WITS Review:
Deborah Minors reports on the launch of The New Radicals
Bookslive report:
Glenn Moss Launches 'The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s' at the Wits Club
Launch of The New Radicals at the Wits Club, Johannesburg, 27 May 2014.
Photographs courtesy Wits Alumni Relations
Author's comments at the Johannesburg launch of The New Radicals, Wits University, 27 May 2014
In one of those moments of synchronicity, it is precisely 40 years – to the day, almost to the hour – that anti-apartheid and Congress Alliance icon Helen Joseph stood on the steps of the Wits Great Hall, and called for the release of all political prisoners.
The piazza in front of the Great Hall steps was overflowing, and the meeting was chaired by Cedric de Beer, who can be seen, with bushy hair and Clark Kent glasses in the photograph recording this meeting in The New Radicals (for those of you who might not know, Clark Kent is the mild-mannered, day-job identity of Superman who, like my generation, also sought to save the world from the forces of evil).
The release all political prisoners campaign of 1974 was probably the most radical and daring undertaken on the Nusas-affiliated campuses. It was not a liberal human rights protest, reacting to the atrocities of an oppressive minority government. It did not involve a call for clemency to be shown to prisoners of conscience. It made no distinction between communists and nationalists, non-racialists and Africanists, saboteurs and those who followed a path of non-violence. It boldly asserted that many of the leaders of South Africa’s majority were imprisoned, and called for their release so that they could participate in dismantling the system of apartheid.
In 1974, forty years ago, this was daring and radical politics, which tested the limits of above-ground organisation and activity. The campaign explicitly aimed to give prominence to the organisations of national liberation, introducing a generation of students to the leadership of the ANC, the PAC, Swapo, the Unity Movement and others, and explaining their endorsement of violence as a means of political struggle.
The campaign had been launched calamitously the day before, when a compromised bantustan leader had invited himself to speak, and drawn a distinction between democrats and communists. Only non-communist prisoners, he argued, should be released. After his speech, we were treated to the sight of Helen Joseph poking him repeatedly in the chest, and shouting ‘Are you saying Govan Mbeki should not be released because he is a communist?’
Now, in the next campaign meeting, we needed to regain and reassert the inherently radical content of our message. Helen excelled in doing this and, as recounted in the book, went a step further: she read out a smuggled message from Robben Island prisoners, commending and supporting the campaign – dangerous stuff in the hard political years of the early 1970s. Years later, then state president Nelson Mandela confirmed that he had been part of the group which penned and smuggled that message.
What is this strangely-titled book about? How can a bunch of aging men and women refer to themselves as ‘new’? The book is about the development of a new political radicalism in the 1970s. It grew from the ashes of the historical defeats on the 1960s, when militant politics was destroyed, when a culture of fear came to dominate within the country, when an understandably cautious multi-racial liberalism occupied what little space there was for political opposition.
The organisations of national liberation were struggling for survival in exile; leadership was banned and imprisoned. The progressive trade union movement had been decimated, both as a result of state action, and the incorporation of many of its best leaders and organisers into the underground campaign of sabotage and armed struggle.
From these ashes, phoenix-like, a whole new generation of political activism arose – initially on the campuses, both black and white, and then within the broader society. The influences were many and varied: black consciousness’s challenge to multi-racialism, which had been seen as a non-negotiable principle of organisation and an act of political resistance in and of itself; growing radicalisation on the Nusas campuses, which increasingly came to see capitalist development and apartheid as involving a symbiotic relationship, rather than as being in conflict; the development and influence of non-Soviet and western forms of Marxism which challenged the intellectual basis of existing anti-apartheid understanding, analysis and strategy.
On the Nusas-affiliated campuses, the emergence and development of the wages commissions, with their focus on empowering and organising workers as workers, rather than ‘blacks’, was one of the most central elements of this new radicalism. The anti-authoritarianism which manifested itself in rejection of ‘the system’, and the cultural and lifestyle choices which accompanied this, were an essential part of loosening the glue which held the ‘new radicals’ to the system of privilege which had formed them.
