TRANSFORMATION 85 (2014) ISSN 0258-7696 146

Review

Billy Keniston (2013) Choosing to be Free: thelife story of Rick Turner. Auckland Park: Jacana

Edward Websteredward.webster@wits.ac.za

It is perhaps a reflection of our times of disillusionment with the currentpolitical parties that we have begun to see the emergence of autobiographiesthat reflect critically on the post-apartheid period: Frank Chikane, JayNaidoo, Ronnie Kasrils, Ben Turok, all part of the post-apartheid politicalorder, now deeply critical of its failures and re-discovering their radical roots.These post-power radicals lament the loss of vision, the self-seekingnature and widespread corruption that characterises contemporary SouthAfrican politics.

Billy Kenistons Choosing to be free: the life story of Rick Turner takesus back further in time to the roots of the internal democratic movement, tothe so-called Durban moment, that brought together the two social movementsthat were to define anti-apartheid resistance in the seventies, BlackConsciousness and the labour movement. These were heady times, the high-point of apartheid; before the decade was over both leading intellectuals ofthese movements, Steve Biko and Richard Turner, were dead, killed at thehands of the apartheid police.

Keniston, an American with roots in the anarchist movement, hasevocatively captured the life story of Turner. Born in 1941 in Cape Town ofBritish immigrant parents, Turner followed a familiar trajectory of a middleclass English-speaking white boy; early childhood on a farm outsideStellenbosch, loved cricket, schooled at St Georges Grammar School andeventually graduating from the University of Cape Town (UCT) with a BAdegree. The early 1960s was a time of turmoil for a left-leaning student atUCT: disillusioned liberals were beginning to embrace radical ideas and asmall group, the African Resistance Movement (ARM), initiated a campaignof sabotage.

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Although Turner was friendly with some ARM members, he eschewedboth the ARM and the Oxbridge path of many of his peers, and decided tostudy at the Sorbonne in Paris. This was to prove a turning point in his lifeas it was here that he was able to deepen his interest in the work of Jean PaulSartre, and Sartres notions of human freedom, of the essential capacity tochose ones values and behaviours (29).

Turner, now very much a product of the emerging European New Left withits destalinised Marxism and deep commitment to participatory democracy,returned home in 1966 to the city of his birth. It was a time of left pessimismand Turner found a ready audience on the fringes of the student left at UCTand Stellenbosch. But it was for Turner a time of wandering and exploration,that ended at the University of Natal in 1970 . There, Keniston writes , hewould truly thrive , intellectually , politically and emotionally , and come intohis own (56).

Turner arrived in Durban to teach politics at a time when a new generationof radical white students was emerging. These students, such as Gerry Mar,Halton Cheadle, Karel Tip, and Charles Nupen, were the brightest of theirgeneration and became a crucial constituency for Turners ideas. The pointof departure in Turners radicalism was his critique of white liberals, thedominant ideology at the so-called liberal universities at the time. Whiteliberals, Turner argued, were white first, and liberal second. By this,Keniston writes, he meant that their capacity to envision any fundamentalchange to their way of life or their values was profoundly limited andcompromised by their daily participation in a racist social, political andeconomic system (63).

Turner was to go beyond a critique of white liberals, a critique he sharedwith Steve Biko, to find a role for the emerging white radical. Kenistoncorrectly describes Turner as a teacher; this was his profession and hispassion (77). But the crucial point about his radical Freirean pedagogy, asHalton Cheadle suggests, was to help us to make an important shift, awayfrom just a generalised opposition to apartheid and increasingly towards aclass-based way of seeing the world (85). As Dan OMeara, a junior lecturerwith Turner at the time, remarks, Rick offered us this idea that it is only byworking with black workers that whites can effect change (123)

Turners most important contribution in the realm of ideas was hispowerful series of essays, The Eye of the Needle: towards a participatorydemocracy in South Africa, published in 1972. The central idea in this shortbook was the necessity of utopian thinking, the need for activists to have

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an alternative vision of what the world could look like. But it was more thana long term vision of a decentralised and cooperative economic and politicalstructure, in which hierarchy is obliterated as much as possible and autonomyis maximised (xi). For Turner it was also an argument for incremental reformas a step in the process of transformation.

