Four months after Steve Biko was beaten to death in police
custody in 1977, fellow activist, academic and philosopher, Rick Turner, was
assassinated in his Durban home. Both men offered South Africans – black and
white – transformative new ways of thinking about and framing themselves and
society. Their ideas were such a threat that authorities at the time tried to
wipe both men off the face of the earth. MARIANNE THAMM revisits Turner’s
legacy and what it might offer contemporary South Africa. The Daily Maverick
Late last year American scholar, historian and author, Billy
Keniston, published Choosing to be Free – The Life Story of Rick Turner
(Jacana) 35 years after this charismatic and influential thinker was
assassinated on 8 January 1978 in his Durban home by unknown killers. Turner
was just 36 and died in the arms of his 13-year-old daughter Jann, today a
well-known novelist and film director. No one has ever been held responsible
for the murder.
Reading Keniston’s biography - which consists of a series of
interviews with friends, fellow academics, former students and family members
threaded through the unusual story of Turner’s life, beliefs and the
germination of his thoughts and ideas - one is immediately struck by how bereft
contemporary political discussion is of committed, independent, bold and
excitingly original thinkers such as Biko and Turner.
One also realises just how much philosophy and philosophical
thinking is absent from the propaganda, policy, ideology, rhetoric, tweeting
and song and dance that passes for public political discourse.
Compared to Biko and Turner, today’s headline sluts [an unfortunate metaphor] who offer
choice click bait to an addicted media, sound like cheap squeaky toys
accidentally squashed underfoot in the dark.
Biko and Turner found themselves in a repressive South
Africa, cut off from the rest of the world, in the intellectual, cultural,
spiritual and political desert of the 1970s. It was in these barren and brittle
circumstances that the two men dreamed of a world that could be different. But
first the old order and all that propped it up – ways of seeing, thinking and
being - had to be dismantled.
Where political ideologies sought to shape the exterior
physical landscape, Biko and Turner understood that people first needed to turn
inwards and perform a sort of deep, psychic root canal on themselves to be
truly liberated. Turner held that people could learn new values by living them.
Where Biko was the founder of Black Consciousness it could be
argued that Turner hoped to spark a renewed “White Consciousness” or “Human
Consciousness” that would help to dismantle notions of race, class and
identity.
“We are born into a society, and we adopt its behaviours and
values; we come to be the person that makes sense within that context. But at
the same time, we are not doomed to accept the world-view we developed through
our upbringing. We have the capacity to decide who we are, what values we
believe and the structure of relationships that we want to be part of…” Turner
wrote.
While some may argue today that the ideas and thoughts of
Biko and Turner remain marginal, and in Turner’s case are 'Utopian', there is
more than enough reason to revisit his arguments. Particularly for those South
Africans who are interested in and committed to exploring the shifting dynamics
of identity and race.
“Today, in the severely compromised political climate of
post-Apartheid South Africa, the need for the kind of idealist vision that Rick
Turner lived and died for is just as urgent as it was during his lifetime,”
writes his biographer.
Particularly Turner warned and understood that democracy
would only be possible as a result of economic equality – a term that today has
led to the formation of a new political party which trawled around 1 million
votes in the last election. Political power, Turner believed, had little
substance without power over the economy.
Because Turner has been so marginalised as a political voice
for so long in this country, perhaps it is apt at this point to recap some of his
early history.
Richard Turner was born in Cape Town in 1941 to parents, Jane
and Owen Turner, who had immigrated to South Africa from England. His father
had been a soldier in the British Army in the Anglo-Boer War and his mother was
from working-class stock from London’s East End. Rick’s father, an alcoholic,
died when he was 13 and it was his mother - who was “rarely sentimental” and
who offered him enormous independence - who helped shape his early life
experiences.
In 1959 Turner enrolled at the University of Cape Town for an
engineering degree but switched later and graduated with an honours degree in
philosophy. It was at UCT that that he developed his political conscience and
joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) a “liberal
non-racial” student organisation. He also taught adult literacy in the
townships in his spare time.
But Turner’s real coming of age occurred not in Cape Town but
in Paris, where he earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1966 on the political
philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. His decision to enroll at a French university
rather than an English one – which would have been the obvious choice of most
of his white, English-speaking contemporaries – “was probably the single most
influential decision of his lifetime,” writes Keniston.
That Turner learned to speak French in his 20s and wrote his
doctorate in that language at one of the world’s foremost universities is in
itself also remarkable accomplishment.
