No one could have predicted the twists and turns Jeya Wilson’s life would take between being born in Sri Lanka in 1951 and living a “hermit-life existence” in Whanganui.
From being bullied as a “blackie” during her childhood in England to helping Barack Obama become the United States’ first African-American president, she helped kickstart the anti-nuclear movement, toured apartheid South Africa with her white partner and won a student election with Boris Johnson as her running mate.
But what she is perhaps best known for is getting David Lange to take part in the 1985 Oxford Union debate, in which he delivered the famous line “... if you will hold your breath just for a moment – I can smell the uranium on it as you lean towards me”.
Wilson told RNZ the Oxford Union was “regarded as the place that produces prime ministers because so many prime ministers have come out of there”.
But, mindful of the abuse she received as a child in England, she never planned to go to Oxford University.
“My father had tried to persuade me to go to England because he had studied there and I’d been there as a child, and I told him he was an anglophile and I wasn’t going to do what he wanted … But after I saw Oxford, I thought maybe I would like to go there after all.”
Unable to afford the fees, she studied hard and won a scholarship. Soon she found herself running for the presidency of the Oxford Union alongside Johnson, the future British prime minister and her successor at the union. She became just the second woman of colour to hold the prestigious title, after Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan.
“My father was a principal, his last job was as the principal in Samoa of the teacher training college. You know, whereas Benazir, her father was a president of a country, and so there were great differences there.
“It was only being able to debate that got me there ... rather than any social or other connections, which I didn’t have any.”
Before that, however, she was on the standing committee that set up the famous debates.
“The then-president jokingly said, ‘Jeya, can you get the New Zealand prime minister to come?’ And I said, ‘Maybe.’ And so I wrote a letter to him. Now, I had known him before through the anti-apartheid movement, and so I wrote to him and said, you know, ‘Would you consider coming?’ And he wrote back and said yes.
“It’s to his eternal credit that he was willing to take that risk and come and debate, not knowing how the debate would go. Because when I was president – and this is quite important – I won’t name the country, but another prime minister wanted to come … and I said, of course, you will be very welcome and we’d love to have you here. But he said, the person who wrote on his behalf, can you guarantee that he will win the debate? I said, no, I can’t.
“And so then I realised ... what a risk David Lange was taking coming there. You know, he could have lost the whole debate which was broadcast all over, live broadcast.”
Jeya Wilson with David Lange, whom she persuaded to take part in the 1985 Oxford Union debate.
She was the first speaker in the debate on the motion “that nuclear weapons are morally indefensible”. The rumour was that Ronald Reagan, the US president, was watching.
“The atmosphere was electric because there was quite a lot at stake in the sense of ... you don’t often get a prime minister coming and debating – they come and speak and there have been lots of them. But debate? That’s a different story.
“David Lange got a standing ovation like, in my time there, I’d never seen a standing ovation like that ... he wasn’t expected to win because he was against, you know, a lot of Americans and the way he handled it … he held that whole audience in the palm of his hand throughout.”
“I am living a hermit-like existence by choice. After 14 years living on the shores of Lake Geneva, I always said I’ll come back home to die, to Aotearoa,” she told presenter Emile Donovan.
“And so my husband and I came back here, and I didn’t want to live in Wellington, and it was Te Awa here in Whanganui … as you know, it is the first river in the world to have been accorded legal rights, and I just love being here and leading a simple existence, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