It is on the point of strategy that I find myself uncomfortable withKenistons portrayal of Turner. Keniston draws very effectively on interviewswith a number of people who were close to Turner but in the end he seesTurner very much through a particular lens, the New Left of the 1960s andwith a quasi-anarchist eye. Keniston implies that Turner would have stronglydisapproved of the direction the movement took after he was assassinatedon January 8, 1978. He denies any continuation of the Turner legacy into thepresent.

Writing a biography is an immensely difficult task; more so when youhave to rely on what others say about your subject. I think Keniston hasdone a good job, especially in bringing to life Turners early life; but the jobis only half done.

I arrived in Durban in late February 1973, as the strikes were ending, andwas driven shortly afterwards to Turners home in the suburb of Bellair. Hehad been banned for five years the week before. We spent the rest of the daytalking; Turner said we needed to set up an institute for worker educationto educate workers into what a trade union is. We should also create a journalto record worker struggles and analyse the emerging worker movement. Thefirst, the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE) was launched a few monthslater; the second, the South African Labour Bulletin (SALB) published itsfirst edition in April 1974, and still continues as a regular publication 40 yearslater.

I worked closely with Turner and his wife Foszia Fisher from February1973 until December 1975 in the IIE and the SALB. My impression is that themass strikes of 1973 profoundly influenced the focus of Turners work. Witha devoted and very effective partnership with Foszia Fisher, Turner wentbeyond his early writings into the difficult task of building a democraticlabour movement. In part he was educated by his students (see thecomment by Cheadle, page 119) to engage more directly with organisationalissue, but he also had a clear understanding that it was through collectiveorganisation, especially trade unions, that black people could exercise somecontrol over their lives and influence the direction of change in South Africa.

Keniston fails to understand this shift in Turners thinking. Instead,

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Keniston suggests that Turners account of the Durban strikes, especiallywhere he calls on employers and the apartheid government to legalise andrecognise trade unions, points to a weak link between Turners theoreticalwriting on workers self management and his strategic thinking in the presenttense (128). Keniston then goes on to prescribe to Turner what he shouldhave done: It is not the role of radical opponents of an economic system totell the rulers of that system how they can more rationally or peacefullyexploit and oppress the population. Nonetheless, in making the case for thelegal recognition of African trade unions, Turner did just that (128).

Quite the opposite: Turner was exploiting the contradictions inherent inthe apartheid workplace and, in the process, winning space for democraticworker organisation. Given the nature of the apartheid workplace and thesuppression of African worker leaders, Turners argument for legalrecognition made strategic sense. As part of his commitment to buildingorganisation, Turner spent the first three years after his banning deeplyinvolved in research and writing on workers and trade unions.

The first publication of the IIE published in 1974 and written largely byTurner with the assistance of Gerhard Mar and others, The Durban Strikes1973 was to become the first sociological study of the new type of industrialworker, the semi-skilled machine operator, setting a new research agenda forlabour studies. In the concluding chapter of this book, Turner makes thecase for the recognition of trade unions for African workers. Indeed thischapter was to become the first edition (Volume One, Number One) of thenewly launched South African Labour Bulletin. Turner went on to writemany of the articles, under a pseudonym, in the first two volumes of theSALB.

But his central pre-occupation in 1973 and 1974 was writing the Handbooksfor the IIE correspondence course on labour studies.1 The first Handbook,the Workers Organisation, analyses the transformation of capitalism, therise of trade unions, the dangers of bureaucratisation and corruption, thenecessity of democracy and the need for workers to be knowledgeable abouttheir organisation. The aim was to turn the notion of agency into a practicalhandbook on the critical relationship between government and internalunion democracy. A central proposition in the book Workers Organisation,was the concept of worker control, which locates decision making at thelevel of the shop floor worker, thereby pre-empting the possibility of electedleaders acting without engaging the base (Lambert 2010:30).

