Ruth First’s Legacy Has Outlived the Regime That Killed Her

Ruth First’s Legacy Has Outlived the Regime That Killed Her South Africa’s racist regime murdered Ruth First, one of the leading activist-intellectuals of the anti-apartheid movement. First’s creative Marxist work on postcolonial Africa has outlived her assassins and is reaching a new audience today. In August 1982, a parcel bomb went off at the Center for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. Sent by the South African government’s Special Branch, its target and victim was Ruth First, a lifelong member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), who was fifty-seven years old at the time. Her assassination has since become the stuff of legend, a symbol of the violent brutality of the apartheid government toward its critics in the last decades of its existence. The murder of First was part of a broader effort by the white minority state to eliminate its opponents following the Soweto Uprising of 1976, which resulted in a revival of (and a generational shift within) the anti-apartheid struggle. Inspired by the ideas of Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness Movement took to the streets of townships across South Africa. Facing arrest and often worse, many sought refuge and exile in neighboring countries, the so-called Frontline States, which included Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. Counterinsurgency raids by the South African Defense Force and Special Branch units ensued, targeting these activists with little regard for the national sovereignty of the countries where they had taken shelter. Ruth First cut a different profile from many other liberation figures. A generation older than the members of the Black Consciousness Movement, she undermines many stereotypes about who was involved in the struggle, for what reasons, and to what ends. Her assassination underscored the complex and evolutionary nature of South Africa’s liberation history and the extreme lengths that the apartheid government would go to avoid its demise. Beginnings Born in Johannesburg on May 4, 1925, Heloise Ruth First was white, Jewish, middle class, university educated, a wife, and a mother of three daughters. Each of these qualities informed her activism in distinctive ways, positioning her at different moments as a political outsider, a party confidant, a fiercely engaged intellectual, and a mother both protective and absent, depending on the circumstances. Her husband, Joe Slovo, was a key figure in the SACP and one of the founders of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and the SACP that was established in 1961. He later became general secretary of the SACP and minister of housing in South Africa’s post-apartheid government during Nelson Mandela’s presidency. First’s life reflected this personal and political partnership, with her actions and outlook shaped by their marriage, if not always determined by it. Indeed, although the role of the family in liberation struggles has at times been recognized, it has frequently been under-conceptualized as a source of political influence and decision-making, in addition to providing security, comfort, and support during periods of political uncertainty. The patriarchal norms of anti-colonial movements have too often been reproduced uncritically, with the heroes and philosophers of revolution remaining men — think of Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Steve Biko. To guard against this tendency, it is important to grasp how personal networks among families and peers alike contributed to the making of liberation ideals and actions. Alan Wieder has noted in his dual biography of First and Slovo how the anti-apartheid struggle in particular was defined by couples, with Nelson and Winnie Mandela epitomizing such intimate political partnerships. First and Slovo’s marriage was equally emblematic of the intersection between political and private commitments. Ruth First herself grew up in a political household, which shaped her socialist outlook and activist future. Her father, Julius, and mother, Tilly, emigrated to Johannesburg from Latvia and Lithuania, respectively, as part of a broader influx of Jewish immigrants to South Africa during the first decades of the twentieth century. Both became involved with the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), as the party was named after its founding in 1921. Ruth First enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she met Slovo, who had returned to South Africa after having served in World War II. The CPSA had supported the fight against Nazi fascism. She also became friends with Mandela and other student activists like Harold Wolpe, who later became known for pioneering the concept of racial capitalism. First’s student activism soon extended beyond campus through her support of the 1946 miners’ strike, which involved approximately 74,000 Black workers. Following the economic stresses of World War II, it proved to be a pivotal moment in labor organizing, extending a long tradition of industrial action that struck at the heart of the country’s mineral economy and its exploitation of black South Africans. Finding a vocation for journalism, First went on to write for the Guardian in Johannesburg and New Age, a leftist paper aligned with the ANC, where she covered black politics. She and Slovo became romantically involved in 1948, the year the conservative National Party came to power with its extremist platform of racial segregation known as apartheid. They married the following year in 1949. Activism and Repression The 1950s were a heady period of activism and even optimism, when the possibility of toppling the apartheid government seemed within reach. The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act forced the CPSA to dissolve publicly and reform underground as the SACP. This shift converged with a growing alliance between the SACP and the ANC. This partnership had origins going back to the 1920s, when James La Guma of the CPSA and Josiah Tshangana Gumede of the ANC both attended the 1927 League Against Imperialism conference in Brussels. They traveled on to Moscow where together they met with Nikolai Bukharin, then general secretary of the Communist International (Comintern). This meeting resulted in the Native Republic thesis, a two-part political strategy for South Africa that argued for black