Constitutional Court Judge Jody Kollapen.
(Photo: Facebook) 
It is hard to comprehend how much the world has changed in the last few years … and how much it has stayed the same. Covid-19, the ballooning climate emergency and now the war in Europe, all coming on top of unprecedented levels of inequality, are a challenge to social justice activists to rethink.
Faced with such existential threats, some in civil society are already expressing feelings of impotence, and even despair. To overcome this, some activists are arguing that civil society must begin to question not just its methods, but its ways of living, thinking and understanding the world in which we now live.
In this context, two recent mini-conferences threw up profound questions that civil society should take on board.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/MC-Civil-society-crossroads_4.jpg "A seminar reflected on the 50th anniversary of South African philosopher-activist Rick Turner's book The Eye of the Needle. Turner was assassinated in 1978. (Picture Jann Turner)")
Learning from Rick Turner
The first was a seminar jointly organised by Wits University Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) and Maverick Citizen to reflect on the 50th anniversary of The Eye of the Needle by Rick Turner, the philosopher-activist assassinated by the apartheid state on 8 January, 1978.
style="font-weight: 400;">view on YouTube here) was titled Utopian Thinking, Revisiting the Ideas of Rick Turner in the Current Political Context. It was an unusual meeting: drawing together a large and unique (these days) mix of activists from across ages, races, genders and geography. Leaders from the #FeesMustFall movement interacted with veteran activists whose work had supported the emergence of South Africa’s powerful trade union movement in the early 1970s. The powerful voice of Foszia Turner-Stylianou, Turner’s comrade and wife, challenged us to remedy the falsehood that South Africa’s struggle has been led mainly by men (read her thoughts here).
The interactions between speakers were too brief, but hinted at the potential benefits of a longer conversation between (then young) activists from the early 1970s, who were confronted with what seemed at that time the unbreakable wall of apartheid and racism, and contemporary (still young) activists struggling against modern-day inequalities in education and employment.
The seminar was rich, multi-layered and moving, but at its heart lay a reconsideration of Rick Turner’s methods of analysing political issues and the efforts at organisation-building that followed upon his ideas.
All speakers agreed that Turner, together with his friend and comrade Steve Biko, had played a crucial catalytic role in the early 1970s. Together they helped crystallise what became an unstoppable and undefeatable revival of political organisation, first by trade unions who organised the Durban strikes in 1973, and then by young people in 1976. Both movements were based on growing political understandings of race, class and power.
Had Biko and Turner not been murdered, the liberation struggle and possibly even our democracy might have followed a different course. But such was their rising influence that both were assassinated within six months of each other by the security police.
To date, Turner’s murder remains unsolved.
Academic Gerhard Maré from the University of KwaZulu Natal’s School of the Built Environment and Development Studies, who was a collaborator with Turner in the early 1970s, presented the keynote speech on the theme of utopian thinking. Maré summed up Turner’s “two reasons for engaging in utopian thinking” as being the need:
“to explore, and, if necessary, to attack, all the implicit assumptions about how to behave towards other people that underlie our daily actions in all spheres.”
And Turner’s conviction that:
“Unless we can see our society in the light of other possible societies, we cannot even understand how and why it works as it does, let alone judge it.”
Maré stressed that for Turner “utopian thinking was not idealistic, not pie in the sky, not avoidance, not unrealisable” but “a method located in radically imaginative thinking to shake ‘common sense’, to remain open to and act towards other possibilities”.
“From this radical imagination of utopia, [a person] is challenged to step back and return to what is being presented as the ‘common sense’ of the everyday world.”
Maré developed this argument by explaining that “utopian thinking recognizes that ‘the way things are’ is itself a contingent status quo that requires active participation by people to maintain practised ways of thinking and behaving for its maintenance.”
But, Maré argued, it is also about the methods and objectives of activist practice because “if humans built this history, humans can change it … with a utopian conception of a goal, methods are formulated, obstacles are identified, primary agents are noted, to reconstruct socially constructed society. To make the supposedly impossible become possible”.
Activists asked to live their politics
Albeit unrelated to each other, the need to reimagine activism also emerged as a theme in a civic educational lecture series on Democracy and Constitutionalism, held by SECTION27 and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution. That conference opened on Monday (