Rick Turner (philosopher)
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Richard Turner (born 1942 in Stellenbosch), known as Rick Turner, was a South African philosopher who was assassinated by the apartheid state in 1978.Nelson Mandela described Turner "as a source of inspiration".[1]
Turner graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1963 attaining a B.A. Honours. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris where he received a doctorate for a dissertation on the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.
He returned to South Africa in 1966 and went farming on his mother’s farm in Stellenbosch for two years before lecturing at the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He came to Natal in 1970 and become a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Natal and in that same year he met Steve Biko and the two formed a close relationship.
Dr Turner became a prominent academic at the University and assumed a leading role in South African political science and published a number of papers. His work was written from a radical existential perspective and stressed the virtues of bottom up popular democracy against authoritarian Stalinist and Trotskyist strands of leftism.
In 1972 Turner wrote a book called The Eye of the Needle - Towards Participatory Democracy In South Africa. The South African authorities thought that the book exercised a strong influence on opposition thinking with its plea for a radically democratic and non-racial South Africa. Such a society, he argued, would liberate whites as well as blacks.
In 1973 he published a widely influential article titled "Dialectical Reason", in the leading philosophy journal Radical Philosophy. In the same year he was banned for five years. He was not allowed to visit his two daughters or his mother and had to stay in the Durban area. Even though he was banned this did not stop him from speaking out and in April 1973 Dr Turner and other banned individuals staged an Easter fast to illustrate the sufferings that bannings impose on people. The fast was supported by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. After his bannings Dr Turner was kept on the staff at the University even though he was not allowed to lecture.
He attended the Saso terrorism trial of nine Black Consciousness movement leaders as a defence witness in March 1976 where he expounded on theories expressed in The Eye of the Needle.
In November 1976 Dr Turner received a Humboldt Fellowship, one of the world’s leading academic awards from Heidelberg University, but after months of negotiating with the Minister of Justice was refused permission to travel to Germany.
In September 1977 Steve Biko was murdered by the apartheid police.[2]
On January 8, 1978, Turner was shot through a window of his home in Dalton Avenue, Bellair, and died in the arms of his 13-year old daughter, Jann. After months of investigations and predictably so, police investigations turned up with no clues, and his killers were never identified. However it is widely believed that he was murdered by the apartheid security police.
Turner has been largely left out of the pantheon of post-apartheid heroes. Most of his former comrades ascribe this to his focus on popular self management and bottom up democracy which is very uncomfortable for the post-apartheid state which is notoriously authoritarian (mixing neo-liberal managerialism with Stalinism in its practices).
He is recognised as the most significant academic philosopher to have come out of South Africa. His work is still read in popular radical movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and academics like Anthony Fluxman, Mabogo Percy More, Andrew Nash and Peter Vale have continued to make use of his work.
Turner's first wife, Barbara Follet, later became a Labour Party Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom.
