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  • Teacher and Comrade: Richard Dudley and the Fight for Democracy in South Africa
  • Muhammed Haron
Alan Wieder . Teacher and Comrade: Richard Dudley and the Fight for Democracy in South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008. 175 pp. Photographs. Glossary. Sources. Index. $65.50. Cloth. $29.95. Paper.

In South Africa's struggle against the apartheid regime and its inhumane policies, numerous antiapartheid intellectuals voiced their ideas in public forums and in publications. Social historians have written about many of these figures, but they have slighted others, especially those outside such main liberation movements as the ANC. In 2003 Alan Wieder published the acclaimed Voices from Cape Town Classrooms: Oral Histories of Teachers Who Fought Apartheid. That study has led to this biography of Richard Dudley, who began teaching in the 1940s and became a leading member of the Teachers' League of South Africa (TLSA) and the New Unity Movement (NUM) (formerly known as the Non-European Unity Movement).

Dudley was one of those Cape intellectuals who took a principled position against the apartheid system from the time he entered the University of Cape Town (UCT)—as a fifteen-year-old!—until South Africa transformed itself into a democratic nation. Dudley passionately defended pivotal principles of "non-collaboration" and "non-racialism" (2-5). Indeed, he took a firm stand against the ANC and other parties for having gone against the "non-collaboration" principle when they engaged in discussions with the Nationalist Party and compromised on numerous issues, such as those contained in the "sunset clause" proposed in 1992 by Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party. Dudley's NUM, along with other disgruntled voices such as the Qibla Muslim Movement (QMM), thus rejected the birth of the South African democratic nation in 1994, and Dudley reaffirmed his noncollaborationist position when former NUM members (such as Abdullah Omar) proposed forwarding his name as a possible minister of education in Mandela's Government of National Unity. Dudley was not prepared to enter an ANC-dominated government that had adopted a collaborationist approach and compromised the struggle.

Each of the eight chapters provides insight into aspects of Dudley's life. The introductory chapter, "Before Dudley: Oppression, Racism, and the Roots of Resistance," describes life in the early 1900s in Cape Town and its southern suburbs where Dudley was born and grew up. The second chapter, "Childhood and Youth: Learning Books, Learning Nonracialism" tells of Dudley's early reading and gradual awareness of "nonracialism." His years at UCT from 1940 to 1944 (chapter 3—"Education and Politics: Lessons for Teaching and Struggle") taught him much about racism in the educational system. Reading whatever he could about (South) African history, Dudley became convinced that education was critical to true liberation. The fourth chapter—"Becoming a Teacher, Becoming a Comrade: Pre-Apartheid [End Page 219] Years"—recounts Dudley's early years as a young critically minded teacher committed to the struggle against a racist educational system.

For thirty-nine years, until 1984, Dudley taught at Livingstone High School (LHS), where he himself had been a student. Chapters 5 and 6—"Education for Democracy I" and "Education for Democracy II"—lay out his arguments against "liberation before education," ideas that influenced many generations of students. This philosophy, which the NUM advocated for decades, was eventually abandoned by many members who left to join the United Democratic Front, a broader antiapartheid movement formed in 1983. Though these former members criticized the NUM for its failed ideas and for Dudley's unyielding position, he remained unfazed, persistent in his beliefs even in the postapartheid period because, he claimed, South Africa was and remained deeply scarred by racism. In a meeting with President Nelson Mandela, Dudley was frankly unapologetic about his stance toward Mandela's democratic government. Mandela, as usual, was appreciative of Dudley's principled position on education.

Chapter 7, "Education for (Liberation) before Education," recounts the story of Dudley's "teaching and (pursuing) politics in the struggle years." Dudley, the TLSA, and the various TLSA-oriented schools such as LHS, Trafalgar, and South Peninsula opposed the advancement of the influential Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) among high school and university students. Like many...

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