OP-ED: Memories of my mother, Mandela, and Archbishop Huddleston

Lessons about standing against apartheid
Nelson Mandela’s birth anniversary falls later this month, and a few days ago when I began to think about him, memories of my mother came flooding back to me. 

In the early 1960s, I was with my mother who was buying fruit and vegetables near our home in southwest London. The shop-keeper said: “We have very nice apples,” and my mother asked where the apples had come from, and the shop-keeper said that they were from South Africa. 

“I am not buying anything from South Africa,” my mother said very strongly. When we had returned home, she explained details about apartheid and racism and told me about the harassment and repeated arrests of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues, and she also explained how she received a lot of anti-apartheid information from someone she admired very much, Father Trevor Huddleston.