Richard Turner is recognized as the one of the most significant academic philosophers to have come out of South Africa. He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1963 and continued his studies at the Sorbonne where he studied under Henri Lefebvre. He returned to South Africa in 1966, then moved to Natal in 1970 and became a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Natal. Turner was shot and killed in January 1978, widely believed to be an assassination carried out by apartheid forces. Nelson Mandela described Turner ‘as a source of inspiration.