John Daniel (1944–2014)—His Life and Politics

Introduction

It will become plain in this tribute to the life and work of John Daniel that his was no run-of-the-mill South African academic career of the 1970s and the 1980s: so, the Bachelor degree with majors in History, Political Science or Sociology followed by an Honours; the routine post graduate degrees—MA, Ph.D.—in Britain, preferably, but also, perhaps, in the USA; then the trudge through the ranks and, conceivably during the 1980s, a brief flirtation with either the Workerist or the Congress tendency in the liberation struggle; then the headship of a department to be followed (especially if one kept one's nose clean) by a Deanship; and onwards to a secure retirement surrounded by grandchildren, several books, and, plausibly, a Festschrift.

In a real way, however, John Daniel's professional career was all of these things, and none of them: this is why his death on 25 July 2014, at (in these times) the relatively young age of 70 years, provides an opportunity to look back on South African politics and the calling of Political Science with an eye to understanding how both charted the career of an extraordinary South African who was, simultaneously, a Professor of Political Science and a political activist.

Integrating the story of John Daniel's own political journey and his professional life seems to be somewhat counter-intuitive in Political Science because the demand for objectivity persists in many places where the field is studied. So, this question hovers over these pages: can a politically active individual be a successful political scientist?

Making

Arthur John Campbell Daniel (he always used the middle name) was born in Pietermaritzburg on 3 March 1944 into a family of four children. His father came from a family of Kentish solicitors and he attended a top education institution, Rugby School in Warwickshire, England. It seems that young James was destined to follow in the family profession but, due to a turn of events, he was sent to South Africa to learn farming. Fortunately, this was not to be his destiny; instead, he settled on teaching even though he had no formal training in the field: in the 1930s, however, an education at a British private school was considered a good enough qualification to teach in primary schools in the colonies. The journey to South Africa of John's mother, Francis Turner, was more exotic than that of her husband. Born in (the then) Malaya, Francis was first schooled in (the then) Ceylon and in England before the family settled in South Africa. The Great Depression curtailed her formal training as a teacher but she persisted, and was to spend her working life in the profession (Daniel 2014).

The couple's third child was enrolled at Clifton Preparatory School whose Latin motto, Prodesse Quam Conspici (To accomplish rather than be conspicuous), might well be considered an anthem for John Daniel's life. It was here that John developed a life-long love for late-colonial games such as rugby and cricket. His high school was the Methodist-centred Kearsney College in Botha's Hill with its equally challenging Latin motto Carpe Diem (Seize the Day). This, too, captures John's life of energy, which sometimes bordered on restlessness as Morris Szeftel, the prominent radical Africanist and friend, once remarked, ‘ … [John] never sits down!’ (Southall 2014). This said, his years at Kearsney were not happy ones—although it was here that he was first exposed to Class as a form of social organisation and where he discovered ‘a brilliant teacher … who taught South African history in a progressive way’ (Fields 2007). In his final year at school, he played in the First XI and won the Annual Prize for History.

Student

Theirs was an Anglophile and conservatively inclined home, but politics was in the air. James Daniel served on committees of the (then) United Party to which, on occasion, he would take the boy along. So, it not surprising, then, that in a 2007 interview, John pointed out that he was a ‘white supremacist’ as a child (Fields 2007).

By the time the youthful John Daniel arrived at the Pietermaritzburg Campus of the (then) University of Natal in 1960, the country's politics was increasingly turbulent but, as Saul Dubow (2014, 98) has recently pointed out, ‘a counter revolution … [by the Verwoerd government] … was in full swing’ (Dubow 2014, 98). This campus—with its less than 1500-odd students—was a relatively secure space to explore what the lessons of the ‘independence wave’ would mean for the then somewhat still unformed policy called apartheid. Although the rigidity which would eventually come to define the system of institutionalised race segregation was not yet clear, one thing was plain—the National Party government had a plan for higher education: the political fallout from this was to occupy John's attention for more than a decade.

History and Political Science, the subjects which John elected as majors, were not his first choice because he had intended to study law, which he did initially. But his parents ran out of money to support him. At this point, he took out an education department bursary, a step that suggested that he was destined for the same profession as his parents (SADET 2004, 2).

