Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid

391 Pages·2013·5.56 MB·English

by  Alan Wieder

Praise for
Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid
THE SOUTH AFRICAN VICTORY over apartheid quickly became the stuff of
legend: the power of good triumphing over the forces of evil, the mighty
Nelson Mandela offering a beacon of hope to oppressed peoples the world
around. True, true, and of course much more complicated in reality. Alan
Wieder’s great accomplishment here is to provide a clear window into that
complex reality, and in the process to rescue the revolution from its myth-
makers. Focusing on the lives of the colorful and contradictory revolutionar-
ies Ruth First and Joe Slovo, Wieder provides detail and context, personality
and character to one of the epic struggles of all time. This book is a gripping
social history, a love song to the revolution, and a passionate and enlightening
portrait of a partnership, a love-affair, and two extraordinary activists who
cast their fates with the dreams of people everywhere for justice and freedom.
—BILL AYERS & BERN ARDINE DOHRN
DEMONIZED BY APARTHEID, Joe and Ruth were revolutionary heroes for
black South Africans. They were formidable opponents in word and deed.
This absorbing account does them justice and illuminates the complexity and
richness of their often stormy relationship and extraordinary times.
—RONNIE KASRILS, anti-apartheid leader and solidarity activist; former
Minister of Intelligence in South Africa; author, The Unlikely Secret Agent
WIEDER’S BOOK ENLARGES AND ENRICHES our understanding of the lives
of First and Slovo, their intense and turbulent relationship, their personalities
and impact on others, and their various roles as lawyer, journalist, under-
ground operative, researcher, teacher, author, political and military leader,
negotiator and cabinet minister. The evocation of the Johannesburg left
during the 1950s—Gillian Slovo called them her parents’ Camelot years—is
vivid and well-observed. Ruth, Joe, and their circle combined commitment
and camaraderie with conspiracy and concealment—and also with careless-
ness and complacency. The account of tensions between the ANC and SACP,
and Joe’s efforts to reconcile African nationalism and socialism, is nuanced
and important. The discussion of Ruth as writer-researcher and researcher-
teacher makes use of earlier evaluations, but goes beyond them in an impor-
tant assessment of her work as an academic engagé.
—COLIN BUNDY, former Principal of Green Templeton College,
University of Oxford
IT HAS BEEN A REAL PRIVILEGE for me to read Alan Wieder’s book. It
brought me back in touch with two remarkable and complex people and ac-
tivists. Ruth First and Joe Slovo emerge from this book as fl esh and blood
human beings facing monumentally diffi cult decisions. Each of them, and
those dearest to them, paid a high price for their respective life choices. Yet
Ruth and Joe’s integrity and full-throated commitment to a different kind
of South Africa not only played an important role in doing away with the
obscenity that was apartheid, they also represent a clear road not taken in
post-apartheid South Africa. This book evokes a vital period which became a
focus of myth-making rather than the kind of clear-eyed, honest history Ruth
and Joe would each have ultimately have deemed essential.
—DAN O’MEARA, author, Volkskapitalisme, and coauthor,
The Struggle for South Africa
TO THE MOVEMENTS HE LED , he was known by his initials, JS. His last
name had become anthemic when the mostly black guerilla army belted out
‘Joe Slovo’ in song as they marched on parade or executed sabotage missions
in the secret war against apartheid. You can’t really appreciate South Africa’s
transition to democracy without knowing why Nelson Mandela relied on his
sense of strategy and how his bravery inspired a revolution committed to
non-racialism. He was a communist known for red socks and a willingness to
make compromises with capitalists that sealed the path to freedom. And just
like Nelson’s relationship with Winnie made him stronger through his long
years in confi nement, Joe’s often tumultuous relationship with his wife and
comrade Ruth First, a brilliant journalist and analyst, until her assassination,
helped defi ne the discourse of the ANC’s painful years in exile. Now Alan
Wieder has plunged into their past of domestic and political struggle to share
their story with the scope, context, and detail that it deserves. And we all will
appreciate his commitment and style in critically respecting their contribu-
tions and bringing this dynamic duo alive as the complex, loving and caring
people they were.
