'UHURU! ~ WIND OF CHANGE REACHES ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY hy Robort Gray
A great meeting of Aberdeen students - described by the Union porter, a man learned in student affairs, as unprecedented 'in my 25 years here! voted on May 14th to maintain the Union AGM's decision in favour of a boycott. The decision was narrow - by 5 votes - but left wing students are well satisfied with the break-through in political consciousness achieved. Some 800 or more students attended the meeting, and it had to move outdoors into a quadrangle. Thanks to the rapidity with which boycott supporters got their campaign off the ground, Tory students - who had probably hoped to reverse the boycott decision unnoticed = were caught on the wrong foot. The announcement of the result of the voting was greeted with scenes of wild joy, as boycott supporters danced about and shook each other's hands; cries of 'Uhuru:! were heard, which somehow symbolised the relationship that the anti-apartheid struggle is building between European socialists and the African peoples. -
Members of the Aberdeen University boycott committee - an ad hoc body which has functioned marvellously well - are determined that this victory is a foundation to be built upon. The decision is being publicised; student opponents of Apartheid elsewhere could well mount campaigns for their unions
(as 5 - or, with Aberdeen, 6 - already do). All in all, the supposedly 'non-political' effort of the Tory students to reverse the boycott has led to the exploding of their claim that the original AGM decision was 'unrepresentative', and given the left the opportunity for what may prove a tremendous break-through in this - hitherto apathetic - University.