Participatory democracy, the Handbook suggests, does not depend so

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much on structures, but on leaders who promote a culture of participation.The role of a leader is to participate in the workers struggle it is not acareer or a way of getting rich they must expect to live at the same standardof living as their fellow workers (cited in Lambert 2010). An autocrat isdefined as somebody who is always telling people what to do, and will neverlisten to criticism from other people an autocratic leader will always thinkhe/she knows best, and can learn nothing from the workers or anybody else(cited in Lambert 2010). A bureaucratic approach emerges when the unionmoves out of the factory and into an office. As a consequence, full timeofficials believe that they run the union, not the workers. Everything is leftto the officials who end up spending more time having tea with themanagement than talking to the workers (cited in Lambert 2010).

As can be seen from these radical notions of a union, calling for theirrecognition was no weak link in Turners thought: it was at the centre ofhow he saw his vision being progressively realised. In the last chapter of theDurban Strikes 1973, Turner writes that trade unions, with the right toorganise freely, and the use of the strike weapon as a last resort, organisedon democratic lines , and possessing their own sanctions over members, arethe precondition for stable industrial relations ( IIE 1974:120).

This approach to strategy, what could be called radical or structuralreform, was at the centre of Turners contribution to social change. Kenistonis right to argue that Turner became isolated after 1975 from the activists inthe labour and student movement, but this was in some sense inevitable andwas, after all, the purpose of the banning order. Keniston is also right to pointto the rift that emerged between those, such as John Copelyn and Alec Erwin,who believed education should be subordinate to organisation (interviewwith Copelyn cited in Keniston (184)) and those, such as Turner and Fisher,who had a broader conception of worker education.

But the predominantly middle class white leaders of this emergingmovement were distanced from the black working class they claimed toserve. The pitfalls of this new political culture was its ignorance of theexisting national political tradition (Webster and Lambert 2013). Thesehidden voices were an essential part of the Durban moment and theirdetermination to embed working class interests in the national movementwas eventually rewarded with the foundation of COSATU in 1985. But theshop floor tradition, committed to translating participatory democracy intostrong shop floor structures, had in no sense disappeared. The strategiccompromise between the national democratic tradition and the shop floor

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tradition was to merge into COSATU, where an autonomous trade unionmovement was recognised, with the ANC as the hegemonic force. It seemedfor a moment in the mid-1980s through to the early-1990s as if the vexedlabour question had been resolved through an equal partnership betweenCOSATU and the ANC.

But this was not to be. The new political elite that emerged dominant inthe new South Africa remained uncomfortable with an independent unionmovement. Labour stands now at the crossroads. The transformation ofwork from the standard employment relationship to growing precariousness,short-term, part-time and casual work, has transformed the conditions underwhich labour historically built its power. The challenge for labour is todevelop new ways of organising, new sources of power and above all analternative to the dominant regime of neoliberal accumulation.

In facing this challenge Kenistons account of the life story of RichardTurner has come at an opportune time. It forces us to reflect on the voicesof the early-1970s and the clear vision that Turner developed that inspireda new generation of radicals. But in drawing lessons from the past, it isimportant that we capture the full picture of Turners legacy, namely, thatmovements are not only the result of individuals (although they are crucial);it takes a network of people dedicated to a cause to develop a movement. Thetranslation of the IIE Handbooks into Zulu, for example, was done byBhekisesa Nxasana, a union-made intellectual, who was a vital hiddenvoice in the Durban moment (Webster and Lambert,2013:8-9).

Turners contribution was to develop an alternative vision andconceptualise the importance of using power in a strategic way. As thestrategy developed, firstly amongst his students, and then into the embryoniclabour movement, it gathered a wider network of supporters. The introductionof the shop steward committee and the recognition agreement in factoriesin Durban at that time by young organisers such as David Hemson, HaltonCheadle, Omar Badsha, and Rob Lambert, was the key institutional innovationthrough which shop floor power was built. On the shop floor, unions coulddevelop a strong factory-based leadership, less prominent than head officeactivists, and closely tied to their members. With the strong backing of theirmembers, factory leaders had the power to push concessions frommanagement, which not only created space for further advances, but alsowon concrete improvements in workers conditions thereby reassuring themof the efficacy of direct action.

