Remembering Ruth First

I am grateful to have known the focussed activist, campaigning journalist 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, witty 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 devastating period of solitary confinement, mental torture and re-arrest, which she found the bravery and honesty to write about in her book 117 Days, after she had reached England with her three daughters.

Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925; her parents were founder members of the South African Communist Party. Among her fellow students at the University of Witwatersrand in the 1940s were Eduardo Mondlane, the Mozambican freedom fighter who became first leader of FRELIMO, and Nelson Mandela who in 1994 became the first President of post-Apartheid South Africa; also Joe Slovo, who would marry Ruth and be a defence lawyer in the notorious Rivonia trial that resulted in Mandela’s 28 year imprisonment. Joe was himself indicted for high treason and escaped the country to lead the armed struggle against the South African regime from Angola, later returning to join Mandela’s cabinet.

In the 1950s, Ruth and Joe were members with Mandela of the African National Congress; as dedicated multi-racialists, they helped to draft its Freedom Charter. While still in her twenties, Ruth had been 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. When, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, a state of emergency was declared, the couple were ‘listed’ under the Suppression of Communism Act, banned from publishing, broadcasting, or being quoted in the press, and subsequently arrested.

During her first years of exile in the UK, Ruth First edited Mandela’s autobiography, No Easy Walk to Freedom, and from Durham she continued to correspond with him on Robben Island. At the same time, she was intellectually active in the British Anti-Apartheid movement, forming policy, giving interviews and speaking at rallies. As an expert in African politics, Ruth took part in missions for the United Nations, while in London she developed close ties with feminist historians and publishers, and co-wrote a biography of Olive Schreiner. At Durham, Ruth was an inspiration to students and colleagues. Her head of department described her 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 resulted in a ground-breaking book on migrant labour. 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, whom Ruth’s daughter Gillian Slovo later had the courage to confront in an interview for the BBC. 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, unveiling 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