Jack Simons: Teacher, scholar and comrade — A Jacana pocket biography

Jack Simons: Teacher, Scholar, Comrade is a pocket biography informed by personal knowledge of its subject, and firsthand experience of the ANC in exile in Zambia, as well as by research in the archives and interviews. Born in 1907, Jack Simons was one of the leading left-wing intellectuals – and one of the greatest teachers – in 20thcentury South Africa. As a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Cape Town from 1937 until he was prevented from teaching by the government in 1964, and thereafter through his lectures and writings in exile, he had a profound effect on the thinking of generations of white and black students and on the liberation movement as a whole. As Albie Sachs wrote in an obituary in The Guardian (1995), ‘It is not just the way he influenced so many individuals. It was the impact he had on the culture of a people. The new South African Constitution requires that the values of an open and democratic society should be nurtured. Simons fought all his life both for openness and democracy. His intellectual rigour, the honesty of his person, the sweep of his information, the humanity of his vision and interactiveness and the vitality of his ideas, imprinted themselves on the generation that fought hardest for liberty and made the most direct contribution to achieving the new constitutional order.’