ABSTRACT
The history of the struggle against racial oppression in South Africa is, to a great extent, a history of ideas. Intellectuals within organisations such as the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress, and in more loosely structured groupings such as the Black Consciousness Movement, developed competing conceptual answers to the questions about justice and identity with which their circumstances confronted them. The Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), to which Neville Alexander became affiliated in the 1950s, arose from the federation of two organisations, themselves federally structured, and both founded to oppose segregatory legislation in the Union of South Africa. In order to focus in on the distinctive step forward from previous NEUM thinking that Alexander’s theoretical work represents, it is first necessary to outline a feature of the NEUM’s political practice which caused controversy among South African Leftists from the beginning.
