showed in 1976—means, at key moments, incurring the wrath of the powerful, putting one’s own body on the line, defying the law, going to jail. That dedication to someone else’s condition—which had first been taken up a decade earlier as Albertans acted in support of the resistance to US imperialism in Vietnam—revealed the principled face of international solidarity in the province.