Remembering Rick Turner

TODAY, 8 January, marks the 38th anniversary of the death of South African activist and Durban resident, Richard Turner, known to most as Rick Turner.
Turner was allegedly assassinated by the apartheid state in 1978 and was described by Nelson Mandela “as a source of inspiration”.

Turner graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1963 attaining a B.A. Honours. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris where he received a doctorate for a dissertation on the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre. He returned to South Africa in 1966 and worked on his mother’s farm in Stellenbosch for two years before lecturing at the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He moved to Natal in 1970 and become a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Natal and in that same year, met Steve Biko and the two formed a close relationship.

Turner became a prominent academic at the University and assumed a leading role in South African political science and published a number of papers. He was a strong advocate of workers control and a critic of the reduction of politics to party politics.
In 1972 Turner wrote a book called The Eye of the Needle – Towards Participatory Democracy In South Africa. * The South African authorities thought that the book exercised a strong influence on opposition thinking with its plea for a radically democratic and non-racial South Africa. Such a society, he argued, would liberate whites as well as blacks.

He attended the Saso terrorism trial of nine Black Consciousness movement leaders as a defence witness in March 1976 where he expounded on theories expressed in The Eye of the Needle.

In November 1976 Dr Turner received a Humboldt Fellowship, one of the world’s leading academic awards from Heidelberg University, but after months of negotiating with the Minister of Justice was refused permission to travel to Germany.

In September 1977 Steve Biko was murdered by the apartheid police. On January 8, 1978, Turner was shot through a window of his home in Dalton Avenue, and died in the arms of his 13-year old daughter, Jann. She and her sister Kim were visiting their father at the time. He had gone to investigate a noise he had heard outside when he was shot and killed.  After months of investigations, police investigations turned up with no clues and his killers were never identified. However it is widely believed that he was murdered by the apartheid security police.

Turner has been largely left out of the pantheon of post-apartheid heroes but is recognised as the most significant academic philosopher to have come out of South Africa. His work is still read in popular radical movements and leading South African academics like Anthony Fluxman, Mabogo Percy More, Andrew Nash and Peter Vale have continued to make use of his work. Durban’s Rick Turner Road pays tribute to this remarkable man who was described as an idealist and who many argue hoped to spark a renewed Human Consciousness that would help to dismantle notions of race, class and identity.

“We are born into a society and we adopt its behaviours and values; we come to be the person that makes sense within that context. But at the same time, we are not doomed to accept the world-view we developed through our upbringing. We have the capacity to decide who we are, what values we believe and the structure of relationships that we want to be part of …” Turner wrote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Turner_(philosopher)

https://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/turner-r.htm