Apartheid, Thought Crime and South Africa’s New Left

Of all the groups tried under apartheid's security laws in the early 1960s, the National Liberation Front was the only one whose members never used violence. Six months after its launch in the Cape Peninsula, its founders were arrested and sentenced to between five and ten years. Allison Drew asks why, recovering the history of an explicitly socialist offshoot of the Non-European Unity Movement that has barely registered in accounts of the liberation struggle.

Drew places the NLF within the transnational New Left of the long 1960s and the wider South African left, tracing its thinking on colonialism, racial capitalism, political education and guerrilla struggle. Her sharpest argument is that apartheid policed ideas as well as bodies, through unequal schooling, censorship and the courts. A precise, rewarding study for readers of South African history and anyone curious about how states set out to contain thought.