These influences initially coalesced in what Tony Morphet famously called ‘the Durban moment’, when black consciousness challenged the liberal multi-racialism of Nusas; when the first wages commission was established at the University of Natal; when a new intellectual project to question everything that existed in literature, in the social sciences, and in political philosophy gained traction; and when cultural and lifestyle choices loosened the bonds between students and the rest of society.
This awakening of a new political radicalism did not develop in opposition to the exiled organisations of national liberation. Generally, however, they were not an influence on this moment. I have argued in The New Radicals that their very absence created the space and the context for a generation to develop a relatively independent, ‘home grown’ politics in response to the changed circumstances of the 1970s. Without access to historical precedent and experience, and in the absence of a previous generation of leadership and organisation, the new radicals were forced to find new and innovative ways to understand and then challenge the society they rejected.
Many of us saw ourselves as operating within a broad, left leaning Congress Alliance tradition, especially where this aimed to strengthened working class and socialist interests within that alliance. This explains the focus on and effort to popularise the Freedom Charter as part of the Release All Political Prisoners campaign and the months’ long programme on the history of opposition which preceded it. In some ways, we ‘imagined’ an older and wiser Congress Alliance, attributed various strengths and positions to it, and then located our radicalism within that trajectory.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the conviction that the Alliance was based on a non-racialism which rejected race as a key element in political identity. We believed non-racialism prioritised identities associated with workers, or those in the impoverished and rural areas, or communities resident in the townships, or gender, or age (as in the youth), or sexual preference or even religion. In retrospect, I think it is evident that the Alliance predominantly embraced multi-racialism, rather than non-racialism; that its analysis and strategies were based on acceptance of racial identities and interests as the central fault line in South Africa’s socio-economic structure.
Ronnie Kasrils, closely associated with both the SACP and ANC intelligence at the time, has acknowledged that the movements in exile greeted the emergence of this new radicalism with suspicion, even hostility in some cases. This suggests a greater distance between the politics of national liberation in exile, and the development of a new radicalism within the country, than we realised at the time.
This disjunction has played itself out in numerous ways since 1990 – in the decision to disband the UDF, the harnessing of organised labour to the ANC as political party, government suspicion of NGOs and civil society, state responses to community activism, the marginalisation of independent and critical thought. In the first half of the 1970s, we assumed a far greater congruence of ideas and strategies between the new radicalism and the mainstream national liberation movements.
Most of what I want to say about the writing of this book, the thanks and acknowledgements, appears in the short preface, and I do not want to repeat this. There are, however, a few very special people who have helped me through this journey. As some of you know, my first draft of The New Radicals was constructed largely from memory. I began checking this against sources, documentation and especially the memory of other people as the book developed, and in this way I have attempted to combine history, politics, story telling and interpretation with the always suspect instrument of memory.
In doing this, I was guided by an informal ‘memory trust’ of friends and colleagues of four decades and more, who challenged me when they thought I was wrong, who provided additional information and perspective and who received many e-mails from me when I was feeling lonely and isolated (as aspiring authors often do). In alphabetical order, my special thanks and acknowledgement to the memory bank of Cedric de Beer, Richard de Villiers, Alan Fine, Kally Forrest, Steven Friedman, Barbara Hogan, Gerry Maré, Athol Margolis and Elaine Unterhalter.
We have witnessed a number of autobiographies in the past decades, where individuals have asserted their roles in bringing down apartheid. The New Radicals is not about individuals, but about a generation and its politics, about ideas and campaigns and events.
