Eye of the Needle - Preface by Richard Turner

From the book: The Eye of the Needle by Richard Turner

What is it that fascinates us so about South Africa? One thing, we would suggest, is that when Americans look at South Africa we are transfixed by what seems the nightmare exaggeration of our own racial troubles.

Another is the sensation that a cosmic drama is being played out there-black against white, integration versus separatism, democracy against totalitarianism, Christian forces against the state, perhaps capitalism against socialism; that events almost beyond human control are hastening humankind-where? to the disaster of racial war? to a new discovery of the human family?

The Eye of the Needle is more than a book about South Africa. It is also a careful examination of capitalism in the light of Christian ethics, and it is a proposal for a radically different politico-economic system which its author believes is the only one compatible with Christian ideals. But it is indisputably a book about South Africa, so it is in that light that we wish first to look at the book.

On October 19, 1977, the Christian Institute was outlawed by the South African government. But for fifteen years prior to that this heroic group of Christians of all races, under the leadership of Beyers Naude, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, had raised a prophetic voice to warn that the racial policies of South Africa are idolatrous. The Eye of the Needle was initially published by the Christian Institute as part of a study project devoted to reconciliation, association, and love in a society permeated with hostility, separation, and domination.

"Separate development" and "multinational development" are the names now preferred by those in South Africa who support what is generally called "apartheid." But "apartheid" characterizes South Africa's racial policies aptly enough, since in the Dutch-derived Afrikaans language that South Africa's dominant white group speak it means simply "apartness." It denotes the policy of separate but not equal that has been practiced toward people of color since Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, but which the National Party government has methodically rigidified into law. Not only the apartness but the inequality is evident and enforced throughout South African society. Each population group must keep to itself except in activities that serve the ends of white domination, for instance, when an African woman prepares the food, cleans the house, and cares for the children of a white family or when an African male provides the unskilled labor that undergirds South Africa's industrial prosperity.

South Africa, like the world, is a patchwork of peoples.

Racially, of its 25 million people about 71 percent are African, 17 percent of European ancestry, 9 percent of the mixed ancestry classified officially as "Coloured," and 3 percent Indian or Asian. The official posture of the Nationalist government is that each of the racial communities is developing its own separate political structure within which it will eventually be sovereign over its own affairs. But what we are supposed to envision is quite different from what has happened to date. The 83 percent of the people classified as "non-white" cannot vote for a Parliament that writes laws for 100 percent of the population; thus every law is arbitrary for the 83 percent. Although Africans have "homelands" in such Bantustans as KwaZulu, where all Africans must establish citizenship even if they have lived all their lives in a township near Johannesburg or Durban, and although the "Coloured" and Indian populations do have Advisory Councils to suggest policies and perhaps mollify their impact-what the government calls "parallel development"-there is never any doubt in anyone's mind about who sets policy and enforces it. Although the Transkei was declared in 1976 to be a sovereign and independent state, no longer part of the Republic of South Africa, only South Africa of all the nations in the world sees it as such. African leaders representing seven of the other eight Bantustans issued a statement saying that they want nothing to do with this type of "independence." "We do not want," they told the government, "to abdicate our birthright as South Africans, as well as forfeiting our share of the economy and wealth which we have jointly built." The prospects for this apartheid strategy are discussed by Richard Turnerin his Postscript.

Throughout the rest of South Africa every aspect of life for those classified as "non-white" comes under domination. The Immorality Act forbids interracial sexual relations. The Group Areas Act and the policy of resettlement allow the government arbitrarily to shift families from one neighborhood to another or from their homes to remote Bantustans. The policy of migrant labor, which is a necessary adjunct to this enforced removal, separates fathers from their families for most of the year. Widespread police payoffs to individuals for spying on others, including their pastors, teachers, and fellow students, extend government control even to the normally private areas of life. Laws that reserve jobs to particular race groups and restrict union activities control the economic life of "non-whites," helping to maintain a white-African family income ratio of 8: 1. "Bantu Education" is carefully controlled by the white government; its critics charge that it is designed to socialize African children into a controlled society, supplying minimal skills that will be of service within that society, bu t avoiding the kind of liberal education that would encourage independent thought. Finally, most hated by Africans among the hundreds of apartheid laws are the pass laws, which require each adult African in "white areas" to carry an elaborate reference book that must be signed regularly by a white employer. Failure to carry the book at all times or to keep it up to date can mean a fine or imprisonment or being "endorsed out," which, in accordance with influx control laws, forces the African to move to a Bantustan.

