Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa by Anne K Hefferman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa by Anne K Hefferman Zolani Noonan-Ngwane (bio) Anne K Hefferman (2019) Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits UP. The last decade has seen the publication of an impressive number of historical studies that question and problematise the picture of Black Consciousness drawn by an earlier body of scholarship. In the latter works Black Consciousness often comes across as either an anticlimactic culmination to earlier forms of radical African nationalism (Gerhart 1978) or as a gateway to a more substantial political treatment of subsequent historical moments such as the secondary school student uprising in 1976 (Brooks and Brickhill 1980, Hirson 1979), and the popular mass movements in the 1980s (Marx 1992). Emerging at the end of the supposedly quiescent 1960s the political force of Black Consciousness is represented as ‘muted’, with its protagonists locked in an endless quest for ‘mythical self-sufficiency’, all this at the expense of providing both a political leadership for a restive working class and organisational structure for the largely spontaneous surge of student protests. Black consciousness historiography has come a long way since then. From in-depth intellectual histories (Magaziner 2010) to studies of the material impact of its developmental programmes on the countryside (Hadfield 2016), Black Consciousness has recently been treated substantially both in its own internal complexity and in relation to the broader anti-apartheid struggle within the country and, as in the volume under review, in exile. Limpopo’s Legacy: student politics and democracy in South Africa is a timely and unique contribution to this new body of work. The book tells the story of student and youth politics as they developed in today’s rural Limpopo Province and went on to influence, if not shape, the national struggle in South Africa. Thus, the book centres ‘local and regional experiences’ as its [End Page 133] main contribution both to the historiography of Black Consciousness and the recent histories of student and youth activism. Indeed, to the general international literature on youth the book’s particular contribution, both theoretically and ethnographically, is a Global South perspective. The book begins with the ‘incubation and development’ of Black Consciousness at the University of the North, currently the University of Limpopo, or more popularly Turfloop, in the late 1960s and 1970s, through the resurgence of multiracial Charterist local and regional student and youth congresses in the 1980s, and ends with the African National Congress’ (ANC) Polokwane national conference held at Turfloop in 2007. Indeed, the timeline for this study can be extended at both ends to start with the formation, at students’ agitation, of the first Student Representative Council (SRC) at Turfloop in 1960 (and its squabbles with the administration throughout that decade) and ending with the second wave of #FeesMustFall as it manifested at Turfloop in 2016. On the one hand, then, Limpopo’s Legacy problematises the widely held notion of the ‘quiescent 60s’ (see also Brown 2016) while, on the other hand, it anchors its historical narrative in recent events affecting higher education in South Africa. Besides its unique focus on local experiences, another rewarding and distinctive aspect of the book is that it is also an extended political profiling of generations of actors associated, by birth or education, with the Northern Transvaal (Limpopo Province): from Onkgopotse Tiro – through contemporary national figures such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Frank Chikane, Mosiuoa Lekota and Aubrey Mokoena – to Peter Mokaba and Julius Malema, Limpopo Provinces’ ‘most famous sons’ (216). While most of the literature on, and popular memories of, the national anti-apartheid struggle have focused on the urban political careers of these individuals, the book traces the trajectory of their activism from the rural Northern Transvaal where they politically came of age. Its argument is that this geographically marginal enclave was in fact the crucible of political activism and ideologies that influenced the national struggle. Like all black universities founded under the grand scheme of Bantu Education, Turfloop was designed to produce graduates who would form an ethnically homogeneous civil service and intellectual vanguard for the apartheid homeland system. Unlike some of the other black universities, however, Turfloop had...