2 - Post-student People

Summary

The state's concerted campaign against Nusas put Jenny Curtis's generation of student activists into a precarious position and forced them to re-evaluate their politics. Surrounded by banned people, Jenny found her room to manoeuvre seriously curtailed. The space for resisting apartheid – legally, openly – was narrowing, and fast. After her brother Neville's dramatic escape to Australia (sneaking aboard a boat, using a friend's passport) others soon followed in his path. Three more of the Claremont communards (Chris Wood, Paula Ensor and Philippe le Roux) were living in exile by 1976. For many young white leftists, there was a sense, as Barbara Hogan remembers it, that

there wasn't a place for white South Africans, so the only moral thing you could do was to leave the country. For many of the young white men it was either that or conscription. What about those of us who chose to stay? Did we have a place or a legitimate place?

Responding to this rapidly deteriorating political climate, Jenny Curtis and her comrades were largely on their own. They had become ‘post-student people’. That is to say, having developed their politics inside Nusas, they now found themselves older than and also intellectually and emotionally beyond the confines of campus politics. The interaction with the Black Consciousness Movement and the repressive tactics of the state had forced these young white people to reject liberalism, and to radicalise in various ways. At the same time, the even heavier repression of the 1960s meant that Curtis's generation was more or less entirely cut off from previous generations of struggle. As Glenn Moss described it, ‘there was very little contact with the past because those who had been involved in the past were either in jail, or banned, or house arrested, or dead, or in exile’. For Barbara Hogan, this separation from older activists meant that ‘we weren't given the givens’. In other words, the process of radicalisation that this group of young people experienced happened largely without the possibility of being mentored, or sculpted, into accepting the so-called ‘correct line’. Cut adrift from the major African nationalist organisations and the Communist Party, this group, says Hogan, ‘developed our own homespun brand of what it means to be a Marxist in South Africa.