Since 1948, when the National Party was empowered by South Africa's white voters to begin putting its calculated program of apartheid into operation, there has seldom been any uncertainty what the major problem of South Africa is. Surely it is race, observers both inside and outside the country have assumed. And the alternative ways of coping with it could only be two: the government's way of apartheid or integration American-style into a society where considerations of race would eventually disappear.

Since these represent ideologically opposite positions, it is not surprising that discussion got nowhere; change in South Africa after 1948 was almost always determined by the government's monopoly of power.

But in 1972 and early 1973, when the authors of this Preface were in South Africa, we began to hear knowledgeable South Africans say, "Ah, but that may be a false analysis. Have you read The Eye of the Needle?" This small book had been published in 1972 by Sprocas, a study project set up by the Christian Institute.

Briefly, the book's thesis is that South Africa's problem is not at its root racial but economic, and that correct as they are about the injustice of apartheid, the liberals' program would never work, even if by some miracle they should succeed in making it the policy of the country, because it would only induct a few blacks into the privileged class while leaving intact the real mechanism of oppression, exploitative capitalism.

The proponent of this thesis is Richard Turner, a young lecturer in political scien c e at the University of Natal in Durban. His proposed solution for his country is a socialist democracy in which worker-owned-and-controlled industries would be the basis of economic and political power. Whether one calls present policy by the old name of "apartheid" or the more palatable "separate development," it is designed, Turner argues, to legitimatize Nationalist Party control while gluing the white minority together politically and promoting a divide-and-conquer domination over blacks.

Critics of government policy, such as Turner, have been nettles in the regime's thin skin, but since the 1950 enactment of the Suppression of Communism Act the government, when vexed, can shed irritating dissenters by means of a "ban."

Richard Turner was banned on February 28, 1973, along with the leadership of the National Union of South African Students(NUSAS), an organization he served as faculty advisor. His banning orders begin, "Whereas I, Petrus Cornelius Pelser, Minister of Justice, am satisfied that you engage in activities which are furthering or may further the achievement of the objects of communism . . ." But "communism" by the 1950 act is conveniently defined as "any doctrine or scheme which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social, or economic change within the Republic by the promotion of disturbance or disorder." Beyond the minister's satisfaction that the act has been violated, no proof is required, and his decision cannot be tested in the courts.

In short, Turner is prohibited by his five-year banning orders from attending any "gathering," which is understood to mean three or more persons including the banned person. When Turner has a visitor in his home, who incidentally might be discouraged by the presence of Special Branch policemen watching from cars nearby, his wife will leave the room in order that there be no "gathering."

The orders also prohibit Turner from leaving Durban and from "being within any place or area which constitutes the premises on which any public or private university. .. is situate; any place which constitutes the premises of the National Union of South African Students," any place where publications are being compiled or published, any factory, any harbor, and any non-white area. He is prevented from joining any association of students or scholars; from communicating with any "named" person (anyone banned or otherwise listed by the government); from contributing in any way to the preparation of any publication; from transmitting any document, book, pamphlet, poster, or drawing in which the State or its policies are defended, criticized, or even referred to, or any which "is likely to engender feelings of hostility between the White and the non-White inhabitants of the Republic of South Africa." Although he remains a member of the university faculty, he is prohibited from giving any educational instruction. Finally, he may not be quoted in public, which means among other things that from the moment he was banned it was a crime to circulate anything he had written or said. All publications which merely quote Turner are thereby banned also until the offending quotation is expunged. The day after Turner was banned, The Eye of the Needle was removed from the shelves of South African bookstores and libraries. "We don't keep a large inventory of books likely to be banned," a bookstore salesclerk explained, "since we take a loss on them."

Thus the banned individual becomes a political non-person without the government having to lay out a cent for prison bed and board. There are at least four hundred banned persons in South Africa, most of them black, in addition to many in prison for long terms because of their political activities; at this writing there are several hundred individuals who are being held in-communicado with no charges filed against them.

