Rick Turner’s living thought

A new book revisits the ideas of Rick Turner, the philosopher assassinated at his home in Bellair, Durban, in 1978. It continues a process of restoring Turner to public consciousness. 

Turner was a gifted, serious and well-trained academic. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris where he wrote his thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre, the great philosopher of freedom, under the abundantly creative French intellectual Henri Lefebvre. 

Lefebvre was also deeply committed to radical freedom and developed the idea of “autogestion”, a commitment to democratic self-management in the form of worker control over production and community control over urban spaces.

Turner was also a dazzling teacher. Charisma is not always an expression of a personal will to power. It can also be energised by a desire for connection and find its spark in the attainment of forms of encounter premised on mutuality. 

Turner’s charisma is recalled as catalytic and enabling and he radicalised a generation of students, many of whom became significant political actors able to work with popular organisations and struggles in productive ways.

He was close to Steve Biko and engaged both the Black Consciousness Movement and, after the 1973 strikes in Durban, the growing trade union movement. 

His commitment to participatory democracy, as both a means of struggle and its goal, connects his thought to the spirit of the best of the popular democratic forms of politics developed in the unions, and taken into the United Democratic Front. 

By the 1980s, millions of people were organised in struggles in which ideas such as workers’ power and people’s power had considerable momentum. These ideas do not derive from Turner, but they certainly resonate, and a number of people inspired by Turner contributed to theorising and building democratic forms of politics in workplace and community struggles.

Turner’s commitment to democratic socialism did not only draw on ideas gleaned from anti-colonial struggles and the European New Left. He also understood the significance of what he, unfortunately using the colonial term “tribe”, described as “an effective ‘counter-culture’ embodying communal and person-orientated values” and connected to forms of collective decision making arrived at “through a process of discussion and consensus”. 

This is a frequently ignored element in popular democratic forms of politics in South Africa, one often only attested to in the margins of the historiography but still intensely present today.

There are political militants, such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, who produce extraordinary writing in the heat of struggle, work with power that accumulates across space and time. There are also militants who, like Pakistani radical Eqbal Ahmad, largely sublimate the self into political work, leaving little in the way of substantive texts. 

Ahmad was an inspiration to great figures such as Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, both of whom often sought his counsel, but did not leave the sort of books that fully record the reach and power of his intellect. 

This is also largely true of Turner. His substantive philosophical work, said to be brilliant, remains unpublished. The book he published in 1972, a few years before he was assassinated at the age of 37, was written at the invitation of a Christian organisation and for their constituency. 

Titled The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa, it makes a sustained argument for a democratic conception of socialism. 

There is a clear commitment to education as, in the words of the Brazilian radical Paulo Freire, a practice of freedom and an equally clear vision of workplace democracy.

The book does not carry independent theoretical innovation or the weight of the anti-colonial writings of people like Fanon or Cabral. What it does do, though, is to deftly bring a set of generative and radical ideas in the air at the time into conversation with the South African situation. 

Turner was able to reach into the wider world, bring threads of radical thought home to Durban, and weave them into a coherent engagement with a particular conjuncture.

Taking measure of Turner’s significance in that conjuncture is important and people have acted to ensure that his memory is sustained against the now declining but once powerful hold of a national liberation movement on the political imagination. 

A biography of Turner, disappointing in some respects but containing useful fragments from interviews and other texts, including police reports, was published in 2013. Two years later The Eye of the Needle was republished by Seagull Books in New York. 

In 2022 a number of articles were published, and a discussion hosted at the University of the Witwatersrand, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first publication of The Eye of the Needle. This was largely driven by people who had known Turner, much of it taking the form of recollections of his extraordinary contributions as a teacher and politically committed intellectual. 

Turner was remembered for the catalytic power of his charisma for a generation of brilliant students who became important political protagonists, his friendship and engagement with Biko, his contributions to the development of the trade union movement after the strikes in Durban in 1973 and his courage to live against the strictures of apartheid.

He was also remembered for his ideas, most significantly his commitment to radically democratic forms of education and politics as both means and end, the political necessity of personal transformation and his argument for the importance of utopian thinking. 

There was also critique. David Hemson examined Turner’s naivety about the political character of Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the “homeland” system. He noted that Biko had taken a very different position, implying that Turner’s misjudgment cannot be explained away as being of its time.

Turner’s Politics as the Art of the Impossible, a new collection of essays published by Wits University Press and edited by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Lawrence Hamilton, Laurence Piper and Gideon van Riet, is different to the set of recollections published in 2002. The editors are from a generation who came to academic prominence after apartheid and the contributors include gifted younger people such as Ayesha Omar and Tendayi Sithole. 

The essays primarily engage Turner as a thinker rather than a historical figure. Both of these facts are important because, for an intellectual to be a living presence as a thinker rather than as a person with a place in the history of thought, their work has to be engaged, and critically, by succeeding generations. 

Nonetheless one of the strongest pieces comes from Paula Ensor, who was a participant in the political milieu in Durban in the early 1970s. 

She reads The Eye of the Needle through Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist classic The Second Sex, first published in 1949. 

Turner would certainly have known this book but Ensor shows that in his writings, including work on the Durban strikes in which he had significant influence, the question of gender is elided.

Crain Soudien’s contribution is also particularly significant. He reads Turner’s ontological optimism — his sense of our capacity to change ourselves, our ideas and the world — against what he sees as the pessimism of Achille Mbembe. 

Soudien draws out Turner’s ideas with great care and affirms his contribution to the tradition of education for liberation but concludes that, while Turner’s positions have enduring value, fresh politics are required to think of liberation in what Soudien calls the “complexity of the technological turn”.

Turner awaits a first-rate biography and there is still much to be said by people of his generation, people politically formed in the ferment of the early 1970s. This includes Mabogo More, the preeminent Sartrean in our intellectual life, who was in the audience at the 1972 graduation ceremony at the University of North when Onkgopotse Tiro gave his famously defiant speech. 

More has dedicated his life to thinking and writing in fidelity to the emergence of Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement on the political stage and spent many years as a trade union educator, often teaching Turner’s ideas about workers’ democracy.

However, there is also much to be said by new generations of thinkers, including participants in the experiments in democratic politics being carried out, in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, by contemporary grassroots activists. 

Every generation needs to extend its own invitation to our intellectual ancestors to enter the present, and Onyebuchi, Eze, Hamilton, Piper and Van Riet have done well to keep an important conversation going. 

Richard Pithouse is a distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.