As was often the case in the early 1960s, History and Political Science were taught within a single department that, like the university itself, was imbued with a strong liberal ethos. The only professorship in the department had been vacated by Arthur Keppel-Jones; in his place, the university had appointed Edgar Brookes (Irvine 2014). A legend in his own life time, Brookes, once a supporter of segregation, had experienced a Damascene conversion to liberalism on a visit to the USA in 1927: he would go on to serve in the South African Senate as the representative of the ‘Natives’ of Natal. On one occasion John pointed out that Brookes had taught him Political Theory but that Brookes did not touch on Marx, although the syllabus included Hegel (Fields 2007). If anything, the Political Science curriculum in the department was rather formalist and hide-bound (Bundy 2014): this said, it consisted of the three traditional pillars: Political Theory, Comparative Politics, and International Relations.

We cannot know whether John chose Political Science (over History) for postgraduate study ‘despite, rather than because, of’ the way it was taught at Pietermaritzburg (Bundy 2014). But, as we will see, his loyalty to Political Science was never secure and, in his academic work, he moved between it and History. What we do know was that John was vitally interested in the issues of the day and this, plus his personal ambition (SADET 2004; Fields 2007), accounts for his immediate enthusiasm for student politics. The archive shows that John served on the Maritzburg Student Representative Council (SRC) in the sport portfolio and that he reported on the same issue for Nux, the student newspaper. It also shows that, notwithstanding changing majors, his studies were successful and that he studied for the (postgraduate) University Education Diploma in the very year, 1965, that he was the President of the Pietermaritzburg SRC (Davids 2014; Zulu 2014).

These were difficult days for student leadership. The crackdown, led by the notorious John Vorster, the country's Minister of Justice, was determined to end student activism. Indeed, two years earlier Vorster had called the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) ‘a cancer in the life of South Africa that must be cut out’ (Dubow 2014, 129). In the same year, several academics had also been banned, including Terence Beard who would eventually become the Professor of Politics at Rhodes University. Closer to home, conservative students in Maritzburg's Agricultural Faculty and the ever-present Rhodesian students (remember that their country was on the eve of its UDI Declaration) were a constant thorn in the side of the Nusas-aligned SRC of which John was President.

His leadership has been described as ‘resilient, committed, [and] serious’ (Bundy 2014), but it is difficult to believe that it was not also marked by the gift of friendship and Joie di vivie: the two attributes that would chart his life of conversation. In the many tributes that have been paid to John since his passing, these qualities have been highlighted again and again. But, perhaps Innes (2014) offered the most insight into the man and his charm:

 … (We) met … in 1966 when I was a young and politically naive second year student at UCT and John was the Vice President of … [Nusas]. To be honest, at that time I was more interested in playing rugby for UCT's first team than getting involved in Nusas politics … .But when John told me that he watched me play rugby I was blown away, firstly because I learned for the first time that a prominent Nusas leader was interested in rugby (of all things) and, secondly, because he knew who I was!

The move in 1966 to Cape Town and into ‘student trade unionism’ was a natural progression of a growing activism: besides, the alternative, as he jokingly pointed out in an interview (Fields 2007), was a teaching post in a provincial town called Eshowe. But Cape Town was immediately to embroil him in student, national, and international politics unlike any other student leader before or after him.

How did this come about?

John had been elected Deputy to the National President of Nusas, Ian Robinson, in 1966. However, in the build-up to their leadership of the organisation, Nusas had invited Senator Robert Kennedy to the country to deliver an academic freedom lecture. The thinking had been that this would be a great publicity stunt. Kennedy, they reckoned, would decline; after all, he was seeking the American presidency, a week-long visit to South Africa would not be a priority. But, contrary to expectations, Kennedy accepted the invitation. This, in turn, presented the apartheid government with a dilemma because the visitor would obviously show support for Nusas, which they were intent on destroying. Thinking they could force Kennedy to reverse his decision, the government banned Robinson under the ‘Suppression of Communism Act’: after all, could a person seeking the American presidency take the risk of consorting with a Communist-inclined organisation? Kennedy was not persuaded.

With Robinson, the National President, not able to participate in any public events, it then fell to John, as the Vice President, to host the visitor. He travelled throughout the country with the Kennedy entourage which, years later, he described as ‘a campaign-style visit’ (Daniel and Vale 2009, 140). Kennedy's visit culminated in a speech¹ delivered at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 6 June 1966. John delivered the thanks. If the visitor's words had ‘blown clean air into a dank and closed room’ (Daniel and Vale 2009, 140–141), it was John that showed, perhaps, a clearer understanding of the full significance of the visit for South Africa. His brief remarks pointed to both the wilfulness of the government's refusal to recognise the Kennedy visit and the long-term damage that the government was doing by attacking Nusas. Interestingly, too, he foretold the international isolation that would eventually overtake the country (see Daniel 1966).