The circumstances of Turner's banning make it clear that it was his ideas the regime feared, especially the possibility that they might spread among militant blacks. Not only from the government, but also from the opposition United Party, which considered itself guardian of business and industrial interests, there went up the cry, "Black socialism!" Those who were not appalled by the noun were made to shudder by the adjective. In a parliamentary investigation of NUSAS by the Schlebusch Commission, Turner was portrayed as the corrupter of youth. Although he grew up, and for several years managed a farm, near Stellenbosch, which should ordinarily put him in good Boer company, the Commission had no trouble ferreting out, at least to their satisfaction, the source of his apparently un-South African ideas. After finishing a degree at the University of Cape Town, which as an English-speaking institution is hazardous enough in the eyes of any Afrikaner nationalist, Turner fell into the quick sands of political recusancy in France, where he finished his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1966 with a dissertation, to make matters even worse, on the Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre.

"Since his return to South Africa," the Commission divulged to Parliament in its confidential report, "Turner has concentrated intensively on the political cultivation of students, [and] . . . plays the role of activist." The Commission unfolded what they dubbed a "tale of his propagation during the past years of his political view, which is nothing other than radical revolutionary theory," by recounting his activities, in addition to his "daily task" of teaching: speaking on other campuses and at NUSAS meetings, advising NUSAS officials "on all kinds of matters," and writing. "He influences individual students both in and outside his classes." To support their judgment that Turner trapped students in a net of dangerous theory, the Commission quoted from various speeches, writings, and personal letters, including some which had never left Turner's office until, ap-parently, the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) discovered them.

Most of the books about South Africa that come our way describe the evils of apartheid, often from the vantage point of some visitor to the country. But Turner writes as a South African to South Africans who are familiar enough with the surface phenomena of apartheid. He asks his readers rather to adopt a theoretical attitude, to inquire with him why such a system exists and why it is so resistant to change. His answer is that it exists for the economic advantage of those who perpetrate it. If we accept this analysis, we will have to reject or at least subordinate the more hallowed explanation that apartheid is caused by the strong racial antipathies of South Africa's whites. Race, in Turner's view, is distinctly secondary to the class discrimination that accompanies the economic exploitation of one group by another.

If Turner is right about the relative roles that race and economics play in South Africa, then the same thing must be true of the United States, because Turner does not base this part of his analysis upon the peculiar history of South Africa, but upon the particular value pattern that was carried by Western European "civilization" wherever it went in the world. This was the drive to seek satisfaction in the accumulation of material goods rather than in relations with other people. But it is this set of values that underlies capitalism. It is in the nature of capitalism, it is the way it is set up to work, Turner would argue, that a minority exploits a majority and presumably uses various rationales to conceal or justify it. One of these is race.

Americans will miss the full impact of this if we think of the United States as a self-contained economic unit.

To be sure, the poor are always with us, but they are a distinct minority and if we have seen to it that the poverty group is not the same, at least not always the same, as a particular racial group, we have done enough, many will feel. But have we managed to include the American worker for a healthy cut of the "bread" only by basing our economy on the exploitation of the masses in other countries, including South Africa? As we are forced more and more by the pressure of events to see the world as a single economy, are we going to discover that Marx was right after all and that capitalism depends for its very life on sucking the blood of the masses?

So we see that while Turner is writing about South Africa, he is doing so in a way that pulls all of us into a whirlpool of questions about our values, our politics, and our economic dealings with other people. If Turner is right, then when we follow down the accusing finger that we point at South Africa's whites, we find at the end-ourselves!

Those readers whose major concern is the present politics of South Africa will find the Postscript the most interesting part of the book. Those who feel uninformed about South Africa may even wish, after finishing this Preface, to read the Postscript before taking up the body of the book. The Postscript was not a part of The Eye of the Needle as published in South Africa; it is published here for the first time. It is dated just sixteen days before Turner's banning. In The Eye of the Needle, Turner had analyzed the South African situation and proposed what he recognized as a Utopian solution. He adds the Postscript to address what he calls "the enormous problem of how to bring such a society into existence in South Africa."

