The New Radicals: a generational memoir of the 1970s by Glenn Moss (review)

It is often said that history, or rather history writing, is only kind to the victors. The ANC are regularly criticised for omitting the unsavoury aspects of the liberation struggle against apartheid from the public record. Furthermore, it is also contended that other opponents of apartheid in the history of opposition are not accorded their legitimate place in the struggle for non-racialism, democracy, and social equality. For instance, these would include the PAC, Black Consciousness, the Unity Movement, Robert Sobukwe, Steve Biko, amongst others. The ‘victors’ do themselves and society in general a disservice by writing unidirectional and teleological accounts of the history of the struggle against racist oppression and exploitation, as they then set themselves up as the messiahs of the new society, leaving little room for democratic participation and contestation.

Clearly the governing party wants to assert its hegemony over many aspects of the society, and an important feature of this is to ‘control’ how the past is seen and made sense of. This involves at least two closely interrelated aspects, one being the correcting of the lies and distortions of the apartheid past, and the second being the projecting of a different and egalitarian future. As Glenn Moss himself writes in his final chapter, ‘Political history has no natural beginning or end. Neither do the stories and memories which give texture and depth to interpretation. There are no real conclusions to what is a never-ending narrative, a process in which the past, present and future influence, and in turn are influenced by, each other’ (247). The critical question of course is how the ideas of the ruling party become the ‘ruling ideas’, and hopefully through rigorous debate, popular participation, and critical reflection on practice, both successful and failed, and not through the imposition of a majoritarian will to power.

Against this background Glenn Moss’s The New Radicals is a particularly welcome contribution to the political history of the 1970s. Outside of the important focus of Soweto June 1976, this decade has been somewhat neglected in the story of the resistance to apartheid, and racial capitalism in South Africa. And this is the story that Glenn wants to tell by focusing on his pivotal involvement in radical student politics during the 1970s, in Johannesburg, and at Wits University. With the exception of the final chapter (chapter 11: Bookends), where Moss very briefly brings his story ‘up to date’ by concluding in 1996 with a meeting with Nelson Mandela and the other Nusas trialists, the other ten chapters stick faithfully to the decade of the 1970s. It might seem odd, and even a criticism, that a text on an aspect of South Africa’s recent political history should stick so resolutely to a specific decade! But, then again, this is not a political history in any strict sense, and is accurately subtitled a generational memoir of the 1970s. Moss undoubtedly has the political and intellectual credentials to write an authoritative political history of the 1970s, and beyond, and yet has written a well-crafted and informative memoir. As with all good biography writing The New Radicals reveals the complex intersection of the personal and the socio-political. It shows a young white man in apartheid South Africa coming of age, and making political decisions against the grain of his white privilege, and having his identity and political consciousness formed by the sociopolitical goings-on, on the ‘margins’ of white mainstream South African society.

However, Moss’s focus is not an autobiographical one, as he uses his personal history of radicalisation as a vantage point to recover the importance of the decade of the 1970s in the wider history of resistance and struggle in South Africa, and at the same time to highlight what for him were crucial developments and influences during this time. One of the first influences that Glenn discusses is Black Consciousness, and opens his book with a wonderful anecdote of his first encounter with Steve Biko in...