The first publishers to see a draft advised me to rewrite it as an autobiography. I declined this advice, and retreated into depression, believing that no-one else would want to publish the outcome of my year’s work. A few days after this first rejection, Russell Martin of Jacana Media asked me for a copy of the manuscript. Within a week, he indicated that he wanted to publish the book – no preconditions about re-writing, no suggestion that the book had to be exclusively an autobiography or a history or a narrative. Subsequent collaboration with Russell as editor has confirmed my view of him as a fine and professional publisher, a pleasure to work with.
Ivan Vladislavic has been an advisor and friend of immense insight, generosity and sensitivity. His gentle and wise influence has been one of the highlights of the writing and publishing process, and I have learnt much from him.
My immediate family - Georgina, Michael and Anthony - is here tonight, having made the trek from Cape Town to join in this generational celebration. Their collective role – in encouraging me to write, harassing and pressurising me when my commitment flagged, and generally ‘being there’ at all important moments – has been another highlight of the writing process.
The Wits Alumni Office has been extremely generous in its support of this launch, helping to organise it, securing the venue, sending out invitations, putting up with my incessant e-mails of enquiry. Thank you, especially to Peter Maher and Purvi Purohit.
To my fellow discussants – Achmat Dangor, Barbara Hogan and Eddie Webster – thank you for agreeing to contribute to the discussion, and participating in this way. I have known you all since the 1970s, and it is a privilege to share this podium with you.
Exclusive Books and its CEO, Ben Trisk, have been immensely supportive of The New Radicals, proving that with the right initiative and leadership, printed books of serious content can still find a valued place in book stores and in the chain of marketing and promotions.
And Gerald Kraak of Atlantic Philanthropies provided generous support which met some of the costs of editing and production.
A colleague wrote to me a few days back, characterising The New Radicals as part of a growing initiative for ‘political internals’ of the 1970s and 1980s to ‘take back their history’. I had not thought of it that way, but that project – of re-balancing the history of how change came about in South Africa, of the contribution of individuals and organisations who have been air-brushed from that process, and of the lessons which this past can provide for understanding and engaging with the highly unsatisfactory present – is something with which I proud to be associated.
My final words relate to the cover of The New Radicals. There is a rock group of the same name, which recorded two songs: You get what you give, and Someday we’ll know. There may be some message there, but I’m not sure what it is. The band’s music is, in my view, awful, and I am sorry if some of you believe that the cover photograph of this book is of those New Radicals. It is not. It is the Nusas trialists after a year-long ordeal under the Suppression of Communist Act. All five are here tonight – Charles Nupen, Eddie Webster, Cedric de Beer, Karel Tip – and me. Thanks, guys, for providing an image for the cover – and, more importantly, for sharing some of those years of radicalism and commitment. I promise not to ask you to perform a song tonight.
Glenn Moss
Wits Club
27 May 2014
The piazza in front of the Great Hall steps was overflowing, and the meeting was chaired by Cedric de Beer, who can be seen, with bushy hair and Clark Kent glasses in the photograph recording this meeting in The New Radicals (for those of you who might not know, Clark Kent is the mild-mannered, day-job identity of Superman who, like my generation, also sought to save the world from the forces of evil).
The release all political prisoners campaign of 1974 was probably the most radical and daring undertaken on the Nusas-affiliated campuses. It was not a liberal human rights protest, reacting to the atrocities of an oppressive minority government. It did not involve a call for clemency to be shown to prisoners of conscience. It made no distinction between communists and nationalists, non-racialists and Africanists, saboteurs and those who followed a path of non-violence. It boldly asserted that many of the leaders of South Africa’s majority were imprisoned, and called for their release so that they could participate in dismantling the system of apartheid.
In 1974, forty years ago, this was daring and radical politics, which tested the limits of above-ground organisation and activity. The campaign explicitly aimed to give prominence to the organisations of national liberation, introducing a generation of students to the leadership of the ANC, the PAC, Swapo, the Unity Movement and others, and explaining their endorsement of violence as a means of political struggle.