There can be no doubt that the government is aware of the existence of Turner's Postscript. Its interest was revealed during a 1976 trial of the members of two African organizations, the Black Peoples' Convention and the South African Student Organization, when Turner took the stand as a witness for the defense. Although hardly germane to the trial, much of the prosecutor's questioning dwelled on The Eye of the Needle, its Post-script, details of when the Postscript was written, and facts about how Turner put it in the hands of "an American professor" who desired to see it published. The prosecutor was, of course, attempting to ferret out evidence that Turner might have violated some modicum of his banning orders by either working on a manuscript or contributing to its publication. Then the prosecutor turned toward Turner's intentions in writing a Post-script and what its title, "The Present as History," might mean. Turner replied that the title was an attempt toward "grasping the present as a process of change" and that "what I tried to do in this was to say:

Look, if you are thinking about bringing about change in South Africa, these are the sorts of realities of the South African situation, realities inhibiting change, realities of various sorts possibly furthering change, that need to be taken into consideration."

The pages Turner added contain what in the opinion of the present writers is the clearest analysis in print of the dynamics of change in South Africa. It points emphatically to the growing value of the Africans ' labor as the one tool by which they may eventually hope to break the white monopoly of political power. The implication is clear for those outside South Africa who wish to contribute to change within the Republic by peaceful means: They must seek ways to abet the organization and political consciousness of the African labor force.

Rather than reading The Eye of the Needle for what it has to say about South Africa, one may choose to read it as a penetrating examination of capitalism in the light of Christian ethics. When read with this aim, South Africa serves only as a case study, but as a particularly apt one because in that country we see capitalism working as Marx and other critics had seen it, without the protection afforded the laborer by the counter-power of unions. Whether this is "true capitalism" may indeed be questioned, especially since the South African government intervenes on the other side to protect the owners and white laborers against blacks' taking full advantage of the value of their labor, even figured in capitalistic terms. But at least in South Africa we see capitalism as much of the underdeveloped world sees it: The whites of the western countries through the device of ownership of resources, which they have in fact seized by force from the non-whites of the world (America being no exception), require the labor of those they have robbed on terms that keep the whites rich and the rest of the world poor. The Eye of the Needle confronts us with the question whether capitalism can be conceptually separated from imperialism; otherwise put, has capitalism avoided a manifestly exploited proletariat in the developed countries only by producing one in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? If so, then South Africa is a microcosm of the world.

Thus we see that, read as a study of economic systems, the book is as relevant to Americans as to South Africans. Moreover, it fills a peculiar need. Christians in capitalist countries have exhibited genuine concern for world economic justice, but have been curiously loath to bring under examination whether the economic system that has developed among them may be incompatible with economic justice. In U.S. churches (synagogues too) one can cause greater consternation by proclaiming, "I don't believe in capitalism," than by announcing, "I don't believe in God." This is all the more curious when one recalls that the earliest Christians "had all things in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need" (Acts 2:44 - 45), and that capitalism as a system has developed only in recent centuries, largely without conscious choice, and at first against the active discouragement of a church that taught that it was a sin to make money from money.

We are not here assuming the truth of Turner's argument. In fact we have misgivings about some points of it.

But we have no question whatsoever that this discussion needs to take place and that this book can be a valuable aid to it. Few of us in the capitalist countries even know the theoretical basis of Marxist criticism of capitalis m , which Turner presents with admirable simplicity in his second chapter.

Richard Turner is not a Communist. Communism, like capitalism, sees people as basically economic animals; Turner accepts the Christian view that people find their fulfillment in loving relationships with other people.

When he looks for living instances of his proposed worker-run industry, Turner finds that almost every-where in Communist countries the model is obscured by the priority given to the Communist party organization, Turner is a humanistically trained social philosopher who borrows heavily from Marxian insights in his interpretations of political and economic reality. If we wish on this basis to call him a Marxist, we should be aware that he has many fellows among reputable thinkers of all non-Communist countries, and that the tradition of Christian socialism is already an honored one.

It may be that present readers are not used to having political and economic proposals subjected to what amounts to a theological examination. Here white South Africa may have something of value to share with us, namely, assistance in recovering our theological traditions. South Africa is a land where church life retains a great deal of vigor. It is the more important for the opponents of apartheid to know their theology because its supporters-overwhelmingly the Afrikaner Calvinists -are inclined to insist that all of life be ordered on the basis of theology, and to believe that their own theology gives them a mandate to order life for all other groups . Whether there really are two irreconcilable theologies involved is a question of great consequence for South Africa.

Implicit in what we have already said is that The Eye of the Needle may be read with profit by those whose chief interest is neither in South Africa nor in a Christian critique of capitalism, but in social and political theory. Turner ' s participatory socialist democracy is a modern Utopia. To be sure, he doesn't give very specific directions as to how it can be brought about, especially within the political straitjacket that is South Africa, but this is not a requirement of Utopias. One has only to refer to Plato's Republic, for example, or to B.F.