—DANNY SCHECHTER, Founder and Director of “South Africa Now,”
Director of six fi lms on Nelson Mandela
Ruth First and Joe Slovo
in the War against Apartheid
ALAN WIEDER
Foreword by NADINE GORDIMER
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Alan Wieder
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher—
ISBN 978-1-58367-356-0 pbk
ISBN 978-1-58367-357-7 cloth
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, New York 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Foreword / 7
Preface / 21
Acknowledgments / 24
Introduction / 27
1. From the Shtetl to South Africa / 31
2. War, Wits, Politics, and Ruth Meets Joe / 44
3. Apartheid, Children, and the Beginning of the Struggle / 60
4. The Treason Trial and Underground Action / 90
5. Sharpeville, Prison, and Exile / 112
6. The Initial Exile: Living in London / 144
7. Academics, Writing, and Activism: Moving toward Africa / 175
8. Academics and Revolution: Taking the Struggle Home / 205
9. Assassination, Grief, and Expulsion from Maputo / 250
10. Lusaka, Marriage, and the Beginning of the Journey Home / 272
11. Home / 300
12. Election, Ministry: To Rest in Soweto / 333
Epilogue / 353
Abbreviations / 357
Sources / 358
Notes / 366
Index / 379
My wife and partner, Joanie Krug, has had the most
impact on my writing this book. Besides her multiple readings
of the manuscript and her willingness to let me talk at length on
Ruth and Joe’s lives since late 2009, she has enthusiastically
and lovingly promoted and celebrated my commitment and
passion for the project. This book is hers as well as mine.
Foreword
by Nadine Gordimer
JOE SLOVO AND R UTH FIRST. We are entering their paths.
Both grew up unbelievers in Jewish or any religious faith. They
met when Ruth was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe
just returned from the South African Army in the war against Nazi
Germany. His motivation for volunteering, eighteen years old, unem-
ployed, lying about being underage for military call-up—his early
alliance with communism, and so to the Soviet Union under attack—
was decisive in the act. But there remained the devastating racial
dilemma in South Africa. He wrote: “How do you tell a black man
to make his peace with General Smuts—butcher of Bulhoek and the
Bondelswarts? ‘Save civilisation and democracy’—must have sounded
a cruel parody. And fi ght with what? No black man was allowed to
bear arms . . . if you want to serve democracy, wield a knobkerrie
[wooden club] as a uniformed servant of a white soldier.”
Joe Slovo’s appetite for the pleasures of life is brought face-to-
face with his political humanitarian drive when at the end of the
war he took a holiday. From Turin to Cairo he went, and with other
decommissioned soldiers somehow got to Palestine although travel
was restricted because of Zionist resistance to British occupation; on
to a kibbutz where “looked at in isolation, the kibbutz seemed to be
the very epitome of socialist lifestyle. . . . it was populated in the main
by young people with the passion and belief that by the mere exercise
of will and humanism you could build socialism as one factory or one
8 / R UTH FIRST AND JOE SL OVO IN THE WAR AGAINST APARTHEID
kibbutz and the power of example will sweep the imagination of all
. . . worker or capitalist.” Social theory aside, the dominating doc-
trine “on this kibbutz, as well on others, was the biblical injunction
that the land of Palestine must be claimed and fought for by every
Jew, and this meant the uprooting and scattering of millions whose
people had occupied this land for over fi ve thousand years (no men-
tion of the collusion of the Balfour Declaration of 1917).” The spirit
of the book admits issue can be taken with this view, whereas Slovo’s
probing of concepts invoked by socialism become consistent to follow
with his lifelong political journey.