The campaign had been launched calamitously the day before, when a compromised bantustan leader had invited himself to speak, and drawn a distinction between democrats and communists. Only non-communist prisoners, he argued, should be released. After his speech, we were treated to the sight of Helen Joseph poking him repeatedly in the chest, and shouting ‘Are you saying Govan Mbeki should not be released because he is a communist?’
Now, in the next campaign meeting, we needed to regain and reassert the inherently radical content of our message. Helen excelled in doing this and, as recounted in the book, went a step further: she read out a smuggled message from Robben Island prisoners, commending and supporting the campaign – dangerous stuff in the hard political years of the early 1970s. Years later, then state president Nelson Mandela confirmed that he had been part of the group which penned and smuggled that message.
What is this strangely-titled book about? How can a bunch of aging men and women refer to themselves as ‘new’? The book is about the development of a new political radicalism in the 1970s. It grew from the ashes of the historical defeats on the 1960s, when militant politics was destroyed, when a culture of fear came to dominate within the country, when an understandably cautious multi-racial liberalism occupied what little space there was for political opposition.
The organisations of national liberation were struggling for survival in exile; leadership was banned and imprisoned. The progressive trade union movement had been decimated, both as a result of state action, and the incorporation of many of its best leaders and organisers into the underground campaign of sabotage and armed struggle.
From these ashes, phoenix-like, a whole new generation of political activism arose – initially on the campuses, both black and white, and then within the broader society. The influences were many and varied: black consciousness’s challenge to multi-racialism, which had been seen as a non-negotiable principle of organisation and an act of political resistance in and of itself; growing radicalisation on the Nusas campuses, which increasingly came to see capitalist development and apartheid as involving a symbiotic relationship, rather than as being in conflict; the development and influence of non-Soviet and western forms of Marxism which challenged the intellectual basis of existing anti-apartheid understanding, analysis and strategy.
On the Nusas-affiliated campuses, the emergence and development of the wages commissions, with their focus on empowering and organising workers as workers, rather than ‘blacks’, was one of the most central elements of this new radicalism. The anti-authoritarianism which manifested itself in rejection of ‘the system’, and the cultural and lifestyle choices which accompanied this, were an essential part of loosening the glue which held the ‘new radicals’ to the system of privilege which had formed them.
These influences initially coalesced in what Tony Morphet famously called ‘the Durban moment’, when black consciousness challenged the liberal multi-racialism of Nusas; when the first wages commission was established at the University of Natal; when a new intellectual project to question everything that existed in literature, in the social sciences, and in political philosophy gained traction; and when cultural and lifestyle choices loosened the bonds between students and the rest of society.
This awakening of a new political radicalism did not develop in opposition to the exiled organisations of national liberation. Generally, however, they were not an influence on this moment. I have argued in The New Radicals that their very absence created the space and the context for a generation to develop a relatively independent, ‘home grown’ politics in response to the changed circumstances of the 1970s. Without access to historical precedent and experience, and in the absence of a previous generation of leadership and organisation, the new radicals were forced to find new and innovative ways to understand and then challenge the society they rejected.
Many of us saw ourselves as operating within a broad, left leaning Congress Alliance tradition, especially where this aimed to strengthened working class and socialist interests within that alliance. This explains the focus on and effort to popularise the Freedom Charter as part of the Release All Political Prisoners campaign and the months’ long programme on the history of opposition which preceded it. In some ways, we ‘imagined’ an older and wiser Congress Alliance, attributed various strengths and positions to it, and then located our radicalism within that trajectory.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the conviction that the Alliance was based on a non-racialism which rejected race as a key element in political identity. We believed non-racialism prioritised identities associated with workers, or those in the impoverished and rural areas, or communities resident in the townships, or gender, or age (as in the youth), or sexual preference or even religion. In retrospect, I think it is evident that the Alliance predominantly embraced multi-racialism, rather than non-racialism; that its analysis and strategies were based on acceptance of racial identities and interests as the central fault line in South Africa’s socio-economic structure.
