Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
Phil Amos, who died in June 2007, aged 81, was
another hero of the Peace Squadron. In 1976, as a result of one of its very
first protests on Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour, he was convicted and fined what
was then a substantial amount, for sailing his small boat into the path of an
US nuclear warship. He wasn’t the only one so punished for such an action
during the heroic and successful campaign to have New Zealand declared nuclear
free, so why should he merit special mention? Because Phil Amos was not your
typical protestor. Until the previous year he’d been a Cabinet Minister. When
the current or immediate past batch of MPs end up in court (or in jail, in the
case of Donna Awatere), it is for sleazy corruption offences, not for a
highminded and physically risky act of principle. I can’t think of any other
former Cabinet Minister who has emulated Amos.
He was an Auckland Labour MP for several terms
in the 1960s and 70s, becoming Minister of Education in the 1972-75
Kirk/Rowling Government. He lost his portfolio and also his seat in the 1975
Muldoon landslide. Shortly thereafter he moved to Tanzania, at the personal
invitation of that country’s inspirational founding President, Julius Nyerere,
to become an adviser at its only teachers’ training college, located on the
deeply forested and heavily populated lower slopes of the magnificent Mount
Kilimanjaro, which erupts out of the Serengeti Plains in the north of the
country, near the Kenyan border. Amos’ Labour government had opened contacts
with independent African countries, breaking the stranglehold of the disastrous
relationship with apartheid South Africa as New Zealand’s sole point of contact
with that continent. Amos was keen to go to Tanzania, which was then seen as a
beacon of hope, a practitioner of Nyerere’s “African socialism” (long since
supplanted by textbook neo-liberalism).
In 1978, preparatory to my own Big OE, I wrote
to him, as a complete stranger (I started by saying: “You don’t know me from a
bar of soap”, a phrase he quoted back to me when we first met) asking for
information on the country. To my astonishment he replied, inviting my then
partner and I to stay with him and his then wife. We did so, spending a
fascinating week in a beautiful setting, being personally shown aspects of
Tanzanian society by a man with unique access. We only spent a fortnight in the
country but it coincided with a momentous time in regional history. It was
during that fortnight that Idi Amin,
Phil Amos stayed in Africa for years,
eventually returning to
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