(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – Joan Gerig’s activism against apartheid in South Africa can be traced back to her experience in a neighboring country, Botswana, nearly a half-century ago.
That’s when the Iowa native and her husband were helping to educate young South African refugees at a United Nations learning center.
“What the young people didn’t know is that they were educating us,” Joan Gerig recalls.
“When we were ready to return to the U.S., they told us, ‘You know, you have to go back and do something in your country because we would not have apartheid in South Africa if we weren’t supported by the United States.’ And so, we took that seriously, and when we went back, we figured out ways to do that.”
Over the next several years, the newly transplanted Chicago resident and her spouse worked with a variety of organizations to further the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement in the U.S.
This included staging annual “Soweto Day” demonstrations here to protest the South African government’s deadly response to the Soweto Uprising of 1976. In the late-1980s, she and others embraced a boycott of Shell Oil because of its support of the racist regime.
The 77-year-old Gerig, who is retired today and living in Iowa City, shares her journey and connection with South Africa in the latest episode of “Looped In: Chicago.” It comes upon the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s visit to Chicago in July 1993 as the freed political prisoner was raising campaign funds (Mandela would become the first democratically elected president of South Africa in 1994).
“There was a Mandela interfaith luncheon at the Palmer House,” Gerig says. “The donation was $100 a ticket. We were living sort of paycheck to paycheck. But my husband and I, we found $100 each to get into that event.
“So, I saw him, heard him – I even sang for him.”
Her efforts did not go unnoticed by legendary Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, who rode an elevator with her afterward.
“He recognized me and he said, ‘Oh, you sang so beautifully for Mandela.’ So, not only did I sing, but I got recognized.”
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