Limpopo Province, long an economic periphery with high unemployment and out-migration, its marginalisation inducing scholarly neglect, over the decades also incubated a radical youth politics rooted in a very youthful population (some 60% is under 35). Anne Heffernan refreshingly re-centres the North through this prism. The region has produced influential national youth leaders and in 2007, nudged by its Youth League, the African National Congress (ANC) decommissioned Thabo Mbeki at a conference held at the University of Limpopo (‘Turfloop’), previously University of the North, the institution most central to this study.
The first section charts the rise and transfiguration in the 1960s/70s of student organisations at the university, its leaders and their philosophies from liberation theology to Black Consciousness (BC). The second part incorporates schools and non-student youth, linking it to the revival of the Congress movement, accounting for BC decline, and detailing changing tactics, including community outreach and violence as a political tool. The final part takes the story through to recent years with a focus on the rebirth of the Youth League and its impact.
Heffernan reinserts the North into the better-known wider history of student politics, arguing for its strong influence on national ideologies. The University served as a feeder college for northern Bantustans and apartheid authorities’ initial tolerance of BC backfired as students not only organised themselves but also mobilised the community. She traces developments, from the University Christian Movement to the more political South African Students Organisation (SASO), which held its inaugural conference at Turfloop, and the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). The defiant 1972 graduation address by SRC leader O.R.A. Tiro saw mass expulsions yet ongoing repression produced a profusion of new groups and campaigns. The Student Christian Movement was politicised by a young Cyril Ramaphosa who emphasised community activism, as he had done in secondary school in Venda. Protests against Bantu Education and pro-Frelimo solidarity in 1974 prompted further repression as the campus remained under the thumb of Pretoria and its Lebowa Bantustan proxies. Heffernan, making good use of interviews, adroitly brings out the complexity and contradictions in the lives of black academics and their families, some complicit in Bantustans, others opponents.
The 1970s also saw protests in Mankweng, adjacent to Turfloop, against forced removals and Bantustans, catalysed by a resurfacing ANC underground led by Ephraim Mogale, who also led the Congress of South African Students to penetrate schools. The Trial of the SASO 9 in 1975/6 publicised these movements but whilst youth anger erupted in the Soweto Revolt, fierce repression again disrupted their structures. Despite such setbacks, Heffernan argues that contestation and ideological experiment at Turfloop contained seeds of change.
Economic growth drove educational expansion. In the 1980s, rising political consciousness in schools and among youth in general heralded the South African Student Movement, AZASO, led at Turfloop by ‘Lion of the North’ Peter Mokaba, and the South African Youth Congress. After 1990, a revived Youth League under Mokaba injected a populist strain. His contrariness and the League's autonomy opened a space of unruliness into which his successor Julius Malema stepped. Heffernan compares and contrasts the two: both from poor townships, cutting their political teeth in school, backed by impoverished youth, facing censure by the mother body. Unlike Mokaba, Malema refuses to bend: the ANC vote in Limpopo drops from 92% in 2004 to 69% in 2016 with the rise of his Economic Freedom Fighters, on which note the book ends.
Limpopo is ‘uncommonly young, poor, and rural’ (p. 218), its political culture moulded by anti-authoritarianism, helping explain the appeal of Mokaba and Malema and, the author more ambitiously argues, the trajectory of national youth politics, even the potency of student politics in the 2015/16 #FeesMustFall movement. She weaves all the above movements into a succinct, original narrative. By linking students to other social forces, Heffernan transcends a fixation by many previous writers on students alone, which can hermetically seal them from society. She claims to offer the first coverage of Limpopo as a whole, though areas such as Venda are less covered. The argument for the North swings on birth, family and education yet many leaders, notably Ramaphosa, absorbed much from the Rand. This is more a linear history of organisations than, say, township, migrant or farm youth, with little new on class or gender. Delius and James’ work on Pedi migrants reminds us how porous boundaries are, and further research could probe more into connections from the Rand back to Limpopo, and across the province. Yet this book opens up such research. Scholars could even run with the theme of continuity to revisit the ignored role of the North in the origins and early radicalisation of Congress and of institutions such as Grace Dieu College that nourished an earlier generation of ‘Lions of the North’.
In terms of sources, there are no great surprises: 20 informants, press clippings (largely limited to those in archival collections) and trial transcripts, knitted together with a synthesis of secondary works. Marepo Lesetja was able to interview Mogale before he died, and this important voice could well have been added. This useful history not just of student but also wider youth politics should re-focus others on the North and encourage rethinking of interactions and continuities in the development of youth organisations and ideologies. And, beyond South Africa, it suggests we might sometimes invert the synergy between centre and ‘periphery’.