The state's action had thrust John Daniel into the Nusas presidency in an acting capacity. A detailed account of this pivotal year in the life of Nusas remains to be written, but it is significant that in August, John met Steve Biko at the University of Natal Medical School where the latter was a student. His presidency done, John was interested in studying further and was admitted to the Political Science Department at the University of Indiana, expecting that he would be issued with a South African passport to travel to take up a scholarship. As a result, he did not contest the Nusas presidency: in the event, Margaret Marshall, who would go on to cap a stellar career by becoming the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, became the National President. Her term was to be followed by that of the Rhodesian-born John Sprack, but he was deported from the country before he could assume office. Leaderless and in grave peril of further action by the state, Nusas leaders turned to John Daniel who, having been refused a passport, was teaching at a school in Cape Town. He answered the call and in a contest against Robert Schrire, later Professor of Politics at UCT, John became National President of Nusas for a second time.

It was to be another tempestuous year in student politics: several campuses disaffiliated from Nusas and the organisation needed healing after the black students, led by Steve Biko, walked out of the July 1967 Congress in Grahamstown—an occasion which John had missed.

Graduate student

The following year, facing arrest for his activities, he left on an Institute for International Education Fellowship to study in the USA on a British passport. His choice was somewhat against the local grain because South Africa's English-medium universities were well integrated into the Imperial higher education system. As a result, Britain was the most sought-after target for postgraduate students. Moreover, as Moss (2014, 34) has recently pointed out, Nusas leaders had developed a somewhat unsavoury reputation for using their positions to secure prestigious postgraduate scholarships to the UK—this was especially the case with the Rhodes Scholarship.²

Because the Indiana option had fallen through, John's destination was Western Michigan University at Kalamazoo where he enrolled for a MA degree in International and Area Studies with a specialisation in African Studies. One of his teachers was the political scientist Howard Wolpe, a specialist on Nigeria, who would go on to be a seven-term representative in the US Congress for Michigan.

The following year, John moved to the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo: first to do a second MA—this one in Political Science—and then to do a Ph.D. with the financial support from the Danforth Foundation.³ The doctorate was completed under the supervision of Claude E. Welch Jr., whom John described as a ‘brilliant scholar’ and the ‘finest academic I have ever encountered’ (Daniel 1975, ii).

As his 2013 autobiographical piece, Teaching Politics in Exile, makes plain, John's years at SUNY were important for him, both intellectually and politically: it was here that he was radicalised. The reasons for this are not difficult to discern. Protests on American Campuses were at their height by the time he arrived, and SUNY Buffalo had established a reputation as a hotbed. As he admits, John ‘thrived on the endless rounds of teach-ins and protests’ but, mindful that he could not risk deportation from the USA, he goes on to say that he restrained his ‘activist exuberance’ (Daniel 2013, 449). Intellectually, too, he was changing: interestingly, responsibility for this came not from a class in Political Science, but from a reading course on South Africa which was presented by J. M. Coetzee, who was then teaching at SUNY. This course offered counter-readings to liberal texts such as the Wilson and Thompson edited Oxford History of South Africa (1969, 1971). These opened John to Revisionist interpretations of South (and southern) African history. These changes were to be reflected in the title of his Ph.D. thesis: ‘Radical Resistance to Minority Rule in 1906–1965’ (Daniel 1975), where the first word, Radical, was made to do the conceptual heavy lifting.

Early in the thesis, John sets down a worry: how will this ‘Radical’ history of resistance to minority rule and, more especially, apartheid be read and interpreted by his audience? Following the work of other radical writers, he admits that writing the thesis was an ‘intensely personal experience’. The very same passage reveals his pessimistic reading of the moment in the country's history. Here is the paragraph:

This study is not a diatribe against white minority rule in South Africa; it is an academic work, hopefully objective and unsparing in its critical insights. But, in its analysis and criticisms, a sense of compassion for the radical struggle and its goals may occasionally surface. The writer trusts that this will not impair the quality of the work: objectivity has constantly been the aim but the writing of this thesis has, in many ways, been an intensely personal exercise. There appear in these pages that follow, and particularly in part three, individuals who were this writer's acquaintances, friends and political colleagues. Many other individuals he wishes he had known; above all, he wishes with every fibre of his being that this study could have recorded the triumph of the radical struggle against minority privilege in South Africa and not, as it must, its absolute failure (Daniel 1975, 23).

