I have had the chance to read the news a little more this week due to a leg injury (which has also given me the opportunity to restart working on this blog). I was saddened that the world lost Wendy Woods, memorialised in the film 'Cry Freedom.' A great human light has been extinguished and the world is a darker place because of it.
I also saw that Doreen Lawrence was to be elevated to The House of Lords.
These are two almost diametrically opposed women with a common goal, Equality and Justice. Woods, the well off white South African social campaigner, made her choices to join the fight against white suppremacy in her homeland, leading to her eventual exile in the UK for the beliefs of her and her husband, the journalist, Donald Woods.
By contrast, Doreen Lawrence was not given a choice to become an activist. Her son was brutally murdered on a London street by a gang of white racist thugs, forcing her and her family into the limelight. Exposing institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police Force, this reluctant hero has been twarted by the establishment (and particularly the Met), every step of the way, eventually managing to see two of the gang convited of her son Stephen's murder. But this is a hollow victory as the rest of the known perpetrators are still at large.
Doreen Lawrence is no different to millions of others. I believe that first and foremost she is a mother. When backed into a corner to protect your children, most people become tigers, who will fight tooth and nail to protect their families. Doreen Lawrence has become the biggest tigress of them all. With every twist and sordid turn of this whole debacle, with a dignity and assuredness borne out of the conviction of what is right and just, she has not only fought the battle for her and her family, but for every person of colour in this country who has been abused and harassed by an institutionally racist system. She has made this country a better and safer place for all of us, regardless of race or gender, at great personal cost. She has lost a son, but in doing so, in many ways she has become the epitome of the British mother, as much of a mother to this nation as Her Majesty the Queen. Without the contacts and privileges that Wendy Woods had, this woman in her battle has taken on the establishment continually, and has won and won and won.
With Doreen Lawrence in the House of Lords, I perceive a renewal of that dusty old institution, and can only warn them: BEWARE THE TIGRESS PROTECTING US HER CHILDREN!
Eamonn
Wendy Woods: Activist who with her husband, Donald, struggled against apartheid
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Wendy Bruce was born in Umtata in the Eastern Cape, and trained as a librarian before becoming a licentiate of the Trinity College of Music. She met Donald as a schoolgirl when their families holidayed on the Transkei Wild Coast. When they married in 1962 she converted to Catholicism, though she had no strong religious beliefs, unlike her mass-going husband. They moved to off-the-beaten-track East London (in the Eastern Cape), where Donald became editor of the morning paper, the Daily Dispatch. It was a time of political upheaval, as the African National Congress, with its large following, launched the armed struggle against white rule. The uprising was neutralised, and the torture and murder of imprisoned activists was widespread.
Wendy joined the highly politicised white women's resistance organisation, the Black Sash; with them she stood in the city centre holding banners highlighting bannings and indefinite detention. Liberated by reading Germaine Greer, she saw the world more analytically than her husband. "For some time Wendy had been more radical than me", he said in his autobiography, Asking for Trouble (1980).
Steve Biko lived a 30-minute drive away in King William's Town, from where he proclaimed the philosophy of black consciousness and ran community programmes aimed at showing black people how to stand up for themselves. The Woods were impressed by his persuasive ideas and exhilarating rhetoric. The whole family, including the five Woods children, was invited to spend the day at a clinic run by Biko's friend, Dr Mamphela Ramphela.
"Wendy and I realised we were on trial", Donald wrote, "but we must have passed muster because in spite of our conservative views we were often invited back. Wendy and I had never met blacks like these in South Africa… we began to live in two different worlds… in the white world you talked of who had dined with whom, and in the black world of who had been arrested or searched that week."
Wendy went to visit Biko during one of his terms in prison – this time for "defeating the ends of justice". On being told that "whites never visit blacks in jail", she demanded to see the commandant. Biko was brought in, angry and withdrawn. His face lit up on seeing Wendy, but with the jailers in the room he adopted his usual stony approach of drawing a veil between himself and his interrogators. Wendy handed him George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and left.