Skinner's Walden Two, to be reminded that the power of social models does not depend upon the practicability of bringing them into existence. Turner will be content, he says, if he can convince us that it could be, by which he means only that "there are neither imperatives of organization nor imperatives of human nature which would prevent such a society from operating once it came into existence."

Nevertheless, it is evident that Turner does have a faith, almost in spite of the evidence, that change can come even in South Africa. For one thing, he knows that the alternative is equally impractical-namely, that present inequalities should continue in South Africa and in the world. As he says in the closing passage of the book, "How practical is it to want a second car when the world is running out of petrol? How practical is it to try to pass a camel through the eye of a needle?" This reference to Jesus' saying-"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matt. 19:24)-suggests that it is just this impractical practicality that Turner is alluding to in the title of his book.

This leads to the question whether in fact Turner anticipates a violent revolution that will put blacks in a position to set up an entirely new political structure.

The answer is no. He specifically says in the Postscript that "white dominance in South Africa is so militarily entrenched that it cannot possibly be threatened by violent overthrow." In the book itself he points rather to long-range changes of attitude and lifestyle such as would be nurtured through education, mentioning particularly the role the church can play in this regard. In fact he says, "If the Christian churches can rediscover their transcendence and show the meaning of love to white South Africans then a peaceful resolution of the struggle will be possible." But the "if" needs to be underscored. The churches might perhaps make this kind of impact on white South Africa if the Afrikaner churches were enthusiastically involved, but until now they have provided the theological justification for apartheid and have chosen to isolate themselves from other churches both inside and outside South Africa rather than give up their belief in racial separation. In the Postscript, after a wide-ranging assessment of the possibilities of change, Turner says more realistically, "White South Africans are not going to give up power voluntarily, either as a result of lessons in the meaning of race or as a result of lectures on Christian ethics" (a possible reference to his own book). What hope then? For Turner it lies in "the changing network of power-relationships" brought about by the increased bargaining power of a growing African labor force. But he warns that such change will be slow, the hope of achieving his model a distant one. Our conclusion is that if Rick Turner has been banned because the South African government thought he was preaching violent revolution, it can only be because the decision-makers know that they would never accept his suggested changes without a fight, and not because Turner has advocated fighting to achieve them.

Since Turner wrote his Postscript the imponderables in South Africa's future have become fewer by one.

Turner's analysis of the weakness of Portugal's position in Africa has proven correct. The hated "terrorists," who a short while ago were far away in the northern reaches of neighboring countries, now, as a result of the abrupt Portuguese abandonment of the continent, are ensconced in political power on South Africa's own borders. Mozambique, whose capital city of Maputo provides South Africa the closest seaport to its industrial concentration in the Southern Transvaal, is now under a black Marxist government. In Angola, as Turner was writing, a half-million Europeans lived pleasantly in what they thought was a fraternal relationship with black Africans; with the approach of independence most of them fled in panic, leaving the rich country to be fought over by rival black factions. Finally that faction that was supported by the Soviet Union gained political control of Angola with the aid of some fifteen thousand Cuban troops, which remained to shore up the shaky government against continued resistance.

The change in the mood of South Africa's white population is perceptible. All eyes turn northward. South Africa's whites now know that they stand alone on the African continent and that if they survive, it will be by their own wits. This has been made even clearer by the change in posture of the United States. The aggressive pressure of the Carter administration for majority rule in southern Africa together with the refusal of Congress to intervene against the Soviet Union in Angola have made it impossible for white South Africans to continue to comfort themselves with the assurance that in a pinch Uncle Sam will intervene to save white rule at the tip of Africa.

Turner gave reasons from the point of view of the Vorster government both for and against going in to shore up white rule in Mozambique. In fact South Africa tried one response with Mozambique, the opposite with Angola. Black Marxist ascendancy in Mozambique was met with a masterful calm by the Vorster government, with the result that for a time South Africa enjoyed an unprecedented "detente" with some of the black African states. But South African fear of Soviet communism is genuine, and when it seemed that in Angola there was a real possibility South African intervention might enable anti-Marxists to prevail, the Vorster government was induced to send in troops. But with Cuban troops fighting on the opposing side and the United States Congress refusing even to provide military supplies, South Africa beat an embarrassed retreat. This first invasion of the territory of a black state undercut the credibility the Vorster government had been slowly building up with the black states, escalated international pressures against South Africa, and apparently gave new courage to dissident blacks within the country. It was a costly mistake.

