Keniston, B., 2013, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick
Turner. Johannesburg. Jacana (276pp.; R220)
Reviewed
by Richard Pithouse, Interface
Rick
Turner, a philosopher and a committed and effective radical, was assassinated
in Durban, South Africa, in January 1978. Turner had, along with Steve Biko who
was murdered in police custody in September 1977, been a leading figure in what
came to be known as ‘the Durban Moment’. The phrase, which was first coined by
Tony Morphet (1990), refers to a period in the early 1970s in which Durban
became a site of significant political innovation in the struggle against
apartheid, innovation that was conceptualised and organised outside of the
strictures of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and South African
Communist Party (SACP). Morphet argued that ‘the Durban Moment’ enabled a
“structural shift in the received intellectual patterns of the social world”
(1990, pp. 92-3). It also had enduring political consequences of real
significance (Macqueen, 2014; Webster, 1993).
The
Durban Moment had direct links to the student rebellion that had leapt from
city to city - from Prague to Paris to Cape Town and Mexico City – in 1968, as
well as the black power moment in the United States and anti-colonial struggles
elsewhere in Africa. Like the rebellions in 1968 the Durban Moment was closely
linked to the university. Biko was a medical student at what was then the
University of Natal (and is now the hyper-corporatized University of KwaZulu-Natal)
while Turner was employed in the politics department[1] in the same university.
The bulk of the people that cohered around these two charismatic men were
students. In striking contrast to the sort of charisma, sometimes cultish – and
all too common in some radical circles, that demands slavish obedience from
followers and treats independent thought as heresy, Biko and Turner, who had a
warm personal relationship, were both animated by the kind of charisma that
enables others to come to voice and action as autonomous personalities.[2]
Turner is remembered as a gifted teacher who used Socratic methods to encourage
his students to come to their own conclusions (Greaves, 1987; Macqueen, 2014).
In
equally striking contrast to modes of leftism in which radical postures are
implicitly taken as an end in themselves, even when they are unable to attain
any sort of meaningful political efficacy, Biko and Turner were both highly
effective political actors. Biko was a key protagonist in the emergence of the
black consciousness movement, an event of real political weight and consequence
(Gibson 2011; Mangcu, 2012), and Turner was an important protagonist in the
alliance between radical students and workers that produced a powerful black
trade union movement that played a central role in bringing down apartheid
(Friedman, 2014; Webster, 1993).
Thinkers
like W.E.B. du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Julius Nyerere and Frantz Fanon were central
philosophical foundations for the young black intellectuals that made the black
consciousness movement (More, 2014). For the young radicals that cohered around
Turner, many although certainly not all of them white, Western Marxism
(Gramsci, Marcuse, etc.) was central (Nash, 1990). But there were significant
overlaps in the intellectual influences of the circles around Biko and Turner.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a primary philosophical influence for Turner (Fluxman
& Vale, 2004; Greaves, 1987; Macqueen, 2014) and an important thinker for
Biko and other intellectuals in the black consciousness milieu (More, 2014). In
a profoundly unfree society the form of radicalism at the heart of the Durban
Moment was characterised by a choice, an immediate choice, to assert freedom
against oppression. Paulo Freire was another thinker whose work was pivotal to
both of the political projects that made the Durban Moment. The Freirean aspect
meant that, at least in principle, there was a shared commitment to dialogical
modes of engagement with people outside of the university based on an
aspiration to mutuality and reciprocity. This was in direct contrast to various
forms of leftism that, then as now, were rooted in the idea that an enlightened
vanguard would bring politics to the people who, at best, were capable of
‘spontaneous’ protest in an almost biological response to deprivation or
repression.
With a
shared investment in thinkers like Sartre and Freire, practices rooted in
ongoing discussion and a concern for the immediate assertion of the autonomy
and dignity of the person the politics of the Durban Moment was very different
to the Stalinism with which the ANC had allied itself, and which continues to
influence aspects of thought and practice on much of that part of the South
African left that has passed through the ANC. It was also very different to modes
of authoritarian leftism, including some Trotskyist currents, organised and
theorised outside of the Stalinism of the South African Communist Party.
The
Durban Moment was a brief opening, a period of just a few years, that was
swiftly crushed by state repression following which authoritarianism forms of
leftism reclaimed some of the political space that had been opened by more
participatory and democratic modes of militancy. Forty years later, with the
ANC having turned to outright repression to contain popular dissent and, with
the partial exception of Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters,
authoritarian modes of leftism unable to sustain productive connections with
escalating popular protest, there is growing interest in the Durban Moment and
in Turner’s commitment to participatory democracy (Turner 1972; cf. Fluxman
& Vale, 2004).
There are
some important academic articles and theses on the Durban Moment and on
Turner’s life and thought. But Keniston’s biography of Turner is the first book
length examination of the Durban Moment from the vantage point of the present.
Xolela Mangcu’s 2012 biography of Biko is largely grounded in Biko’s life in
the Eastern Cape and doesn’t offer a full illumination of Biko’s life in
Durban. Keniston’s book is also the first book length study of Turner.
Keniston’s
book has often been read, and on occasion reviewed (e.g. Egan, 2013), together
with Beverley Naidoo’s superb and beautifully written 2012 biography of Neil
Aggett, a trade unionist who died in police custody in 1982, as well as, more
recently, Glen Moss’s valuable contribution, The New Radicals (2013).
Naidoo and Moss both offer important accounts of the white left in Johannesburg
that, although rooted in the student movement, found its political vocation in
the trade union movement. Both books enable us to think the Durban Moment as an
event with national consequences. But the comparisons with the better
written and more politically sophisticated books by Naidoo and Moss do not
flatter Keniston’s work. In Keniston’s introduction and conclusion his attempts
to reach towards poetic insight fall rather flat, to the point of being
embarrassing rather than illuminating or moving. Moreover the author is not
able to sustain a consistent fidelity to the central point that he wishes to
make.