In its emphasis on gradualism, flexibility and compromise with employers

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and the state, the strategy stood in marked contrast to the armed strugglebeing waged by the African National Congress, which aimed at the statesoverthrow. In place of a vanguard movement to smash the state, the unionssought to build a broad movement from below based on strong factorystructures, held together through practices of democratic accountability.This is, I believe, is a central part of the legacy of Richard Turner.

His banning was testimony to the impact he was making, especiallyamongst students and progressive academics. The banning forced Turnerto develop effective innovative strategies to continue his work. Hisassassination, the apartheid police decided, was the only way of ensuringthat he was silenced, permanently.

Billy Kenistons book is the first full-length biography of Richard Turner.It is a highly readable and engaging account of this courageous and brilliantpolitical philosopher. His assassination by the Durban security police at theage of 36 was a tragic blow to his family, friends, and colleagues in the internaldemocratic movement. His logical and rational mind is sadly missed as webegin again to explore alternatives to neo-liberal capitalism. Choosing to beFree: the life story of Rick Turner, eloquently reminds us of the rich past ofthe left tradition in South Africa and Turners contribution to the socialistdemocracy that South Africa could become.

Note1. It was established as a correspondence course as Turner was not allowed to

teach. Instead he wrote the four IIE Handbooks: The Workers Organisation, TheWorker in the Factory, The Worker and the Law, and The Worker and theEconomy. The exercises in the Handbooks were marked by Turner and BhekisesaNxasana. The ideas in the Handbooks were conveyed by other members of theIIE Working Committee at weekend seminars.

ReferencesIIE (1974) The Durban Strikes 1973. Durban: Institute for Industrial Education.

Lambert, R (2010) The Durban moment and the new labour internationalism,Transformation 72/73.

Webster, E and R Lambert (2013) Hidden voices: the promise and the pitfalls ofthe Durban moment. Paper delivered at a Conference on the Durban Moment,Rhodes University, February 2013.

Notes on Contributors

Hoosen Coovadia is a Director at MatCH Health Systems (Maternal,Adolescent and Child Health) a division of the Wits Health Consortium, inthe Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, at the University of theWitwatersrand (from 2008). He is also an Emeritus Professor of Paediatricsand Child Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (from 2003). He is aCommissioner on the National Planning Commission for South Africa (from2010).

Benedict Xolani Dube is a Senior Researcher at the Xubera Institute forResearch and Development, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

Bill Freund is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the Universityof KwaZulu-Natal where he was Head of the Department of EconomicHistory and Development Studies at the University of Natal until 2004.

Grahame Hayes lives in Durban, and is a founding editor of PINS(Psychology in Society). He was on the Nusas executive in the mid-1970s.

Mondli Hlatshwayo is a Researcher in the Centre for Education Rightsand Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg.

Marie Huchzermeyer is Professor in the School of Architecture andPlanning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Rachel Matteau Matsha is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in theDepartment of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,Durban, South Africa.

Marianne Morange is a Senior Lecturer in the Departement of Geographyat the University Paris Diderot and a junior fellow at the InstitutUniversitaire de France.

Annsilla Nyar is a PhD candidate at Department of Political Science inthe School of Social Sciences at the University of Witwatersrand.

Theodoros Rakopoulos is a social anthropologist, Post-Doctoral Fellowat the Human Economy Programme of the University of Pretoria.

Carin Runciman is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the SouthAfrican Research Chair in Social Change, University of Johannesburg.

Jrgen Schraten is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University ofGiessen, Germany, and Associate of the Human Economy programme,University of Pretoria.

Ben Stanwix is a Researcher at the Development Policy Research Unit(DPRU) at the University of Cape Town.

Tony Voss is a Research Associate of Nelson Mandela MetropolitanUniversity, Port Elizabeth. He retired in 1995 from the service of theUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, as Professor Emeritus of English.

Edward Webster is Professor Emeritus at Wits University and Directorof the Chris Hani Institute.