THE MAKING OF TURNER

Richard Turner, known as Rick Turner, was a South African academic and activist. He was born to a farming family in Stellenbosch in the Cape in 1941, and lived only until 1978, when he was assassinated in his home in Durban, aged 37. Turner was married twice, first to Barbara Follett (née Hubbard) and then to Foszia Turner (née Fisher). Turner's eldest daughter, Jann Turner, is a Hollywood director, novelist, television director and screenwriter. Barbara Follett later became a British Labour Party member of parliament.

Rick Turner's life was a testimony to making the impossible possible. As a white South African from a privileged background, he rejected the racial supremacy, sexism and authoritarianism of apartheid rule, engaged in various forms of activism – such as supporting the dockworkers’ strikes in Durban (today eThekwini) in 1973, and became an ally of the Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. It was almost certainly Turner's significant role in the ‘Durban Moment’ during the 1970s, when the city of Durban became the centre of the most vibrant resistance to apartheid, that led to his death. To this day the crime of his death remains unsolved and his assassin is yet to be brought to justice, although the case has recently been reopened, 45 years after his murder.

But Turner also made the impossible possible intellectually. In his search for a just alternative to the oppressive apartheid order, he was deeply influenced by both the Marxism of the New Left and French existentialism. While Marxism was common among many in anti-apartheid movements, Turner's blending of it with existentialism was singular. This came about from his time of studying towards his PhD under Henri Lefebvre at the Sorbonne in Paris, and gave his ideas a unique flavour that can be summed up in the italicised phrase: the point of philosophy is not just to interpret the world, but to change it, not least by changing oneself. This qualification of Marx's famous dictum is central to Turner's intellectual distinctiveness. A key example of his personal transformation was his choice to marry and live openly with a black Muslim person at a time when sex and marriage across race lines were illegal in South Africa.