On 8 January 1978, an unknown gunman shot Rick Turner through a window in his Durban home, leaving him to die in the arms of his 13-year-old daughter. He was 36 years old and had played an important and prominent role within the white left, encouraging people to assist the emerging black trade union movement, and to adopt a more sympathetic stance towards the Black Consciousness Movement, founded by his friend Steve Biko. Biko had been tortured to death in prison just four months before Turner was assassinated.

 

Like Biko, Turner was seen as a threat to the apartheid regime. The security police were forced to admit that Turner had a ‘a marked ability to influence people’; ‘in an era of racial and labour conflicts, conditions are ideal for [Turner]… to promote the idea of a social and economic change’.

 

In the harshly repressive climate of the 1960s and 1970s Turner’s politics were refreshingly daring; his vision for transformation in South Africa was independent and radical. Today, in the severely compromised political climate of post-apartheid South Africa, the need for the kind of idealist vision that Rick Turner lived and died for is just as urgent as it was during his lifetime.

 

Billy Keniston is a writer and historian. He earned an MA in History from the University of the Western Cape, after completing a thesis entitled Rick Turner’s Contribution to a Socialist Political Culture in South Africa, 1968-1978.