Glen Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the
1970s, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2014
Reviewed by: Benjamin Fogel, Journal of Asian & African Studies
The New Radicals is a generational memoir, or rather a
political memoir of a generation of white South African student radicals that came of age in the early
1970s through the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This generation formed a key
part of the emerging movements that awakened South Africa from the political slumber of the
1960s. As Glenn Moss puts it, his book “records how they (a group of students) moved from the
relatively liberal protest and symbolic politics of an elite university to help in creating the
preconditions for a radical challenge to the society that had formed them” (p.vii).
Moss was a leading student activist at the University of the
Witwatersrand, later in the trade union movement and one of the founders of such important
labour-oriented left publications as Work in Progress and The South African Review. The book is
largely based on his own memory and that of his comrades. Rather than being an exhaustive work of
archival research, it is an account from the perspective of an active participant in the events
described.
The strength and influence of white student radicalism should
neither be burdened with the hubris of nostalgia on the part of ageing radicals or the
misleading scorn of those who would seek to portray “white radicalism” as parochial or just another
incarnation of liberalism. This book forms part of an emerging literature of the struggle against
apartheid that breaks with the hegemonic messianic narrative in which the African National Congress
(ANC), and through the figure of Nelson Mandela, in particular liberated the country and
redeemed the country from the sins of its past. This rapidly expanding literature includes books such
as Beverley Naidoo’s Death of an Idealist: In Search of Neil Agget (Jacana 2012), Billy
Keniston’s biography of Rick Turner Choosing to Be Free (Jacana, 2014) and Saleem Badat’s history
of the black student movement, Black Man, You are on Your Own (Real African Books, 2010).
Much of the attraction of these books is that they portray
the real hope that many South African activists and intellectuals had for a different vision of a
liberation to that of the increasingly polarised South Africa of 2014, a South Africa that would have been
able to break with the economic structure of colonialism and apartheid, one based on an
egalitarian ethic, rather than a surrender to market-driven values, a South Africa where the Marikana
Massacre would have been unthinkable. The strength of these political memoirs is that they are told
through the perspective of those engaged in the political struggle, through the optimism of
that particular moment rather than the cynicism that can be brought upon by hindsight.
This generation of radicals turned away from the traditional
multiracial liberalism of NUSAS and the Progressive Federal Party, in part as a reaction to
the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement. Black Consciousness emerged through the South
African Students’ Organisation (SASO), which had famously broken with NUSAS during a
national conference in Grahamstown in 1968 after Rhodes University refused to allow black NUSAS
students to eat and stay in the same facilities as white NUSAS members.
Black Consciousness’s rejection of the liberal multiracialist
politics within NUSAS, and its harsh critique of white liberalism, forced activists such as
Glenn Moss and his comrades in NUSAS to re-evaluate the politics of NUSAS and to attempt to steer
it in a more radical direction. The critique of apartheid that they developed moved away from
both the official liberal and Communist position, which held that apartheid held back the development
of capitalism in South Africa. Instead it held that apartheid and racism were an integral
part of the development of capitalism in South Africa. Moss himself entered the world of student
politics through his own rebellion against the masculinist student culture that had taken hold in Wits
University’s student residences.
This period saw the emergence of a new generation of South
Africa Marxists theorists based in the United Kingdom, mostly sociologists and historians who
attempted to theorise the connection between capitalism and apartheid, in particular Martin
Legassick and Harold Wolpe. Other figures, such as Rick Turner, Dan O’Meara, Rob Pieterson, Mike Morris
and Duncan Innis, make regular appearances in the book. As Steven Friedman notes, while
academic Marxists managed to eventually take over the social sciences in South Africa, many others
attempted to turn their Marxist theory into a new praxis within the emerging black trade
union movement.
Marcuse, Lukacs, Gramsci, Cabral, Althusser and Sartre were
read along with the canonical texts of classical Marxism. The intellectual fertility of
this period is well captured, along with the methods used to pass on banned texts from photocopying to
sneaking in Marxism in postgraduate courses in Development Studies. This period saw a Marxism
emerge that broke with the dogmatic Soviet Marxism of the South African Communist Party (SACP)
and moved well beyond the limits of sectarian Trotskyism to produce an ambitious and rich
literature. In academic terms its particular strengths lay in labour sociology, social history and
attempts to re-theorise the nature of the apartheid and economy.
Figures such as the labour journalist and commentator Steven
Friedman, the sociologist Eddie Webster, Steve Biko, the poet Breyten Breytenbach and
activist Jeannette Curtis constitute the cast of characters that make up the book. The action is set in
student digs, student residences, conferences in the bush, police stations and a prison. The police
infiltration of NUSAS is also recorded, in particular the role of the odious Craig Williamson. Moss
notes that many within NUSAS viewed Williamson as a spy. Williamson went on to have Jeannette
Curtis murdered through a letter bomb.
The manner in which NUSAS mobilised and was radicalised
through actions directed against apartheid repression is another major feature of the book.
Moss and 27 other student leaders were imprisoned for months by the apartheid state in what became
known as the NUSAS trial, which eventually saw the acquittal of all 27 students. Many of
those who were charged would later be put under a banning order that saw them placed under house arrest
and prevented from participating in political activity, or even meeting with more than one person
at a time.
The book’s other major strength is its ability to locate the
debates surrounding the black trade union movement in the political context of the time, as
radical students inspired by the likes of the charismatic philosopher Rick Turner began to form “wage
commissions” set up to investigate the working conditions and wages of black workers. Many of these
students took part in the occupation of the Anglo-American offices following the massacre of 11
striking workers at the Western Deep Mine on 11 September 1972; the massacre served as a
political awakening to a generation of South African students about the link between apartheid and
capitalism.
Many of the initial disputes about the direction of the black
trade union movement are recorded in the book, minor disputes morphed into political
sectarianism and eventually the famous “workerist” versus “populist” debate, around the question of how trade
unions should relate to the ANC and the struggle against apartheid. These debates are now
being rediscovered in the markedly different political context of the emerging split between
South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of the Mineworkers of South Africa (NUMSA),
and the ANC.
The major shortcoming of the book, however, is its abrupt
ending. The book ends in 1976, in the midst of the political action of the time. Its scope does
not cover the late 1970s and 1980s and the birth of a vibrant alternative publishing industry in
South Africa, both legal and underground, the emergence of the United Democratic Front (UDF), the
growth of South African Marxism in universities and the birth of the Federation of
South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). However, this can be forgiven. Moss has produced an
enthralling and important book, which captures well the ideas and practices developed during this
period that would later become a key part of the mass struggle against apartheid.
