In
recent months there have been events in both South Africa and the United
Kingdom commemorating 30 years since the South African apartheid regime
assassinated Ruth First. During the long
fight against apartheid in South Africa there were several remarkable couples
who devoted their lives to the struggle -- Winnie and Nelson Mandela, Albertina
and Walter Sissulu, Hilda and Rusty Bernstein, and of course the intrepid Ruth
First and Joe Slovo. Ruth and Joe began
their activism the decade before the apartheid regime came into power. They became members of the Communist Party in
the 1940s as they fought racism, class disparity, and oppression in South
Africa. Beginning in 1947 and ending
just before she was imprisoned in 1963, Ruth was the editor of the Johannesburg
office of The Guardian, a radical,
opposition newspaper that exposed the atrocities of the South African state,
and featured the voices of black opposition leaders. Forced into exile in 1964, she continued to
speak back to power in South Africa through her activism, writing, and
teaching. In 1982, she paid the ultimate
price for her commitment to a democratic South Africa when she was assassinated
by the apartheid regime. A year earlier,
South African commandos were elated because they believed that they had killed
Joe Slovo whom they referred to as “Enemy Number One.” The commandos had mistakenly shot the wrong
person, a Portuguese engineer. There
were later attempts on Joe’s life. At
the government’s infamous interrogation and torture prison, Daisy Farm, there
was a basement cell referred to as the "Slovo Suite."
The South African government
demonized both Ruth First and Joe Slovo throughout the struggle years. With Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Govan
Mbeki imprisoned for almost three decades beginning in 1963, Joe Slovo was,
along with Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani, one of the most important leaders in
the struggle against apartheid. He was
the main strategist of the armed struggle, and later a key player in the
negotiations with the apartheid regime that led to the country’s first
democratic government in 1994.
Ruth and Joe were complex individuals:
their partnership, early years and beyond, was tested by their individuality,
irreverence, ideology, infidelity, and intensity. Ruth First could be
thoughtful, contentious, generous, academic, intellectual, revolutionary, and
more. Joe Slovo was tough, humorous,
soft, harsh, congenial, thoughtful, political, musical, and OF COURSE revolutionary. Ruth
was sometimes compared to Rosa Luxemburg.
Her commitment to the struggle against apartheid was given as testimony after
her assassination – it still is today. Retired Constitutional Court justice, Albie
Sachs, said, “I once described her as a product of Lenin and the London School
of Economics.” Headlines from a
newspaper interview with Ruth during her London years read, “I am a
Revolutionary.” Finally, her American friend,
Danny Schechter, the Media Dissector, said, “She was not playing the
revolution, she was making the revolution, or trying to.”
Ruth First and Joe Slovo were both
leaders amongst leaders. They had
different styles. They had different
roles in the struggle. Most importantly,
their complex and vital places in the fight for a democratic South Africa need
to be portrayed for the people that knew them and more importantly for those
that have come after them – both in South Africa and throughout the world.
Their legacies are especially important
in South Africa today because both politicians and other leaders, some who were
their struggle comrades, are enmeshed in repression and corruption. Unfortunately, comrade Pallo Jordan’s eulogy
of Joe where he said he had no doubt that Joe’s life and work would continue to
inspire radicals, and publisher Ronald Segal’s promise after Ruth died that the revolutionary movement would find
new purpose because of her death, remain unfulfilled.
But in 2012 huge contradictions remain
corresponding to Ruth and Joe’s revolutionary legacies and the current reality
in South Africa. They taught us that capitalism
and imperialism have inflicted immense misery on humanity and that we have to
voice and act upon our passion for economic justice, our hatred of inequality
and our impatience with reformism. Ruth
and Joe’s values and actions need to be kept alive in South Africa and
throughout the world. The spirit of each
of their positions in the struggle against apartheid is sorely necessary in the
current struggles for social justice.
Recently, University of Montreal political scientist Dan O’Meara commented
on Ruth and Joe’s lifelong fight against the rich and powerful. He spoke to the essence of why their life
stories are so important to portray at the present time.
Ruth
and Joe died trying to change the world; they died not in the arid despair of
the mind, but in hope at the possibility of change, knowing that only 'we'
could wring such change from the grasping bloody hands of 'them'.
Ruth First and Joe Slovo’s
actions always confronted the vile ruthlessness of power that initiated,
fostered, sanctioned, and protected class disparity and racism. Ruth’s work as a political activist,
journalist, writer, academic, and Director of Research at the Center of African
Studies in Mozambique, challenged commonplaces and injustices, class disparity
and racism, in South Africa and throughout the Continent. Joe, first as a radical lawyer, then as the Chief
of Staff of the struggle underground, and finally as the leader of the South
African Communist Party, combined strategy with action to fight unwaveringly
against the apartheid regime.
Both people spent their
entire lives daringly fighting for a non-racial, democratic South Africa with
the goal of socialism and equality for all people. Their values and actions help remind
generations across the board, old and young, of the possibilities when courageous
and brave individuals join together to fight oppression, or to paraphrase the
preamble to the South African Constitution:
Believe
that the World belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity!
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