‘Think More Clearly than the State Allows’: Rick Turner’s Challenge to the Present

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Notes

1 R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: An Essay on Participatory Democracy (Johannesburg: Spro-Cas, 1972).

2 I here refer to Foszia Fisher, Rick’s partner.

3 The Turner Memorial Lecture was given under the title ‘“Brushing History against the Grain”: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’ and was published in Theoria. T. Morphet, ‘“Brushing History against the Grain”: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’, Theoria, 76 (1990), 89–99. It also appears in the 2015 republication of The Eye of the Needle, with a new foreword by Rosalind C. Morris (London: Seagull). The 2015 edition also includes a text by Morphet from 2010 entitled ‘The Intellectual Reach of The Eye of the Needle’. Morris contextualised these pieces in her ‘Afterword: Reflections on Richard Turner and The Eye of the Needle’.

4 Sacks’ poem was originally published in P.M. Sacks, In These Mountains (London: Collier Macmillan, 1986). The segment quoted is reprinted with kind permission by Peter Sacks.

5 P. Hudson, ‘Let’s Talk about Rick Turner’, Theoria, 64, 151 (2017), 2. Peter Hudson and I had been in conversation, just before his death, on how to revisit ‘The Durban Moment’ in a more extensive way, tracking those who had been ‘there’.

6 Ibid.

7 A number of the people influenced by Rick are directly indicated in the interviews in Billy Keniston’s 2013 biography of Turner. B. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013). They are also indicated by those who attended and spoke at the launch in Cape Town of the 2015 edition. It would include Peter Hudson’s reflections as mentioned above, Tony Morphet’s ‘Introduction’ to the 1980 Ravan edition of The Eye of the Needle, and his contributions to the 2015 edition of The Eye of the Needle. Also Andrew Nash, specifically mentioned by Morphet in his ‘The Intellectual Reach of The Eye of the Needle’ in the 2015 edition, Laurence Piper, and many other people. L. Piper, ‘From Religious Transcendence to Political Utopia: The Legacy of Richard Turner for Post-Apartheid Political Thought’, Theoria, 57, 123 (2010), 77–98.

8 In the section ‘Seeing like a State’ of his 2013 biography of Turner, Keniston draws attention to how the state approached people like Turner. Keniston, Choosing to Be Free, xiv–xv. Translating, from Afrikaans, some of the documents Keniston used brought that crudity home to me. The conclusion was pregiven – guilty as intended – and ‘evidence’ was framed to suit it.

9 T. Morphet, ‘“Brushing History against the Grain”: Oppositional Discourse in South Africa’, in R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2015), 209 n. ii.

10 The Survey of Race Relations in South Africa series was published annually by the South African Institute of Race Relations, the Black Review by the Black Community Programmes in Durban.

11 In 1975 the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) had a campaign entitled ‘The Threat and Promise of Alternatives’. Turner was an advisor to NUSAS and an honorary president, and we in NUSAS consulted him during his banning.

12 Rick, interestingly, saw an opportunity here, at least in terms of the KwaZulu bantustan, then in formation. It is possible that he was influenced in this by his friend and colleague Lawrence Schlemmer, who early on had established a relationship with Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the political leader of KwaZulu from its establishment until 1994. Schlemmer worked with the Inkatha movement, formed in 1975 as the main political part in KwaZulu, in some innovative ways.

13 But back to the time when The Eye of the Needle was written in Durban: it was a time when, politically, the ideas put forward by figures such as Biko, Sathasivian ‘Saths’ Cooper, Strinivasa ‘Strini’ Moodley, Barney Pityana, and many others were spreading to the rest of South Africa. But the ideas also remained powerful in Durban because of the wider ‘mix’ of apartheid categories there – the notion of ‘black’ extended its reach in crucial ways, inclusive (as in black consciousness) and exclusive (as in its fragmented apartheid form). The latter was illustrated in the KwaZulu bantustan as it was taken to the next-to-final phase of ‘development’ under a leader – Buthelezi – who had been a member of the African National Congress (ANC), carried the support of then ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli, and rejected the ‘independence’ that was intended to be the crown jewel in the ethnic policy of the revised apartheid state. And, most importantly, the time was marked by restlessness among workers, shown spectacularly in 1973.