Ronnie Kasrils, closely associated with both the SACP and ANC intelligence at the time, has acknowledged that the movements in exile greeted the emergence of this new radicalism with suspicion, even hostility in some cases. This suggests a greater distance between the politics of national liberation in exile, and the development of a new radicalism within the country, than we realised at the time.
This disjunction has played itself out in numerous ways since 1990 – in the decision to disband the UDF, the harnessing of organised labour to the ANC as political party, government suspicion of NGOs and civil society, state responses to community activism, the marginalisation of independent and critical thought. In the first half of the 1970s, we assumed a far greater congruence of ideas and strategies between the new radicalism and the mainstream national liberation movements.
Most of what I want to say about the writing of this book, the thanks and acknowledgements, appears in the short preface, and I do not want to repeat this. There are, however, a few very special people who have helped me through this journey. As some of you know, my first draft of The New Radicals was constructed largely from memory. I began checking this against sources, documentation and especially the memory of other people as the book developed, and in this way I have attempted to combine history, politics, story telling and interpretation with the always suspect instrument of memory.
In doing this, I was guided by an informal ‘memory trust’ of friends and colleagues of four decades and more, who challenged me when they thought I was wrong, who provided additional information and perspective and who received many e-mails from me when I was feeling lonely and isolated (as aspiring authors often do). In alphabetical order, my special thanks and acknowledgement to the memory bank of Cedric de Beer, Richard de Villiers, Alan Fine, Kally Forrest, Steven Friedman, Barbara Hogan, Gerry Maré, Athol Margolis and Elaine Unterhalter.
We have witnessed a number of autobiographies in the past decades, where individuals have asserted their roles in bringing down apartheid. The New Radicals is not about individuals, but about a generation and its politics, about ideas and campaigns and events.
The first publishers to see a draft advised me to rewrite it as an autobiography. I declined this advice, and retreated into depression, believing that no-one else would want to publish the outcome of my year’s work. A few days after this first rejection, Russell Martin of Jacana Media asked me for a copy of the manuscript. Within a week, he indicated that he wanted to publish the book – no preconditions about re-writing, no suggestion that the book had to be exclusively an autobiography or a history or a narrative. Subsequent collaboration with Russell as editor has confirmed my view of him as a fine and professional publisher, a pleasure to work with.
Ivan Vladislavic has been an advisor and friend of immense insight, generosity and sensitivity. His gentle and wise influence has been one of the highlights of the writing and publishing process, and I have learnt much from him.
My immediate family - Georgina, Michael and Anthony - is here tonight, having made the trek from Cape Town to join in this generational celebration. Their collective role – in encouraging me to write, harassing and pressurising me when my commitment flagged, and generally ‘being there’ at all important moments – has been another highlight of the writing process.
The Wits Alumni Office has been extremely generous in its support of this launch, helping to organise it, securing the venue, sending out invitations, putting up with my incessant e-mails of enquiry. Thank you, especially to Peter Maher and Purvi Purohit.
To my fellow discussants – Achmat Dangor, Barbara Hogan and Eddie Webster – thank you for agreeing to contribute to the discussion, and participating in this way. I have known you all since the 1970s, and it is a privilege to share this podium with you.
Exclusive Books and its CEO, Ben Trisk, have been immensely supportive of The New Radicals, proving that with the right initiative and leadership, printed books of serious content can still find a valued place in book stores and in the chain of marketing and promotions.
And Gerald Kraak of Atlantic Philanthropies provided generous support which met some of the costs of editing and production.
A colleague wrote to me a few days back, characterising The New Radicals as part of a growing initiative for ‘political internals’ of the 1970s and 1980s to ‘take back their history’. I had not thought of it that way, but that project – of re-balancing the history of how change came about in South Africa, of the contribution of individuals and organisations who have been air-brushed from that process, and of the lessons which this past can provide for understanding and engaging with the highly unsatisfactory present – is something with which I proud to be associated.
