Life
Turner graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1963 attaining a B.A. Honours. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris where he studied under Henri Lefebvre and received a doctorate for a dissertation on the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.
He returned to South Africa in 1966 and worked on his mother’s farm in Stellenbosch for two years before lecturing at the universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Rhodes. He moved to Natal in 1970 and become a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Natal and in that same year he met Steve Biko and the two formed a close relationship and became the leading figures in The Durban Moment.
Turner became a prominent academic at the University and assumed a leading role in South African political science and published a number of papers. His work was written from a radical existential perspective and stressed the virtues of bottom up popular democracy against authoritarian Stalinist and Trotskyist strands of leftism. He was a strong advocate of workers' control and a critic of the reduction of politics to party politics.
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