Turner spent the early sixties in Paris with his wife Barbara
Hubbard (and their young daughter Jann) and returned to Cape Town in 1966, at
the age of 25.
In 1968 students at the Sorbonne took the streets in an
uprising that provided a direct challenge by a post-war generation to the
political order of the time and almost forced out the then-president Charles de
Gaulle. The European uprising inspired similar revolts in the rest of Europe
and the US. Back in Apartheid South Africa the event hardly made it to the
news.
But ripples of dissent had washed across the continent. At
UCT students staged a nine-day sit-in protest when a black anthropologist,
Archie Mafeje, had been appointed to the department but the government
pressured the university to reverse the decision. At the time UCT was closed to
black students. Turner was a frequent visitor and contributed to mass meetings
at the sit-in.
“While many whites still attempted to be reasonable and make
respectful demands of the government, at least the possibility of more radical
thought and action was once again visible,” Keniston writes of the sit-in.
In 1969, after his marriage to Barbara had collapsed, Turner
moved to Grahamstown where he found a job in the politics department at Rhodes.
These were crucial years for student politics when Biko, a medical student at
the University of Natal, began to call for “a fundamental shift in the
relations between white liberals and blacks”.
In 1969, after the development of Black Consciousness, a
group of black students split off from NUSAS and formed the South African Student’s
Organisation (SASO).
Turner immediately recognised Black Consciousness not as a
threat but as an invitation.
“Black Consciousness invited whites to reconfigure themselves
as neither innocents nor as saviours, as neither entitled to their present
status nor excluded from human interactions with the black majority of South
Africa,” writes Keniston.
Turner, Keniston says, immediately understood this point,
writing “the refusal of blacks to want to ‘be like whites’ is not racism. It is
good taste.”
Turner saw white people as being trapped within a social
structure – which was of their own making – that persistently and severely
constrained the capacity of human beings to have any kind of genuine
interaction with each other.
In 1970 Turner took up a position at the University of Natal.
By then the South African security police had already been alerted to his
activities and he was being spied on regularly. That year Turner married Fozia
Fisher according to Muslim rites, which were not recognised in the country at
the time. The couple – because he was white and she was black – risked
punishment and arrest.
What is so appealing about Turner and this thinking is that
it is impossible to stereotype or categorise where he was situated on “the
left”.
“Turner was never a member of the African National Congress,
the Communist Party or any union or political party of any kind. His vision for
transformation in South Africa was independent and radical in away that the
vision of the ‘stereotypical revolutionary’ never can be,” writes Kensiton.
Andrew Colman, who met Turner in the student movement and who
is now professor of psychology at Leicester University, describes Turner as
“the opposite of a demagogue” and says he was “ecumenical in his political
views”.
Turner, if one needed to categorise his political thinking,
could be termed a libertarian, humanistic Marxist with liberal tendencies.
“He was very radical, but not a communist. Like many of us,
he was very anti-state, particularly anti-Soviet,” said Colman.
Turner had radical ideas on education and labour and
connected with and consulted with a wide spectrum of organisations.
In 1972 Turner penned Eye of the Needle, a short book that
has become a classic and which expounded his idea of the “necessity of Utopian
thinking”. It was a book that profoundly influenced a generation of young white
intellectuals, including Max Du Preez.
The book can be read on the South African History Online
website.
In 1973 Turner, along with the entire NUSAS leadership, were
banned for furthering the aims of Communism.
His movements were severely restricted; he was unable to
connect with friends, colleagues and even his family. He became, in essence, a
“non-person”. It was also a crime to quote him in any newspapers or to possess
a copy of his book.
Rick Turner was shot dead through a bedroom window of his
Dalton Road home on 8 January 1978, just four months after Steve Biko’s death
in detention on 12 September 1977. Jann and her sister Kim were visiting their
father at the time and he had gone to investigate a noise he had heard outside.
There is much food for thought, much to argue with, mull
over, consider and reconsider in Keniston’s book. There is the inspiration to
imagine a society that could be different from the one we live in today.
Whether it is realistic or probable is not what counts; it is the mere fact
that Turner was capable of imagining and proposing something different.
One is left, also, with the feeling that South Africa has
been robbed of yet another extraordinary thinker who did and could have
continued to contribute to a deeper understanding of a fractured society and
perhaps seen a different “promised land.”
“Ironically”, writes Keniston, “if we can understand the
extent to which Rick Turner was marginalised by the one-dimensional heroes of
the liberation struggle, his ideas will have space to re-emerge as a viable
alternative.”
We’ll give Turner the last word.
