ABSTRACT
Conforming to the truism that history is written by the victors, histories of the South African liberation struggle are dominated by the ruling party of the post-apartheid period—the African National Congress. But in the years immediately after South Africa's National Party took power in 1948, opposition to the new government's racist laws was decisively shaped by the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). For Benita Parry, the NEUM provided an alternative world to the University of Cape Town, where "many students went on dancing at segregated balls [and] most were intent on learning professional skills". Frantz Fanon's excoriation of postcolonial Africa's "national bourgeoisie" in The Wretched of the Earth accordingly generalizes from several African nations—Algeria, the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Tunisia, and South Africa—supplemented with occasional references to the Caribbean. Many of Parry's interventions in postcolonial theory and literary criticism from the 1980s to the present bear deep traces of the arguments in NEUM publications of the 1940s and 1950s.