The thesis seeks to account for the failure of majority efforts to end minority rule in South Africa: it is organised chronologically: the first section covers the period 1906–48, which details the strategy that moved resistance beyond its ‘liberal stage’; the second section (1949–1961) covers the development of ‘non-violence’ as an instrument of change; and the third phase covers 1961–1965, the period of organised violence which ends in ‘the counter-revolution’ of which Saul Dubow was later to write.

The thesis is an interesting and important piece of intellectual work that, disappointingly, was never published as a book. As the product of an American ‘Political Science’ department, however, it shows an unusually subtle understanding of the social and economic underpinnings of politics and is a good example of the ‘historical sociology’ stream which marked South (and southern) African Studies in the 1970s. Given the challenge it presented to orthodox interpretations of the issues it addresses, it is not surprising that the thesis was banned in South Africa in 1977—a prohibition that was lifted in 1991.

The work was mainly written when John was living in Swaziland—probably between late 1972 and 1975—the year of its acceptance at SUNY, Buffalo.

How did this come to pass?

In December 1972, with his first wife, Judy, and their young son, Jeremy, the family visited Swaziland in order to see his parents who travelled to meet them from neighbouring South Africa. They billeted with friends at the world-famous Waterford-Kambala School that is situated on the outskirts of Mbabane. During the stay, Judy was offered a teaching post at the school and they decided to stay for a year. Six months later, however, John was offered a post at the University of Swaziland, which is located at Kuleseni on the other side of the city. He was to teach here until his deportation in February 1985. Given local Swazi politics, apartheid's deepening interest in the affairs of the region, especially after the April 1974 Lisbon Coup, and the fact that John founded a new department, the completion of the thesis itself was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Exile

Although John left South Africa in August 1968, his 12 years in Swaziland—the country that he sometimes called ‘South Africa without apartheid’ (O'Meara 2014)—must be considered to be his ‘exile years’. Indeed, he sometimes described his life story in these phases: ‘Before Swaziland’, ‘In Swaziland’, and ‘After Swaziland’ (Fields 2007).

Both professionally and politically, he was increasingly confident of his role and his considerable energy was directed into a variety of projects. An early one resuscitated his links with Nusas through an organisation called the International University Exchange Fund, which, as it was to turn out, had been thoroughly infiltrated by apartheid agents. Another was what he later described as ‘a rather special type’ of relationship with the African National Congress (ANC) as courier, money-holder, and guardian of safe-houses (Waetjen 2014). But, as more and more refugees flooded into Swaziland—mostly, but not all from South Africa—these two projects were drawn together in managing and raising funds for a parallel schooling and welfare system. All of these activities were of interest to apartheid South Africa's growing number of agents in the country.

Based on his own experience of exile and several visits to Swaziland, Dan O'Meara (2014) describes John's account of the bedding-down and growth of a Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Swaziland as ‘overly modest’. Certainly, the names of those he taught in the department are astonishing—Thuli Madonsela, Patrice Matsepe, and Lindiwe Sisulu—to name only three (Daniel 2013, 458). The list may well represent the single most important ‘school’ in the preparation of generation of future South African leaders (see Daniel 2013). Roger Southall (2014), who taught alongside John in Swaziland, provides a captivating insight into an exercise that was rooted in radical thinking:

[T]he task was to make our courses relevant for our student bodies—composed largely of South Africans and Zimbabweans as well as students from the BLS countries. After all, these were exciting times. The liberation war was raging in Zimbabwe and popular resistance was on the move again in South Africa … [T]he mission was to produce a decolonized curriculum for our students, and unsurprisingly this involved our devouring the radical African political economy of the day while engaging the revisionist wave of scholarship then beginning to emerge in and about South Africa.

All this came at a high price, however: assassinations and killings were commonplace as were betrayals and the disappearance of friends, colleagues, and students. Moreover, as the years passed, things got progressively worse in Swaziland. His passion for his work and apartheid's ruthless destruction of it—at great human cost—explain his considerable anguish—no, anger—that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), for which he was later to work, was perfunctory in its treatment of the crimes committed by the apartheid regime in southern Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The chief aim of South Africa's destabilisation of the region was to establish compliant neighbours and these were to be linked to the apartheid state by security pacts. In 1981, the first of these was, clandestinely, signed between Swaziland and South Africa. Given the range of John's activities, both in and off the campus, his immediate future was to become a victim of the warming relations between the Kingdom and the minority regime. Faced with a range of retaliatory options available to the apartheid regime and the increasing acquiescence of the Swazis, his deportation from Swaziland was possibly the best thing that could, in the circumstances, have happened.