Nonetheless
a biography of Turner is certainly a welcome event and for those unfamiliar
with Turner’s life the book does provide a useful account of its subject’s life
and political work. Keniston does not aim to provide a sustained account or
exploration of Turner’s philosophical work and so criticism of the book on the
grounds of this absence is unfair.
Unusually
for a biography much of this book is made up of a collage of interviews, long
quotes and documents. This can be a lazy way of working that absolves the
writer of taking on the sort of responsibility to his or her subject that
Naidoo’s recent book on Neil Aggett achieves with luminous grace. But in this
case collage seems to work. A clear picture of Turner emerges and as the book
reaches its climax the narrative that emerges from the collage of materials attains
a real emotional power. Perhaps there is something to be said for a method in
which the author edits, or perhaps even curates, more than writes. Certainly
this method does allow a variety of voices to emerge.
But of
course the editor or curator is not absolved of the political responsibility
for making choices about what is included, and how. Keniston’s primary
political project is to bring out the stakes in the difference between
democratic and authoritarian modes of leftism and to place Turner firmly in the
democratic camp. Early in the book he quotes Sartre describing the French
Communist Party as “putrid” and noting, that “we were never sure that they
weren’t in the process of slandering us somewhere” (2013, p.31). Keniston
develops a sustained critique of what one of his interviewees calls “gutter
Marxism” (2013, p.133) and what he calls the “cold”, “mechanistic” and “crudely
rational” Marxism of Stalinism and Leninism that, in his estimation, is “merely
a tool to organise large masses of people – to seize and exercise power” (2013,
pp.232-234).
In his
generally positive review of Keniston’s book Eddie Webster, in his youth a
protagonist in ‘the Durban Moment’, offers two critiques. The first is
Keniston’s claim that Turner’s support for the official registration of black
trade unions was an instance of clear contradiction between Turner’s political
ideas and his practices. Webster argues that, on the contrary, this position
made prefect strategic sense as “Turner was exploiting the contradictions
inherent in the apartheid workplace and, in the process, winning space for
democratic worker organisation” (2014, p. 149; cf. Friedman, 1985). Elsewhere
in the book Keniston demonstrates some awareness that abstract ideas about
radical politics don’t always fit well with actually existing political
realities, including actually existing forms of solidarity and
organisation. He quotes a former student radical explaining that when the idea
of setting up a formal organisation was first proposed in a meeting between
workers and students it turned out, to the surprise of the students, that the
workers’ first priority for the new organisation was that it should provide
funeral benefits. But Keniston’s position on the registration question seems
both ahistorical and to confuse the easy assertion of abstract political
principle outside of any historical or organisational context with the
altogether more difficult work of making the strategic choices required to
sustain actually existing forms of mass mobilisation under a repressive state.
Webster’s
second critique of Keniston’s book is perhaps more interesting. He argues that
the new political culture that emerged in Durban around Turner’s charisma had a
serious weakness, one that Keniston doesn’t address – an “ignorance of the
existing national political tradition” (2014, p. 150). On two recent occasions
Webster, speaking at Rhodes University, has recalled that Alec Erwin, once seen
as something of a guru in some left circles in Durban, concluded that when a
survey run by white radicals and seeking to determine who black workers
considered to be their leaders threw up a name (Moses Mabhida – a Communist who
had been a leading activist in Durban in the 1950s) that was unfamiliar to the
white left Erwin’s response was not to take seriously his alienation from
popular politics. On the contrary he sought to reinscribe his authority by
concluding, a priori, that the survey had to be fraudulent. This is
a telling anecdote with regard to a city, and indeed a country, where more than
forty years later there are still people on the middle class left, often but
not always white, in which even rigorously researched accounts of
organisational and intellectual political practices in a popular sphere beyond
the reach of the middle class left continue to be dismissed, on an a
priori basis, as romantic or even fraudulent.
Keniston
makes an important point when he insists, in the conclusion to his book, that
“the ultimate erasure of Turner’s ideas is to insist that they have been
assimilated into the movements after his death” (2013, p. 234). The same point
could be made with regard to Biko’s thought. But Keniston’s concluding remark,
that today the problem is that “the organisations of the liberation struggle
have gained so much power that nothing much else has room to breathe (2013,
p.234) erases both the real struggles that have been waged from below, and in
recent years with enough force to provoke a wave of assassinations of
grassroots activists in Durban, and the undeniable fact that the authoritarian
left has often been part of, rather than opposed to, the elite power bloc that
has sought to expel these struggles from the domain of the political.
References
Egan, A.
(2013) ‘Remembering Heroes on the ‘Fringe’’, The Journal of the
Helen
Suzman Foundation, 71, pp.
66-71.
Friedman,
S. (2014) ‘From Classroom to Class Struggle: Radical Academics and the Rebirth
of Trade Unionism in the 1970s’, Journal of Asian
& African Studies, 49(5), pp.526-543.
Fluxman,
T. & Vale, P. (2004) ‘Re-reading Rick Turner in the New South Africa’, International Relations,
18(2), pp. 173–189
Gibson,
N. (2011) Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to
Abahlali baseMjondolo. Pietermaritzburg.
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
Greaves,
D. (1987) ‘Richard Turner & the Politics of Emancipation’, Theoria,
70, pp. 31-40.
Keniston,
B. (2013) ‘Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner’.
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Mangcu,
X. Biko: A Biography. Cape Town. Tafleberg.
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T (1990) ‘Brushing history against the grain: oppositional discourse in South
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[2] This is
well remembered by participants in ‘the Durban Moment’ and comes through
clearly in Ian Macqueen’s recent paper (2014).