14 P. Randall, ‘Foreword’, in R. Turner, The Eye of the Needle: An Essay on Participatory Democracy (Johannesburg: Spro-Cas, 1972), n.p., emphasis added.

15 Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), 1.

16 Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), emphasis added.

17 Turner, The Eye of the Needle (1972), 3, 5; Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), 1, 4.

18 Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), 2.

19 Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), 4.

20 Morphet’s words reminded me of Lee McIntyre’s discussion of scientific attitude, which I recently read: ‘An ethos. A spirit of inquiry. A belief system that tells them that the answer to empirical questions will be found not in deference to authority or ideological commitment – or sometimes even in reason – but in the evidence they gather about the subject matter under investigation. […] I will call this the scientific attitude’. L. McIntyre, The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (Cambridge: MIT, 2013), 47. Rick certainly called for an ‘attitude’, (2015), 225.

21 Morphet, ‘The Intellectual Reach’, 236.

22 Morphet, ‘The Intellectual Reach’, 236–237.

23 Roman Krznaric used the term ‘tyranny of the now’ to appeal to thinking beyond the immediate, a powerful call to respond to the climate catastrophe through long term thinking – becoming a ‘good ancestor now, for future generations. R. Krznaric, ‘The Good Ancestor’: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World (London: Penguin, 2021), 5.

24 Morphet, ‘Brushing History against the Grain’, in Turner, The Eye of the Needle (2015), 215.

25 ‘UDF’ refers to the United Democratic Front that formed in opposition to apartheid in the 1980s.

26 I challenge you to list the number of deadly conflicts within and between states that are ongoing at present; the conflicts that erupted around basic resources, such as water; and those that use constructed identities that draw on incontestable historical exclusivity to issue death threats.

27 The political structure of South Africa in the 2020s might be a ‘constitutional democracy’, but it is a hollowed out one: as demonstrated by the Zondo Commission, by Prof. Sandra ‘Sandy’ Africa’s High-Level Review Panel on State Security, or by Mark Heywood in eloquent Daily Maverick Citizen editorials. South Africa remains massively unequal, and it is becoming more so by the month. A blind emphasis on certain kinds of economic growth demands and ‘allows’ that process to continue. Gross displays of wealth are celebrated as sign and evidence of a person’s success and considered as reason for admiration and aspiration. We have a situation of domestic and public violence against women and foreigners (there are cases where women are openly denied their full humanity and xenophobia is implicit party policy). And we have a cacophony of debate and collective thought taking place on social media platforms. ‘Think more clearly than [the status quo] allows’, was Turner’s call.

28 After all, ‘ex unitate vires’ is Latin for ‘strength from unity’.

29 See the media coverage of the 2022 Rick Turner Lecture hosted by the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies: B. Roberts and C. Desmond, ‘From the Real to the Ideal State of the Nation: Rick Turner and the Enduring Necessity of Utopian Thinking’, Daily Maverick, 17 February 2022, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-02-17-from-the-real-to-the-ideal-state-of-the-nation-rick-turner-and-the-enduring-necessity-of-utopian-thinking/, accessed 18 February 2022; H. Cheadle, ‘Philosopher-Organiser: Rick Turner and the Revival of the Trade Union Movement in the Early 1970s’, Daily Maverick, 21 February 2022, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-02-21-philosopher-organiser-rick-turner-and-the-revival-of-the-trade-union-movement-in-the-early-1970s/, accessed 21 February 2022; M. Heywood, ‘Activists Urged to Reimagine Civil Society and the Fight against Inequality’, Daily Maverick, 3 March 2022, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-03-03-activists-urged-to-reimagine-civil-society-and-the-fight-against-inequality/, accessed 3 March 2022.

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Gerhard Maré

Gerhard Maré is professor emeritus at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.