On leaving, he travelled first to Lusaka and, then, on to Amsterdam—and the Free University to ostensibly complete a contract to establish an Institute for Social Science at the University of Swaziland. He wrote a bit and even taught classes in the Free University's Department of International Relations.

But, in 1986, he secured a position in London as the African Editor of Zed Press: an old friend from Nusas days, Robert Molteno, brokered the move. Zed operated as a collective and sought to publish radical books on Third World issues. It was to be an important change in professional direction because John learnt the publishing business, which drew him towards a skill which he performed with great alacrity, editing—both of these were to become important in the great step he would next take.

In the interview with Field (2007), John confesses that he thought he would end his working days in the comfortable employment of Zed Press until one February morning when, on his arrival in the office, a colleague called out, ‘You can go home now!’ F. W. de Klerk had just made the famous speech: John knew immediately he would return to South Africa.

Return

The formal move took place in 1991 when he took up the post as a Senior Lecturer and Head of Rhodes University's International Studies Unit, which had been established in 1987 with an eye to developing critical scholars in the field and to training a new generation of truly representative South African diplomats. John embraced these challenges with passion and purpose and, during the formal transition, would go on play an important role in not only a ‘foreign policy group’ that had been established by the ANC, but also in the selection and training of diplomats for the new foreign ministry.

Two years later, John moved to Durban to become the Chair of Politics at the University of Durban Westville (UDW). In a very distinctive fashion, this was a return to his Natal roots. Given his political and intellectual pedigree, his arrival at the university was considered a ‘shot in the arm’ for the department (Suransky 2014). Under his leadership staff numbers grew and around him (and his colleague Len Suransky), a group of young intellectuals began to make their mark on the national scene in Political Science: these included Adam Habib, Heidi Hudson, and Kiru Naidoo—while Lubna Nadvi and Richard Pithouse, both then teaching in UDW's Philosophy Department, were also drawn closer.

It was a turbulent time for the country's universities which were subjected to intense ideological and turf wars. UDW was embroiled in a particularly dark and damaging internecine conflict. John resolutely defended the centrality of academic work within the university in the face of the determination from some quarters within his own faculty for self-immolation (Suransky 2014). It was a productive period in teaching, too: several of his students went into senior positions in the government of the new democratic state. This was a time in which John rekindled old networks: first into southern Africa by conducting training in countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and his old haunt, Swaziland; and, second, by establishing himself as an external examiner—both undergraduate and postgraduate—at South Africa's universities. Always level-headed and determined that the academic project should be protected at all costs, he continued in this role until his death.

There was, however, to be a crucial two-year break in this ‘academic service’ when he moved to the TRC as a Senior Researcher. He was to describe this ‘as the most challenging and interesting work I'd ever done’ (Jenkins 2014). It is no surprise that his own TRC research focused on apartheid's destabilisation of southern Africa. Although TRC researchers were not allowed to operate outside of the country, John used his networks (especially in Swaziland) to follow many leads: these answered many outstanding questions about apartheid's ‘dirty war’. The account of his findings is to be found in the chapter called ‘Gross Human Rights Violations outside South Africa, 1960–94’, which appears in Volume II of the TRC Report (TRC 1998). The full implications of the findings in this chapter surely have still to run their historical course because the issue of South Africa's debt to the region's people remains one of the unresolved issues in the politics of southern Africa and, indeed, the Continent. This work will all draw from John's TRC work.

The work in the TRC also seems to have returned him to the role of historian, methodologically speaking. After the TRC, he was sceptical of the sometimes-flimsy empirical evidence on offer by Political Science. When addressing this issue, in his interview with Sean Fields, he seems to have been drawn to an almost forensic interest in what constituted evidence. In the service of the TRC his skills as an editor were also called upon. Aside from his individual contributions, responsibility for editing large sections of the Report fell to him.

This skill was just one of the many that John took with him, in 2001, into the new-look HSRC (Human Sciences Research Council), when he became, amongst other responsibilities, the Director of Publications. It was an encouraging appointment for the local academy because, as Freund (2014) points out,

John was unusual in acquiring the skills involved in publishing material of the kind Zed Press produced while in exile. I think it was important that he brought these skills back to South Africa. We benefitted from this at … [the journal] … Transformation but … the chief beneficiary was the once moribund HSRC Press which he was instrumental in restructuring.

