[Politics]Rick Turner and Steve Biko were leading liberation thinkers in 1970s South Africa – why their ideas still matter

[GreenBoys]

Steve Biko was undoubtedly the most influential South African liberation struggle theorist and activist of the 1970s. Rick Turner was arguably among the most effectual white anti-apartheid activists of the era. Biko espoused black consciousness while Turner was a Marxist philosopher. Biko (30) was murdered by apartheid police in 1977. Turner (36) was shot dead by an apartheid assassin in 1978. Their ideas continue to resonate. Political scientist and philosopher Michael Onyebuchi Eze sets out, in a chapter of a new book, Rick Turner’s Politics as the Art of the Impossible, how the two men’s philosophies mirrored and critiqued each other. The Conversation Africa asked him to explain.

What were Turner’s and Biko’s philosophies?
Following almost three centuries of colonialism, the National Party came into power in South Africa in 1948. It formalised apartheid (apartness) into law. The policy kept black people and white people apart, and discriminated against the black majority. In 1960, the apartheid regime banned the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress liberation movements.

Rick Turner and Steve Biko gained prominence in the freedom struggle in the 1970s. Turner taught philosophy at the segregated University of Natal. Biko was studying at the “non-European” section of the university’s medical school. They met in Durban in 1970. The meeting triggered the “Durban Movement”, which mobilised workers’ and wider societal resistance against apartheid and capitalist exploitation. The movement shaped strategies in the fight against apartheid.

Biko’s black consciousness movement articulated a profound and multilayered critique of apartheid. It called for the psychological and cultural liberation of black South Africans. The core argument of black consciousness was that black people (“Africans”, “Coloureds” and “Indians”) needed to rally together around the cause of their oppression — the blackness of their skin. It implored them to work as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bound them to perpetual servitude.

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