Remembering Ruth First

I am grateful to have known the focussed activist and intrepid intellectual Ruth First. We both joined the staff of Durham University in the 1970s: she in the department of Sociology, and I in English. Ruth was then in her fifties, a vibrant, stylish woman with decades of experience behind her; I was in my thirties, a naïve academic, but she included me in her generous and positive approach to life.

In term-time, we shared a small terraced house that had none of the comforts of her former home in South Africa, or her current London home. It was on an unmade-up road that ended abruptly in the high wall of Durham Jail. I still wonder whether that wall reminded Ruth of her own imprisonment in South Africa in 1963: a period of solitary confinement, mental torture and re-arrest, which she found the courage and honesty to write about in her book 117 Days, after she had reached Britain with her three daughters.

Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925; her parents were founder members of the South African Communist Party (SACP). She graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in 1946, with first class degrees in Sociology and Anthropology. Among her fellow students were Eduardo Mondlane, the Mozambican freedom fighter who became first leader of FRELIMO, and Nelson Mandela, who was already a member of the African National Congress (ANC), and would become the first President of post-Apartheid South Africa.

In the same law class as Mandela, was Ruth’s future husband Joe Slovo, who became a leading activist and theorist in the SACP and, after long exile, would play a vital role in the negotiations to end Apartheid in the 1990s. Ruth and Joe’s marital home was a centre for multiracial gatherings, both social and political, and subject to police raids. Their daughters’ experience of a privileged, yet threatened, childhood later shaped Shawn Slovo’s film A World Apart and Gillian Slovo’s memoir Every Secret Thing.  

While still in her twenties, Ruth was an editor of the Johannesburg Guardian, specialising in investigative reporting on such issues as slave labour on farms, slum conditions, anti-pass campaigns and bus boycotts. She went on to edit other radical journals, Fighting Talk and the New Age, and helped to draft the Freedom Charter. In 1950, the SACP was outlawed and Ruth and Joe were ‘listed’ under the Suppression of Communism Act, banned from attending public gatherings, or being quoted in the press.  

1n 1956, both were arrested with more than one hundred others and charged with treason; after a four-year trial, all were acquitted. Then came the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, when a state of emergency was declared. The ANC, having been non-violent, now started a sabotage campaign against the Apartheid government. Joe was already outside the country, and did not return; he would dedicate the next decades of his life to organizing the armed struggle from abroad. In 1963, African leaders including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, were arrested at Rivonia, put on trial and sentenced to life imprisonment. Ruth herself was detained without charge under the notorious 90-day rule; on her release, she followed her father into exile.

During her first years in the UK, Ruth First edited Mandela’s autobiography, No Easy Walk to Freedom, and from Durham she continued to correspond with him during an imprisonment that would last 27 years. At the same time, she was active in the British Anti-Apartheid movement, forming policy, giving interviews and speaking at rallies. She published two books on South West Africa, one on African coups d’état, and another entitled Libya: the elusive revolution. Recognised as an expert in African politics, Ruth took part in missions for the United Nations, and continued her work as a campaigning journalist on topics including Western investment in Apartheid.

In London, she also formed close ties with feminist historians and publishers, and co-wrote a biography of Olive Schreiner. At Durham, Ruth pioneered gender studies, as well as the sociology of development: she was an inspiration to both students and colleagues. Her head of department described Ruth First as a ‘one woman think tank’, while the BBC’s Fergal Keane praised her for being one of the few South Africans of her generation who ‘chose to step out of the privilege of their skin’.

After four years in the North of England, Ruth was invited to direct research at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Maputo in newly independent Mozambique. There, she developed her collaborative approach to learning through fieldwork with graduate students, which would result in a ground-breaking book on migrant labour, Black Gold: The Mozambican Miner.

Re-united with her husband after long periods apart, Ruth was happy to be back in Africa until, one morning in August 1982, she was opening her mail at the university when a letter bomb exploded, annihilating a brilliant life. It was a targeted assassination by an agent of the South African security service. They also tried to kill Joe Slovo, who survived to return to South Africa and serve as a minister in Mandela’s first government. 

A fellow exile, Ronald Segal, described Ruth First’s death at the hands of the Apartheid regime as ‘the final act of censorship’. President Mandela, who unveiled a blue plaque to both Ruth First and Joe Slovo in Camden Town, celebrated her as ‘a beacon to all who love liberty’.

Diana Collecott