My final words relate to the cover of The New Radicals. There is a rock group of the same name, which recorded two songs: You get what you give, and Someday we’ll know. There may be some message there, but I’m not sure what it is. The band’s music is, in my view, awful, and I am sorry if some of you believe that the cover photograph of this book is of those New Radicals. It is not. It is the Nusas trialists after a year-long ordeal under the Suppression of Communist Act. All five are here tonight – Charles Nupen, Eddie Webster, Cedric de Beer, Karel Tip – and me. Thanks, guys, for providing an image for the cover – and, more importantly, for sharing some of those years of radicalism and commitment. I promise not to ask you to perform a song tonight.
Glenn Moss
Wits Club
27 May 2014
A message from Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor, University of Witwatersrand
To colleagues and comrades at the launch of The New Radicals
The launch of this book probably generates mixed feelings among many. On the one hand, the publication of the book is a celebration of the lives of a generation of intellectuals and academics who inhabited the corridors of our universities, including Wits, and changed our world. They represented the best traditions of what it means to be scholars and intellectuals. Passionate, committed, they battled with ideas and translated them into practice. In the process, they assisted in the building of trade unions, social movements and universities and effectively created the leverage that fractured the apartheid state. It was Karl Marx who said in his Theses on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. These men and women did precisely this, and should be the exemplars for all of us who still inhabit the academy
But for many the publication of this book will also be a poignant moment. Too many of this original cohort of scholars and intellectuals who ventured out to transform our world are no longer with us. Some were assassinated and murdered, others died of natural causes, and yet others descended into the morass of despondency. But perhaps today, through the medium of those that are still present, and through especially their memories and reminiscences, we can once again connect to those who are no longer in our midst. And as we connect with them, we celebrate their lives, their contributions to the creation of the world we now live in. This is a world that still has many challenges, and it is our responsibility to stand on the shoulders of these organic intellectual giants, and once again, through the battle of ideas, engage in a struggle to transform our world.
I am sorry I cannot be with you. I unfortunately have to fulfil other more bureaucratic duties, the date for which could not be changed. But my thoughts are with you tonight as you connect with intellectual comrades who are no longer in our midst, and perhaps once again, revitalise your intellectual souls for a struggle not yet completed.
Professor Adam Habib
Vice Chancellor
University of Witwatersrand
27 May 2014
The launch of this book probably generates mixed feelings among many. On the one hand, the publication of the book is a celebration of the lives of a generation of intellectuals and academics who inhabited the corridors of our universities, including Wits, and changed our world. They represented the best traditions of what it means to be scholars and intellectuals. Passionate, committed, they battled with ideas and translated them into practice. In the process, they assisted in the building of trade unions, social movements and universities and effectively created the leverage that fractured the apartheid state. It was Karl Marx who said in his Theses on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. These men and women did precisely this, and should be the exemplars for all of us who still inhabit the academy
But for many the publication of this book will also be a poignant moment. Too many of this original cohort of scholars and intellectuals who ventured out to transform our world are no longer with us. Some were assassinated and murdered, others died of natural causes, and yet others descended into the morass of despondency. But perhaps today, through the medium of those that are still present, and through especially their memories and reminiscences, we can once again connect to those who are no longer in our midst. And as we connect with them, we celebrate their lives, their contributions to the creation of the world we now live in. This is a world that still has many challenges, and it is our responsibility to stand on the shoulders of these organic intellectual giants, and once again, through the battle of ideas, engage in a struggle to transform our world.
I am sorry I cannot be with you. I unfortunately have to fulfil other more bureaucratic duties, the date for which could not be changed. But my thoughts are with you tonight as you connect with intellectual comrades who are no longer in our midst, and perhaps once again, revitalise your intellectual souls for a struggle not yet completed.
Professor Adam Habib
Vice Chancellor
University of Witwatersrand
27 May 2014