Cape Radicals: Intellectual and political thought of the New Era Fellowship, 1930s-1960s

The history of a radical group of intellectuals who founded the New Era Fellowship, which shaped human rights precedents and social justice policy in South Africa

In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa, embarked on a project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). In doing so they sought to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and ‘race’ – on which they were based. In diff...