The Cape Radicals

In this fascinating and readable book educationist Crain Soudien offers an insight into the work of a group of young Capetonian socialist intellectuals whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises - class and race - on which they were based.
In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers' Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala and Mda Mda, embarked on a public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF).

Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society's responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping black people of their human rights to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid.

The group included some of the city's most talented scholar-activists, whose aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises - class and race - on which they were based.

By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape.

The Cape Radicals is a testament to the NEF's position at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.