Devorah's Prayer (ePub)

This is a work of fiction based on the world of radical student activism during the 1970s in South Africa. Given the political complexities of apartheid South Africa Franco Sorrentino and Devorah Kirschenbaum become, inadvertently and ineluctably, drawn into radical political activism causing them to face complex and paradoxical moral choices during the time of the Angolan Civil War.

In the 1970s as a result of the intellectual labours of senior academics working under the auspices of what become known as 'The History Workshop in South Africa' a resurgence of radical political activism erupted among students on the historically white university campuses. Apart from the critical revision of South African history which was informed by applying Marxist class analysis to the explaining and understanding of the origins and development of the Apartheid, undergraduate students became increasingly exposed in lectures to Marxist thinkers such as Lukacs, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Althusser. Works by Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Poulantzas became standard reading among the new radicals of the 1970s. However the intellectual drift among students was not towards the 1960s Neo-Marxism of Europe and North America, it was rather something much more radical, more African in a manner of speaking, it took the form of a rediscovery of Communism. An influential hard-core minority of white students became Communists without necessarily joining the banned underground South African Communist Party.

As a consequence of the new academic trends within South African universities, a sizable minority of white students broke ranks with the traditional liberal positions of the so-called white liberal progressive politics and openly embraced radical non-racialism within the totalizing system of Marxist-Leninism.

Franco and Devorah were two such people. However, eventually, Franco Sorrentino the grandson of an Italian prisoner of war and the son of a panel beater and Devorah Kirschenbaum the granddaughter of Jewish Trotskyite grandparents who fled Warsaw in 1939 and daughter of a prominent Johannesburg businessman, become drawn towards Anarcho-Communism.