national liberation in advance of communist revolution. This approach came out of Vladimir Lenin’s “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions,” which were issued at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. Though the CPSA had dropped the thesis as an explicit platform by the time of World War II, its general approach informed the ANC-SACP alliance in the decades ahead. For SACP members, the thinking behind the alliance was as follows: the ANC would spearhead a black liberation struggle aimed at achieving a national democratic revolution, which would be succeeded in turn by a SACP-led socialist state. This collaboration generated intellectual debates over the national question and the idea that South Africa constituted a “colonialism of a special type.” Members of both organizations viewed the system of apartheid as fundamentally colonial in nature through its elements of political disenfranchisement and economic extraction, thus aligning their ambitions with anti-colonial movements across Africa and around the world. However, there was less clarity around questions of political timing, tactical coordination, and what a future South Africa might look like. Such questions would preoccupy First in the decades ahead. Under the leadership of Chief Albert Luthuli, the ANC spearheaded the multiracial Congress Alliance during the 1950s with mass actions, including the 1952 Defiance Campaign, which involved strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience against pass laws and other apartheid measures. This public resistance culminated with the Congress of the People in 1955, held in Soweto, which involved the member organizations of the Congress Alliance and resulted in the promulgation of the Freedom Charter, which demanded a nonracial, fully democratic South Africa. The apartheid government responded swiftly by arresting 156 activists for their involvement in the Congress of the People, accusing them of attempting to overthrow the state. First and Slovo were among those detained. The Treason Trial subsequently unfolded from 1956 to 1961, depriving the activists of political momentum but also providing them with a stage to communicate their anti-racist principles to a global audience. The Treason Trial proved to be a moment of public solidarity that unified different activists across organizations, genders, and racial lines. In addition to First and Slovo, among the accused were Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Moses Kotane, Helen Joseph, Ahmed Kathrada, and Alex La Guma. Mandela would later quip in his autobiography that the trial was “the largest and longest unbanned meeting of the Congress Alliance in years.” Sharpeville Though all the accused were eventually acquitted, the protracted nature of the Treason Trial created an opening for other parties, principally the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Founded by Robert Sobukwe, a former ANC member, the PAC emphasized a more strident black nationalism in contrast to the multiracial front of the Congress Alliance. Sobukwe served as a forerunner to Biko and the Black Consciousness movement of the late 1960s and ’70s. On March 21, 1960, the PAC organized a pass law protest involving an estimated five thousand people in Sharpeville. Police opened fire, killing at least ninety-one people and injuring hundreds more. This proved to be a turning point in the history of the liberation struggle. The apartheid government reacted to the Sharpeville Massacre by declaring a state of emergency and banning the PAC and the ANC. Sharpeville also prompted the turn to armed struggle by the ANC and SACP in 1961. Mandela, Slovo, and First were key figures in the development and implementation of this new strategy, which marked a generational shift away from the civil disobedience approach of Luthuli. The next several decades would be defined by the maneuvers of MK, linking the ANC and the SACP with other liberation struggles in Africa as well as similar movements in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Palestine. The banning of the ANC and the escalation of police surveillance had a major impact on First’s life. She traveled to Swaziland (present-day Eswatini) with her daughters shortly after the state of emergency was declared, at a time when Slovo was detained. She eventually returned to continue her work as a journalist, though her situation began to unravel in 1962 once Mandela and other activists were arrested for their militant activities. The subsequent Rivonia Trial led to Mandela’s sentence of life imprisonment along with seven others in 1964. First herself was detained in August 1963 after police raided her home and found illicit political material. Slovo had already left South Africa in June for what was intended to be a temporary mission for MK. Incarcerated under the ninety-day detention law, First ultimately spent 117 days in prison, an experience retold in her memoir, 117 Days (1965), which conveyed the inhumanity of the apartheid regime for a global audience. “Left in that cell long enough, I feared to become one of those colourless insects that slither under a world of flat, grey stones, away from the sky and the sunlight, the grass and people,” First wrote, depicting the escalating sense of dehumanization she felt. Yet 117 Days also describes her resistance to this process, with the prison symbolizing the broader apparatus of the apartheid state through the cruel spatial intimacies of the prison cell and the brutal Special Branch interrogators she encountered. “In prison, you only see the moves of the enemy,” she later recalled. “Prison is the hardest place to fight a battle.” 