South African social history and the new non-fiction

Abstract

Americans examining the South African upheaval of 1976 to 1994 are often prone to read that period of dramatic change as the analogue of the Civil Rights Movement. There may perhaps be some justification for making that comparison a basis for historical sociology, but it is a very bad guide to understanding the thinking of the South African activists of that time. For, outside of a relatively small number of liberal activists, and a handful of religious leaders, Marxism—in a number of varieties—was, by far, the dominant set of ideas amongst militant anti-apartheid activists. The people who made the political running in those days did not believe they were participating in the March on Selma, but rather that they were involved in the analogue of, variously, the Russian, Cuban, Vietnamese or Nicaraguan revolutions. They may well have been deluded in this regard, but this was how they thought. In the 1980s, as Marxist politics crumbled elsewhere, it was very vigorous in South Africa. And this was also true of the oppositional political culture on South Africa’s campuses.