Everything changed with the murder in detention of a Dispatch journalist, Mapetla Mohapi. The paper's angry reaction made Donald a hate figure for the establishment. Bullets were fired at the Woods' house; there were midnight phone calls, and their telephone and home were bugged. When the police arrived to harass labourers working on their house, Wendy hurried the two men into the upstairs bathroom and locked herself in with them. "It's me in here", she shouted, when they rapped on the door. They left, sure no white woman could be closeted in a bathroom with "kaffirs".
When Biko was murdered in a prison cell the story was unleashed day by day on the Dispatch front page, accompanied by a picture of his body in the mortuary. This lead to Donald being banned under the Internal Security Act; he could no longer work as a journalist or leave East London. So Wendy sat through the inquest in Pretoria into Biko's death. "What I find so painful is that the security police reduced him to a cabbage lying naked on a concrete cell floor," she wrote. "They stripped him of the very dignity we had spoken about in discussing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and they did it because, to them, he was 'just another kaffir', and that is what I will never forgive them for."
While Wendy was in Pretoria, her five-year-old daughter Mary received a "present" from the security police – a T-shirt that had been dipped in acid. The burns remained on her face and arms for three weeks. It was time to leave their comfortable home – the Mercedes in the garage and the grand piano bought with the proceeds of Donald's libel action against a cabinet minister who had called him a communist – but most of all, their black and white friends.
Donald went first. Wendy dyed his hair black and, disguised as a Catholic priest, he drove to Lesotho. Wendy and the children left the next day. She found a border official in the throes of giving up smoking. While he perused the six passports, she distracted him with advice on a drug that would help him cope in a post-tobacco life. Bleary-eyed, he stamped the passports.
London was not as exciting but it was busy. They settled in Surbiton, south London and Donald raced around the world campaigning against apartheid, while Wendy saw to the children, worked for the Canon Collins educational trust and Amnesty International, collected books for Fort Hare, Nelson Mandela's old university, and wrote articles for the cause.
As a trustee of the Mandela statue fund, initiated by Donald before his death, she unveiled the statue with the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Parliament Square, London, in the presence of the former president. The Donald Woods Foundation, which she founded, has built clinics in the impoverished rural Eastern Cape. Wendy and her family are repaying a debt to the country that allowed them to play a small but significant role in its developing story.
Denis Herbstein
Wendy Heather Woods, human rights campaigner: born Umtata, South Africa 5 February 1941; married 1962 Donald Woods (died 2001; three sons, two daughters, and one son deceased); died London 19 May 2013.
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Baroness Lawrence: Stephen's mother Doreen set to join House of Lords as Labour peer
Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence who was murdered in a racist attack in 1993, is to be made a Labour peer in the House of Lords.
The Independent understands the Cabinet Office will make the announcement tomorrow.
Ms Lawrence campaigned tirelessly for her son’s killers to be brought to justice after he was stabbed to death at a bus stop in south east London aged 18. Ms Lawrence believed the Metropolitan Police’s subsequent investigation was flawed, involving elements of racism.
In 1999 the Macpherson Inquiry established the Met police was ‘institutionally racist.’
Ms Lawrence also founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust and sits on panels within the Home Office.
In May 2011, following a cold case review, it was announced two of the original suspects, Gary Dobson and David Norris were to stand trial for Stephen’s murder. In January 2012, both Dobson and Norris were found guilty of murder and were ordered to spend a minimum of 15 years in prison.
Doreen Lawrence is an inspiration and a fighter for Equality and Justice, in further news this week, she will utilise her new found position to take forward the struggle of people who are often voiceless in society and ignored by the establishment. Here is a further article about this courageous woman from the news papers this week...
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The Home Office faces investigation by the equalities watchdog over stop-and-check operations condemned by new Labour peer Doreen Lawrence.
The Independent revealed today that officials had conducted a series of “racist and intimidatory” spot checks to search for illegal immigrants in the wake of the Government's “go home or face arrest” campaign.