Under his leadership, this Press was certainly out front in publishing new academic work. Moreover, successive editions of the annual State of the Nation series—which reopened space for critical voices—carried several essays co-written by John—most, but not all of them, in the general field of International Relations and Foreign Policy. These bore his hallmark style: ‘a trenchant analysis combined with a wonderful style as if he was simply telling a story’ (Southall 2014). In soliciting manuscripts he took care to seek out the work of a new generation of South African scholars. And if this signalled his ongoing interest in the future, he drew on old friends to support his new mission by travelling each year to the US African Studies Association Convention as he had done when he was with Zed Press.

However, this period of fruitful and committed intellectual engagement fell victim to a more direct form of transformation after Mark Orkin (another friend from Nusas days) stepped down as HSRC President. In quick succession both John and Roger Southall, with whom he had forged another dynamic partnership, left the HSRC: John because he passed the nominal ‘retirement’ age.

The answer to the decades-long question—‘What's next?’—was quite easily resolved in Durban where he and Cathy, his second wife, and their two children Lesley and Jayram had set up home. He joined the South African chapter of the Vermont-based School for International Training, eventually becoming its Academic Director. In this role, he revelled in bringing to successive cohorts of (mainly) American students his own understandings of the history and politics of a country that he had helped to change.

Journey

What were John Daniel's own politics? Did these touch his professional judgement?

His politics were strongly fused with the emancipatory impulse, not only those of this age, but also those of the broad Enlightenment sweep: why else would he have studied at four separate universities and taught at four others? Moreover, John's interest in education was all-encompassing. He was a great teacher who engaged the young with challenging ideas and took great joy at what his students had done with their own lives, especially with the non-racial politics he had taught them.

If his conservative childhood opened him to a passion for politics, it was the activism that brought him into its cauldron. His undergraduate training at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, held that race mattered most in South Africa, but it was the questions raised by his peers—Maeder Osler, Colin Bundy, and Jeff Guy (Fields 2007)—which indicated that the liberal race-centred optic was only one way—of many—to understanding the great South African drama. The years in Nusas, as he told Sean Field (2007), were not a time for reading and deep thinking: this took place in the USA during the explosion of radical thinking and action that marked the years after 1968 and from which he was well placed to learn. This sealed a radicalism that believed that only by going back to the source—the very roots—of the issue was it possible to understand and change the country.

If the content of this change was clear—replacing race-based social relations with a non-racial one and a redistribution of wealth, the method of how to change was deeply contested as it always is for Radicals. He was to discover that Nusas leaders were, like all activists against apartheid, caught in the ‘bullet versus the ballot’ predicament. Debates of this kind were fine for students who could dally over issues such as calling for a sports or arms boycott against apartheid (SADET 2004), but, in exile, things were different: here, both education and activism effortlessly crossed the theory–practice divide.

Throughout his adult life, the direction of John Daniel's politics was plain. But until he moved to England in 1986, he never formally joined a liberation movement. He readily used Marxism as the point of analytical entry, and this made him a rare bird amongst South Africa political scientists. Methodologically, he was drawn more towards the History that he had first studied at Pietermaritzburg, than to the Political Science he learnt in America. Moreover, as his post-TRC drift to methodological concerns indicates, he was increasingly concerned with the rules of evidence and inference—an issue that seldom preoccupies local Political Science.

So, finally, what are we to make of the lifeless question asked in the foothills of this tribute, namely ‘Can a politically active individual be a successful political scientist?’ The answer to this did not worry John Daniel: indeed, his life's work is a cri de coeur that all who are interested in politics–especially political scientists–should take a Radical stand when it come to the issues of emancipation and justice.

Notes

1. The South African-born film-maker Larry Shore has produced a movie called RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope (2009). The UCT/Jameson Hall speech section of the film runs between 14:34 minutes and 19:44 minutes. The camera catches a wonderful moment of a beaming John Daniel looking out over the proceedings.

2. John Daniel touches on the self-same point in several interviews (see, e.g. SADET 2004; Fields 2007).

3. Founded in 1927, the St Louis-based Danforth Foundation aimed to promote ‘the well-being of mankind’. In 1952, the foundation initiated the Danforth Graduate Fellowship Program, to

bring into college teaching a larger number of young men, thoroughly trained according to the highest scholastic standards, who are aware of the place for moral and religious values in teaching and counseling … The candidates may be preparing to teach in any academic discipline common to an undergraduate college.

The ‘Kent Fellowship’ which was awarded to him by the Danforth Foundation was competitively awarded to graduate students who showed both academic excellence and a commitment to ethical standards (Washington University in St. Louis 2006).