FOR ARGUMENT’S SAKE
Very few people choose to become radicals. In most cases their circumstances lead them to it. So it was for Dr Lloyd Vogelman. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, for Vogelman, rebellion was a logical response to the oppression of his fellow citizens. Not to actively rail against a racist regime, he believed, would have made him complicit in its policies.
“I describe myself as a recovering extremist,” says Vogelman, a former clinical psychologist, who today is the founder and executive director of consultancy firm Corteks. “I was brought up in a society that was extreme. Apartheid South Africa was extreme, not only in its racism. It was extreme in its authoritarianism as well.”
Vogelman grew up in a small “ultra Right” mining town outside Johannesburg. “Injustice was so obvious that you had to make a choice,” Vogelman says. “So, I think I was a rebel from a very early age.”
After being a student leader, at 23 he joined the United Democratic Front, a political resistance movement linking hundreds of anti-apartheid organisations. When the Front was banned, he went into hiding and was later named as a co-conspirator in one of South Africa’s largest treason trials, an experience that saw him develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But while his enemy was so stark and oppressive that extremism seemed the only legitimate course of action, Vogelman wasn’t entirely comfortable in his role as a firebrand. A self-described natural outsider, he says that within the liberation movement, he at times felt suffocated and ill at ease with its dogmatism and singular focus.
“Authoritarianism creates an injury in your psyche,” he says. “In your resistance to it, you sometimes behave like your oppressors. You can become equally dogmatic. I think in my opposition, I became extreme as well. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the lack of questioning in myself and others.”
His growing discomfort gradually saw him move away from hard-line activism. At 27, he set up the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, an organisation that focused on promoting human rights
