Rick Turner was a South African academic and activist who rebelled against apartheid at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years of age, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.

This book takes seriously Rick Turner’s challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner’s seminal book The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa laid out some of his most potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.

The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner’s work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his participatory model of democracy, and his critique of enduring forms of poverty and economic inequality. They show how, in his life and work, Turner modelled how we can dare to be free and how hope can return, as the future always remains open to human construction. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism where the need for South Africans to define their understanding of their greater common good is of crucial importance.

Zero to Hero is unique in that it tells the story of Victor Roe, one of the longest- serving RAF rear gunners with The Pathfinders and in so doing, plots the rise of an 'institutionalised' lad from a Boys' Home to a well-respected bomber aircrew member amongst peers, who were an elite group of top class airmen and who all of whom had a far better start in life than he did. In stories such as this, it is not uncommon to find the words 'humble beginning' describing the start in life that someone had. In Victor's case a humble beginning would have been a huge step up from where he started his short, but astonishingly praiseworthy life. One of nine children born to two impoverished alcoholics-all of whom were removed by the courts from their parent's custody by the age of two-is hardly the start that would be attributed to a hero of the RAF, but that was how Victor started. Victor was always determined that with the advent of war, he would do his bit for his country, no one can deny that he did that and more.