Over the past few years, the CIHA Blog’s coeditor Simanga Kumalo and Luce editorial assistant Albert Bangirana have been bringing to light issues that concern a number of South Africans vis-à-vis the past, namely justice, humanitarianism, peacebuilding and democracy. This piece is part of an ongoing series of reflections on the situation in South Africa, which we should all consider in how it applies there as well as to other parts of the continent and partners beyond the continent.
by Christopher Merrett
This reflection is part of a series that focuses on the moral philosophies of people and organisations who struggled against past injustice in South Africa but now occupy only a marginal role in the nation’s collective consciousness, emphasising their contemporary relevance to healing and ethics for a faith community.
Richard Turner was a political philosopher who taught on the Durban campus of the University of Natal. On 8 January 1978 at the age of 36 he was assassinated by a person yet to be identified, but undoubtedly acting on the orders of the apartheid state. From time to time, the government realised that people with challenging ideas were more dangerous to the status quo than those wielding guns, and it killed them (Steve Biko had been murdered just 118 days earlier). Turner had been banned in February 1973 in his very early thirties, and thus forbidden to teach, publish or attend any gathering, so it is remarkable that as a philosopher he is remembered at all. There is a road named after him in Durban (formerly Francois Road) and a building on the Howard College campus.
He was considered exotic for his time, having completed a thesis in France on existentialism. While not a practising Christian, he had been recruited by a now long-forgotten commission set up by the South African Council of Churches and Christian Institute called Spro-Cas (Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society) to serve on its economics commission. His minority, dissenting and alternative report was considered important enough to be published by Spro-Cas under the biblical-sounding title The Eye of the Needle.
Turner was concerned about power. Where does it lie, how is it exercised, by whom and for whose benefit? Those are questions to be asked of any organisation including churches; but Turner was a big-picture thinker and posed the most significant question of his time: how do you remove an unjust system like apartheid while ensuring that power is not simply assumed by a new elite using new forms of repression? Prophetically, he feared that extension of the vote would have insufficient impact on poverty, squalor or exploitation and argued that economic liberation was as crucial as the political. He anticipated, from a distance of 45 years, personality politics and a lack of respect for common institutions and property, a new apartheid of influence and wealth.
Real power, argued Turner, lies in logical thought and rational argument, not unsubstantiated authority and rhetoric. In other words, reason rather than mindlessness. He had great faith in a human capacity to think analytically, critically and creatively and then work meaningfully. True liberation, he thought, must respect the individual, shaking off the dogma and stereotyping attached to group identity and the false prophets and political messiahs who feed on it. (This is a theme common to a number of strands of South African political thought outside the mainstream, particularly on the Left.) He believed that we are socialised into inappropriate thinking that can be reformed through vision, hope and commitment. Society can be comprehended and altered. Injustice – political, economic, social − is not natural state of affairs; it can be changed.
Given Turner’s prompting, we could have expected, in a democratic South Africa, the growth of what might be called rational space that accommodates a flourishing culture of active and meaningful citizenship. Instead, often there has been resort to violence and the dominance of the demagogue, even at our universities.
To tackle his vision, Turner advocated Utopian thinking. The term ‘Utopian’ is often used in a disparaging sense, but nothing can be more so than the Christian hope for the realisation of the kingdom of heaven on earth. Turner argued we should imagine the most desirable state of affairs in society and then work backwards to identify the obstacles, rather than the normal practice of tackling short-term problems piecemeal and then being surprised that we have made little substantial progress regarding the bigger picture. Put simply: if we do not consider the desirable, we shall never achieve the possible.
The mechanism for this he termed participative democracy. This was no theory: Turner was influential in the development of participative democracy in the emerging trade unions of the 1970s. The Durban Moment during the strikes of the first quarter of 1973 was a watershed point in recent South African history. In practice, participative democracy involves a flattening of hierarchy, the abolition of undue deference, decentralisation of authority, and co-operative and democratic decisionmaking.
Turner’s politics was one of redemption, a yearning for a radically different social order that draws upon Christian values in which people, love, justice, truth and openness matter more than materialism and other vices and superficialities. At its root was a profound and practical belief in the Christian tenet of love of neighbour through which maximum personal freedom and fulfilment can be established in an equitable society. A transcendent morality can alter established practices, and negative habits can be changed in different circumstances − as history has proved. The best example is the development of the concept of human rights, particularly of women and children, which since World War II has been truly revolutionary in its depth and breadth.
Ordinary people can shape history. Perhaps that was Turner’s most radical thought. Indeed, it may have been the one that killed him. But it left South Africans with much to think about and act upon if they cared to do so.