During Joe’s absence from South Africa, membership in the Com-
munist Party (CP) had grown fourfold in the period 1941–43 with
correspondingly the greatest call for action of the African National
Congress (ANC), although there are years ahead which the book fol-
lows in vivid attention, enlighteningly frank about a Communist-ANC
alliance. Joe and Ruth were both prominent in protests of the CP and
ANC against racist laws; two events among others—squatters’ rights
in townships outside Johannesburg and Defense of the Basotho Peas-
ants Organization in Basutoland. Joe wrote that they became lovers in
Basutoland. But he dated his “life with Ruth” as having “started off
with political tension.” It’s not clear—nothing glibly assumed in this
book—whether he is recollecting Students’ Representative Council
meetings, the other student organization, Federation of Progressive Stu-
dents (FOPS), or the Ismail Meer fl at where his initial response to Ruth
and her friends was “sort of a little feeling of insecurity . . . these Smart
Alecks could formulate speech and so on . . . were just too big for their
boots . . . so my life with Ruth started off with quite a degree of politi-
cal tension based on this nonsense.” We echo in our own minds their
friend describing the differing qualities of Joe and Ruth—“She didn’t
have a rapport with ordinary working class blokes . . . needed the better-
educated or bigger-thinkers . . . couldn’t bring herself to be one of them.
And yet she would have given her life to protect them and their rights.”
And did.
Ruth and Joe had fi erce arguments throughout their lives together,
political and ethical, unlike the accepted domestic confl icts; the book
speculates that culture, “upbringing,” hangover from “nature of
respective childhoods contributed to their disagreements.” Ruth came
from a middle-class Johannesburg family, went to a private school and
on to university. Joe came to South Africa aged ten an immigrant from
Lithuania, speaking only Yiddish. But for themselves disagreement
Foreword / 9
was always an essential in the process of learning, discussions jolting
one another out of too righteous a certainty that he or sheunderstood,
analyzed most clearly an issue of human lives. Here is self-honesty
against revolutionary complacency.
In the incredible many contradictions in South African history,
the Witwatersrand University and the University of Cape Town were
the only “open” universities—half-open as students who were not
white were permitted to do their course work there but excluded from
“social, cultural, political, athletic activities.” Among such students
at the Witwatersrand University was a young Indian rebel intellec-
tual from Durban, Ismail Meer. A love affair bringing together race
difference and the sharing of searching intellect and politics, First
and Meer found each other. A parliamentarian (all-white parliament)
announced he had been told of a love affair between a European girl
and a non-European: “This state of affairs can no longer continue.”
(Double entendre no doubt unintended.) A student affi liation of the
Afrikaner Ossewa-Brandwag held protests against ”black students
and their fellow travellers, communists and Jews.” Ruth and Ismail
Meer joined a leftist student organization, Federation of Progressive
Students (FOPS), many of whose leaders were members of the Young
Communist League. (The early convolutions of the maze to be solved
toward freedom.) The Communist Party accepted FOPS as means
of inroad to the University; although FOPS had claimed that safer
stance, progression as Trotskyites, others shunned it as a Communist
front. Between denials, affi rmations, accusation and manipulation of
ANC elections FOPS was unable to claim the ANC Youth League as
an ally. But its fi rst chosen executive is seen as indeed Ruth First, the
perfect conduit to the University. A newspaper calling itself Mamba
ran a sideline that represented Ruth as “Truth Last.”
Meer’s fl at was the meeting place for young leftists at the Wit-
watersrand University, revealed bluntly for readers by an habitué as
“dreamy, bloody depressing . . . but warm with activity . . . always a
hive.” Nelson Mandela, law student along with Meer and eventually
Slovo, described it as “here we studied, talked, even danced cold early
mornings.” He remembered “sleeping over”—dossing down?—in
the fl at. One is reading not of self-perceived martyrs but individuals
greedy for life even while giving up so much personal fulfi llment for a
way of intense certain risk. A level of involvement, the process in mak-
ing a life, living, hardly to be imagined. In this sense, among much
else to come, this book is a revelation to be reckoned with.