Rick Turner: The present as history

Thirty-five years ago, on 8 January 1978, Rick Turner was gunned down in his Durban home, dying in the arms of his 13-year old daughter, Jann, a few weeks before the expiry of a five-year banning order.

No one has ever been prosecuted for his death nor has anyone accounted for it. Few doubt the involvement of the Apartheid security apparatus.

Turner - a philosopher, lectured in political science at the University of Natal, Durban. He was actively involved in re-establishing the trade union movement that led to the 1973 Durban strikes, forty years ago.

He had a close relationship with Bantu Stephen Biko, whose violent death at the hands of the Apartheid police in 1977 preceded his own by only a few months.

I first heard of Rick Turner in 1985 as a first year student activist at the University of Cape Town, after a National Union of South African Students (Nusas) political education workshop.

The workshop dealt with theory of organization, the concept of participatory democracy and the conviction that the way we organize should reflect the society we are organizing for.

A more experienced activist came to me afterwards and whispered, in conspiratorial tones, that I should read The Eye of the Needle by Rick Turner.

The book's full title is, The Eye of the Needle: Toward Participatory Democracy in South Africa.

"It is banned!" I was warned - probably as an incentive to ensure that I read it.

I tried my luck in the restricted literature section of a library where, with permission, it might be accessed. As a tribute to my incipient skills in clandestine activity, I emerged with a surreptitiously made photocopy.

Years later I acquired the copy that remains within reach on my bookshelf - published by Orbis Books in New York in 1978. A small box of text on the back cover explains the cost of its authorship.

Rick Turner dwelled in my thoughts while I was listening to President Jacob Zuma deliver the ANC January 8 statement in Durban, thoughts prompted by more than coincidences of time and place, birth and death.

Whilst his work is rooted in its own space and time, many of Turner's insights remain timeless, fresh and challenging.

Turner argued that in order to understand society it is necessary both to describe it as well as to theorize it, and that a necessary step to theorizing it is, "to grasp the present as history" - to understand that the existence of something, including that of a social system, is no guarantee that it will continue to exist.

Hearing President Zuma announce how the ANC, as it enters the second phase of our transition, was committing itself to speed up the elimination of a racist legacy which resulted in poverty, inequality and unemployment, I recalled Turner's deep understanding of the dialectic of race and class in a society shaped by colonialism and apartheid:

"In South Africa the major cause of conflict is the unequal distribution of wealth. This unequal distribution coincides almost exactly with color or race differences, and somewhat more roughly, with cultural differences.

"Neither cultural nor racial differences are in themselves inherently causes of social conflict, although they can, through ignorance and prejudice, become causes of conflict.

"In South Africa, this basic cause of social conflict and tension is overlaid by race and cultural prejudice in a potent mixture. Prejudice can be cured by education. Contradiction of interest cannot.

"However, if the wealth gap is done away with, there will no longer be any inherent reason for conflict. Cultural or racial groups can and do co-exist when they are not also divided by different economic interests.

"The maintenance of their cultural identity by white South Africans is a reasonable wish, but it is not dependent on their maintenance of economic privilege, and should not be confused with this."

And ...

"The whites are, in an important sense, themselves victims of the very system that they fight to preserve. For in becoming racialists and exploiters they become closed off to important areas of human experience.

"We have already discussed in general terms what is meant by the injunction "love your neighbor as yourself." To be yourself, you must love your neighbor. The question is, what do you become if you fear and hate your neighbor?

"The essential thing that white South Africans lose is openness to the future and to other people."

As Cyril Ramaphosa, newly elected Deputy President of the ANC, announced that the ANC's 101year birthday cake would not be eaten at the stadium but would be divided in two, one half going to an orphanage and the other to an old age home, I also recalled Turner's exhortation that:

"We must attack racism, but we must also attack the unquestioned acceptance of material values underlying racism. We must try to show to all those who accept the dominant values how much they lose in this society and how much they could gain in a good society. "Self-interest" and "material interest" are not the same. In fact, they are often incompatible."

>> Andries Nel is the Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development. This article first appeared in the African National Congress' newsletter, ANC Today.

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter