Radical white students played an important role in opposing apartheid and paved the way for Cosatu, writes Gavin Evans.
THE NEW RADICALS: A GENERATIONAL MEMOIR OF THE 1970s by Glenn Moss (Jacana)
I first met Glenn Moss 32 years ago at the Johannesburg offices of Work In Progress (WIP), the political magazine he founded and edited. My aim was to get my honours dissertation published and I went to WIP more in hope than expectation.
Moss was everything a good editor should be – perceptive and encouraging without any hint of condescension – and somehow he managed to turn my dry research on the military into a series of three impeccably subbed articles. I was impressed.
At the time he was about 30 years old and I took him to be an activist-academic type whose politics had probably emerged somewhere between the seminar room and the picket line.
Over the next few years I met a number of his lefty contemporaries – political lawyers, unionists, journalists, lecturers and ANC exiles – but the question never occurred: Where had they come from?
The history of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) that my generation received tended to start around 1976. Perhaps it was the solipsism of youth, prompting the assumptions about who invented the wheel, but we lacked curiosity about those who preceded us. Their world was, at best, opaque.
Which is one reason why I found The New Radicals to be such an important addition to “struggle” history – a book that fills in a decade-long gap in impressive detail, leaving no doubt about the immense achievements of this innovative generation.
For full review by Gavin Evans see Mail & Guardian
PHOTO CREDIT: The new radicals: Wits students protest against the death of Ahmed Timol in detention. (Wits Historical Papers).
