Joe Murray
IT WAS WHILE walking down O’Connell Street on my first ever anti-apartheid protest in the late 70s that I first registered the name Nelson Mandela. Though vaguely aware before, it was when a friend and co-walker Catherine Moloughney began to chant ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ that I was led to find out more about Mandela and the cause he represented.
The urgency and the obscenity of the apartheid system was brought home later when then Bishop Desmond Tutu visited Ireland at the invitation of Afri in 1984 and told extraordinary stories about the reality of apartheid, like, for example, the fact that he had been refused permission to accept a previous invitation from Afri in 1982. Tutu’s great humanity, compassion and warmth was in itself the most stinging challenge to the odious system of apartheid. Continue reading “Honouring Mandela’s Memory with an Appropriate Legacy”