The Vorster government has, however, continued to find common ground with the black-ruled states of southern Africa on the subject of Rhodesia, or Zimbabwe as the liberation movements call it. The South African government has played a quiet but important role in trying to persuade the Rhodesian government of lan Smith to accept some settlement that would satisfy demands for majority rule and yet protect the investments of the white settlers. But the stubbornness of Smith, together with the distrust black leaders have of him and the inability of Zimbabwe liberation groups to get along with one another, worked against a settlement, and guerrilla fighting continued with possibilities increasing that another Angolan situation might develop there.

Why would Vorster acquiesce in undercutting the only other white-ruled country in Africa, its neighbor with whose European residents South African whites have close ties? It would be impossible to explain for anyone who maintains that South Africa is motivated primarily by ideology. Under Turner's analysis it is understandable. Vorster knows that militarily and economically Rhodesia is a drain upon South Africa rather than an asset. It appears to have been Vorster's goal to replace the row of white buffer states that once insulated South Africa from African vengeance with a cordon of semi-friendly but weak black states, including some of the South African Bantustans, tied to South Africa within a regional economic interdependency.

That hope now seems forlorn.

Another dashed hope of apartheid rule is the north-western knot on the cordon, Namibia. South Africa took the territory from Germany in World War I, administered it for the League of Nations as a mandated territory, and violated the mandate after World War II by institutionalizing apartheid and ruling the trust territory as if it were part of South Africa. Although the

United Nations General Assembly in 1966 terminated the mandate, South Africa refused to admit the U.N. Council for Namibia. The Turnhalle talks, a conference promoted by the Vorster government to draft a constitution, were scrapped in 1977 with the South Africans agreeing to elections and independence for Namibia in 1978. The most widely accepted African organization, the South West Africa Peoples' Organization (SWAPO) was not present at the Turnhalle effort but, according to the proposal, will participate in the election campaign.

If the elections and United Nations supervision are undermined, the guerrilla war between SWAPO and the South African Defense Forces now being waged near the Angolan border where most of the Namibian people live will be a prelude to a long struggle.

The period since the Portuguese demise has brought sharply increasing internal tension in South Africa. A series of illegal strikes by African workers and bannings of black labor leaders has continued to point up the vulnerability of the South African economy to the disaffection of its black labor force. In 1976 African youth sparked the first widespread civil disturbances in over a decade, resulting in over four hundred deaths, most of them Africans apparently killed by police. In tough reaction, the government brought criminal charges against 4,200 persons and escalated the rate of detentions under no-trial security laws. Black opposition groups had begun emerging into the open for the first time since the severe repression of the early sixties.

With sporadic de m onstrations continuing in the urban townships, seventeen of these organizations were summarily outlawed in October of 1977 and virtually all their leaders put under indefinite detention. The only major newspaper catering to an African readership was closed down and its editor imprisoned. A prominent white editor who had spoken out on behalf of the blacks was banned. The interracial Christian Institute, original publisher of The Eye of the Needle, was outlawed, its property confiscated, and its internationally respected leaders banned.

The astute realism with which the Vorster government has accepted black rule in Mozambique and the possibility of it in Rhodesia and Namibia, together with its expressed willingness to concede to Coloureds and Indians a larger measure of self-government through far-reaching constitutional changes, contrasts sharply with the government's harsh repression of African aspirations within South Africa. What this demonstrates is that white survival, not race theory, is the dominating principle of Afrikaner leadership. Its fear of Soviet-Cuban presence in Angola and its suspicion that all internal unrest is traceable to communist infiltration show that the Vorster government agrees with Richard Turner's basic thesis, that white privilege in South Africa is inseparably linked to an economic system.

January 1978

To speak as Richard Turner has spoken is to make enemies. One of those enemies has now brutally killed Richard Turner. Thus the U.S. edition of The Eye of the Needle which Rick Turner had waited so eagerly to see becomes his memorial. We take courage from the knowledge that it will continue to argue Rick's message of brotherhood and justice.

Merrill Proudfoot, Park College

Ronald Christenson, Gustavus Adolphus College