From the political ashes of the late 1960s, new and radical initiatives grew with surprising speed in the first half of the 1970s. The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s tells the story of a generation of South African activists who embraced and developed forms of opposition politics that had profound consequences. Within six short years, the politics of opposition and resistance had developed from an historical low point to the beginnings of a radicalism which would lead to the first democratic election in 1994. The book explores the influence of Black Consciousness, the new trade unionism, radicalisation of students on both black and white campuses, the Durban strikes, and Soweto 1976, and concludes that these developments were largely the result of home-grown initiatives, with little influence exercised by the banned and exiled movements for national liberation.
Glenn Moss was a student leader at Wits University in the 1970s. Detained and charged under security legislation in the mid-1970s, he was acquitted after a year-long trial. He went on to edit the South African Review and Work in Progress, head Ravan Press, and then work as a consultant to South Africas first postapartheid government.
