Chapter 2 - Race, Political Change and Liberal Critiques: Rick Turner and Sam Nolutshungu

Summary

The fifty-year anniversary of the publication of Rick Turner's book, The Eye of the Needle: An Essay on Participatory Democracy (1972a), has prompted scholars to reflect on the meaning and value of this text in South African political theory and philosophy. Turner's life and writings exemplify an important political project that instantiates the struggle against apartheid. Perhaps more significantly, his book undergirds a particular moment in South African anti-apartheid intellectual history, and is generative of further contestation and debate. This is in reference to both normative questions, ideational possibilities and Turner's utopian vision for political reform and social change through the notion of participatory democracy. Many scholars have been generously attentive to Turner's scholarship, commenting variously on the substantive nature of his ideas and providing detailed analysis on its theoretical architecture. There is also a resurgence of citing Turner's continuing relevance for the social and political challenges facing contemporary democratic South Africa (see Fluxman and Vale 2004; Piper 2010; Keniston 2013; Friedman 2017; Macqueen 2018). After all, The Eye of the Needle represents Turner's attempt to produce a theory of political and social change for an ideal South African society. But in it is encoded a complex and sometimes bewildering set of ideas that signifies Turner's existentialist training, his mode of radical theoretical engagement, and the context of oppositional thinking that informs his scholarship.

Turner concedes that The Eye of the Needle was composed with the intent to influence political action rather than offer a ground-breaking academic argument. This text also speaks to a particular audience: ‘Until white South Africans come to understand that present society and their present position is a result not of their own virtues but of their vices … they will not be able to communicate with black people, nor, ultimately, with one another’ (Turner 1972a, 92). In this sense, political reform, for Turner, may be construed as a bold challenge to white society and to ‘whiteness and its failings’ (Friedman 2017, 14).

But like Turner, other South African intellectuals operating in a context of opposition and defiance to the apartheid system, and imbued with a similar spirit of radicalism, critiqued dominant theoretical and ideological constructs to develop visions for social and political change.