Officers wearing stab vests conducted random checks near stations in the London suburbs of Walthamstow, Kensal Green, Stratford and Cricklewood over the past three days. Nationwide, more than 130 alleged “immigration offenders” have been arrested including in Durham, Manchester and Somerset.
Speaking this morning Mrs Lawrence said: “Why would you focus mainly on people of colour?
”I'm sure there's illegal immigrants from all countries, but why would you focus that on people of colour, and I think racial profiling is coming into it.“
The mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, asked if the spot-checks were a cause for her to take up in her new role in the House of Lords, replied: ”Definitely so.“
Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, said she had received reports from constituents who had been stopped at around 7am yesterday outside the train station by a team of around a dozen Home Office officials.
“I’ve been told they were only stopping people who looked Asian or African and not anyone who was white,” she said. “This kind of fishing expedition in public place is entirely unacceptable. I will not have my constituents treated in such a manner.”
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is now set to look into what happened, as well as the Government's controversial poster van warning immigrants of the risk of staying in Britain illegally.
A spokesman said: ”The Commission is writing today to the Home Office about these reported operations, confirming that it will be examining the powers used and the justification for them, in order to assess whether unlawful discrimination took place.
“The letter will also ask questions about the extent to which the Home Office complied with its public sector equality duty when planning the recent advertising campaign targeted at illegal migration.”
The Home Office denied that its raids were connected to the “go home” vans. However, officials could provide no evidence of similar “random searches” taking place in the past.
Onlookers described their shock at the operations, with one member of the public saying it was akin to “Nazi Germany”. The Labour MP Barry Gardiner had written to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, demanding an investigation into the checks which he said violated “fundamental freedoms”. The raids come just a few months after Ms May took direct responsibility for immigration from the disbanded UK Border Agency.
“We do not yet live in a society where the police or any other officers of the law are entitled to detain people without reasonable justification and demand their papers,” Mr Gardiner wrote. “The actions of your department would however appear to be hastening us in that direction.”
Witnesses who saw the operations in London claimed the officers stopped only non-white individuals, and in Kensal Green said that when questioned, the immigration officials became aggressive.
Phil O'Shea told the Kilburn Times: “They appeared to be stopping and questioning every non-white person, many of whom were clearly ordinary Kensal Green residents going to work. When I queried what was going on, I was threatened with arrest for obstruction and was told to 'crack on'.”
Another witness, Matthew Kelcher, said: “Even with the confidence of a free-born Englishman who knows he has nothing to hide, I found this whole experience to be extremely intimidating. They said they were doing random checks, but a lot of people who use that station are tourists so I don't know what message that sends out to the world.”
The Home Office said a Ukrainian woman aged 33, an Indian man aged 44 and a 59-year-old Brazilian woman had been detained as part of the checks at Kensal Green. At Walthamstow Central station, immigration officials arrested 14 people after officers questioned people to check if they were in the UK illegally.
Christine Quigley tweeted: “Sounds like UKBA checkpoint today in Walthamstow only stopping minority ethnic people. FYI UKBA - not all British people are white.”
In Stratford, photographs posted on Twitter appeared to show Home Office officials talking to men of Asian origin. The Home Office said a Bangladeshi man had been arrested on suspected immigration offences. In Cricklewood on Tuesday in a joint operation with the Met, more than 60 people were questioned near the railway station. Police said three men were arrested for “immigration matters”, and 27 men received notices requiring them to surrender at Eaton House immigration centre for further investigation.
Muhammed Butt, leader of Brent Council, said he believed that there was no coincidence between the “go home or face arrest” van and the new random checks in Kensal Green. “I am sure it is probably connected and it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth,” he said. “These so-called spot checks are not only intimidating but they are also racist and divisive. It appears from speaking to people who witnessed what happened in Kensal Green that it was only black and Asian-looking people who were asked to prove their identity. What about the white Australians and New Zealanders who may have overstayed their visas?”
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