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).