117 Days provided a firsthand sense of political incarceration with its gendered and racial dimensions, its psychological challenges through solitary confinement, and its potential for new forms of solidarity. Above all, her account raised a set of fundamental questions. What counted as a “crime” in apartheid South Africa? Who are the victims? Who are the perpetrators? Who is the law for? Where is justice in a situation where the law and morality are diametrically opposed to one another? Exile Released in December 1963, First left South Africa in March 1964, never to return. She was greeted as a celebrity when she arrived in London with her daughters Robyn and Gillian. Yet, as with many others, exile proved to be a complex experience — personally liberating, but at the price of losing touch with one’s homeland. Exile could be long and rife with uncertainty. London was disorienting for First, not just culturally but also because of the new sense of freedom and agency she had. Political work competed with domestic responsibilities. The so-called external mission of the ANC involved diplomatic trips and speeches at numerous venues. Still, though her ongoing activism provided a point of orientation, it was her intellectual work that blossomed. In exile, First’s experience as a journalist translated into longer works of scholarship and political theory after the publication of 117 Days. Above all, First’s writing grappled with questions that animated the policy discussions and debates among ANC and SACP members. Her first book, South West Africa, published in 1963 before she left for exile, presented a critical appraisal of South Africa’s control over what is today Namibia. In effect, the book presented a more expansive engagement with the concept of “colonialism of a special type” by examining South Africa’s colonial rule of the former German territory, which had been granted under the League of Nations mandate system after World War I. First’s later books similarly confronted and tested party ideas through different contexts, as well as through the lens of her personal experience. Her 1980 biography of Olive Schreiner (coauthored with Ann Scott) addressed the life and politics of one of South Africa’s most important socialist intellectuals, a study that undoubtedly held meaning for First. The Mozambican Miner: Proletarian and Peasant, published posthumously in 1983, contributed to discussions of racial capitalism in the wider region of southern Africa. However, it is First’s 1970 book, The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’État, which stands out as her major contribution to the literature of revolution and postcolonial political theory. On the surface, it is an account of coups in postindependence Africa, with case studies drawn from Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana. The book is not an armchair retelling of these episodes. First traveled extensively to gain firsthand knowledge on the ground. As she wrote, she wanted The Barrel of a Gun to be attuned to “the sense of pulsating life in the streets” and to reflect “something of the way people see, and say things about, their condition.” The Barrel of a Gun also reveals a deeper subtext with its focus on African militaries and their political power. First’s keen interest in the topic was shaped by her involvement in the formation of MK and the anti-apartheid movement’s turn to armed struggle. Indeed, her personal papers reveal an early optimistic view of armies as a revolutionary vanguard that gradually shifted as her research progressed. Her conclusions in The Barrel of Gun are very different, underscoring how postcolonial militaries are much more ambiguous in their character. At times, coups could speed up the process of political change to positive ends by ending autocratic regimes. But they could also do the exact opposite by establishing authoritarian rule. First’s most important contribution is to underline the legacy of colonialism in fostering the conditions for postcolonial political instability. In his classic work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), Walter Rodney forcefully argued how centuries of European colonialism set back the continent from an economic standpoint. In The Barrel of a Gun, First likewise argues that European colonialism politically underdeveloped Africa, by leaving weak institutions that were vulnerable to military takeover. For this reason, among many, The Barrel of a Gun still stands as a foundational diagnosis of postcolonial Africa in the years immediately following decolonization. Legacies If The Barrel of a Gun marked a certain culmination of First’s thinking, it was certainly not the final answer to her questions about the vicissitudes of political power and the possibilities of revolution in Africa. Her book Libya: The Elusive Revolution, published a few years later in 1974, is a provisional sequel to The Barrel of a Gun, examining the opportunities and limits of the coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power in 1969. However, it was the liberation of Mozambique from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 that opened a new horizon for First. Neighboring South Africa and led by the Marxist-Leninist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), independent Mozambique presented her with an opportunity to witness a revolution in southern Africa as it was unfolding. It provided her with a chance to live out her revolutionary ideals. This period of optimism for First, lived in the belief that a Marxist-Leninist revolution would soon cross the border into her native South Africa, proved all too short. The police unit whose members interrogated her in 1963 was the same unit that organized her assassination almost two decades later. Despite her premature passing at the age of fifty-seven, First’s writing and political example live on. Though committed to the South African cause and communism as a political worldview, her work avoided the parochialism of many nationalist thinkers, as well as the constraints of Marxist orthodoxy. Her vision remained expansive by considering case studies beyond South Africa, yet it aligned with questions that preoccupied her comrades and friends in the SACP and the ANC. Like the work of Frantz Fanon, who was a crucial influence for her, First’s perspectives and ideas endure because they were born in the unstable crucible of active struggle, not the sequestered institutional spaces of academia or the conformist atmospheres of party offices. Though the revolution First imagined for South Africa has not occurred, with the two-stage program of the long-ago Native Republic thesis only partly fulfilled, the questions she raised for her country and her continent continue: What is the nature of political power? What is the role of the state in the lives of ordinary people? What is the role of violence in liberation or oppression? How can the lives of workers, both women and men, receive justice? And, finally, what are the conditions for revolution, and what does revolution mean in practice? These questions and the force of politics behind them still deserve answers.