11 Books you should read before going to south africa

http://mic.com/articles/88397/11-books-you-should-read-before-traveling-to-south-africa

Paul Joseph

Paul Joseph was totally committed to the struggle against apartheid and remains dedicated to social justice in South Africa and throughout the world.  As a young man he worked for Julius First, Ruth's father.  Below is a letter that he recently sent me about Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid.

_{Paul & Adelaide Joseph}

Dear Alan,

Thank you very much for the copy of your biography on the lives of Ruth First & Joe Slovo ‘In the War Against Apartheid.’

In the course of convalescing I managed to finish the book. I found it absorbing, enriching in which there were so many facets that were new to me.

The way you sketched out these two characters with such poignancy, sensitivity & fascinating details brought out such vivid recollections of our association with Joe & Ruth over years of friendship.

As I was getting towards the end of the book I was listening to Nigel Kennedy performing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at a Proms night. He was accompanied by some musicians from Gaza.

He played with gusto. When he finished there was a tremendous applause. He made a short statement of how pleased he was with the end of apartheid. There was an explosion of applause.

At that very moment I was reading your description of how Joe’s life was seeping out.

I choked and cried at the way you described Ruth & Joe who gave their lives to end apartheid.

It was well after 1 a.m. I got up to go to Adelaide’s room. I wanted to talk to her about what you wrote about Ruth & Joe.

She was sound asleep. Her health is also not too good. I left her.

The next morning as she was preparing the coffee I briefly told her but could not continue as I broke down. She embraced me saying she understood how I felt about Ruth & Joe.

My sincere appreciation to you for describing the lives of Ruth & Joe as well as that of Tilly, Julius, Ronnie & the grand-daughters.

I think this book should be considered for a textbook for universities of South Africa which encompasses the CP, ANC, the Congress Alliance and MK.

The book will also benefit scholars, students and activists in Africa, Europe and the Americas & the Caribbean & Asia.

Many thanks for a work of true scholarship.

Sincere Regards,

Paul Joseph

London - April 29th

http://monthlyreview.org/press/news/alan-wieder-uk/

Africa Review - Kenya

Mandela achieved few of his big feats solo By DANA APRIL SEIDENBERG | Monday, March 24   2014

The towering figure of Nelson Mandela is often depicted as a lone warrior for justice and as the symbol of that nation’s triumph over apartheid.

Imbued with seemingly magical powers, he prevented that beloved country from being swept away in a tidal wave of resentment, the result of decades of ill-treatment at the hands of a sleaze-oozing, ruthless regime.

His magisterial No Easy Walk to Freedom has been savoured by millions who crave connection to him. Not to diminish Madiba’s larger-than-life legacy, he achieved few of his huge accomplishments alone.

American oral historian, Alan Wieder’s new dual biography investigates the lives of Ruth First and her husband Joe Slovo, passionate whistleblowers whose dangerous underground activities and personal sacrifice for revolutionary social change have earned both an honoured place in history.

First, Ruth First. In l963 after two soul-destroying stints of solitary confinement lasting 117 days in a Johannesburg prison, First fled to Britain where she taught political science at Durham University. She also wrote or edited several books including Mandela’s own work, and with Kenya’s Oginga Odinga, his l967 memoir, Not Yet Uhuru.

Having taken up a position at Mozambique’s Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, First was targeted for assassination by the apartheid regime.

In l982 at age 57, this Red-hot academic was killed by a letter bomb she opened at her office desk after lunching with movement photographer, Moira Forjaz and others.

In l960 Mandela joined the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party to impose its armed struggle on the ANC leadership. Joe Slovo scripted with others the SACP/ANC Freedom Charter and organised the guerrilla movement.

Slovo, Spear of the Nation

After Madiba was sentenced to life imprisonment, Slovo assumed his exalted position as leader of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

Held responsible for multiple acts of sabotage including the bombing of installations around South Africa, he, too, was on the run…living in exile …on and off with Ruth in Maputo. From “terrorist” to national hero, Slovo served in President Mandela’s government oddly as Minister for Housing until in l995 when he died of cancer. An official state funeral followed.

What is wrong with this schema? Why investigate the successes and travails of this particular courageous couple among the thousands involved in South Africa’s liberation and others around Africa in the late 20th century?

Still, their contribution as trusted comrades at the very top of the ANC movement hierarchy cannot go unnoticed. Aside from strengthening the ideological platforms of progressive political struggles elsewhere, their egalitarian message, social daring and achievements could serve as pointers for new generations of progressive political activists.

The moral authority of Ruth First and Joe Slovo rested on their SACP membership. As brilliant Marxist-Leninist intellectuals only later did they become ANC strategists.

Looking back, Mandela, who met First and Slovo when the latter two were law students at the University of Witwatersrand, commented: “Joe Slovo had one of the sharpest, most incisive minds I have ever encountered. He was an ardent Communist… . Ruth had an outgoing personality and was a gifted writer.”

As the years went by, in Wieder’s view, Slovo remained an idealistic admirer of Soviet Communism while First dismissed the “workers’ state” as a gross deception.

First’s parents and Slovo were part of the large two-pronged turn-of-the-20th century Jewish migration fleeing Eastern European pogroms to the subcontinent and to New York.

Out of Lithuania and Latvia’s anti-Zionist Socialist Bund, came the Marxist-Leninist Firsts and Slovos…as did the family of Albie Sachs. (In Nairobi a few years ago Professor Albie Sachs — also in the book — was among those on the Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board charged with sweeping Kenya’s judiciary of its corrupt judges.

Abraham Block

Also targeted for assassination, miraculously Sachs survived.) Abraham Block, another Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant around whom a family biography, Abraham’s People, has just been published, had arrived in Kenya via South Africa. Hatched in the same nest, there the common narrative ends. A number of Johannesburg Jews became immersed in SACP/ANC politics.

The Blocks alongside Kenya’s Jewish and other immigrant populations focused mainly on business. Those who stayed put in Europe suffered a tragic fate at the hands of Nazi Germany.

READ: Abraham Block: The ultimate hustler

Wieder has done a commendable job of interviewing most everyone who knew First and Slovo well. So painstakingly rendered is Wieder’s character study of the two, they could escape from the pages into your life. Unfortunately the work lacks a framing or over-arching perspective in which to contextualise events in their partnership.

The ANC/SACP, like the Paris Commune once described as a “sphinx” because of its mysteriousness, is too ill-defined to link the couple’s involvement to either of them.

Outside the ANC/SACP — the couple’s response to the Sharpeville massacre of l960, the Soweto uprising of l976, the Black Consciousness movement, and Steve Biko’s martyrdom — is sketchy too.

By April 27, l994 when Mandela became president, legislating away what Bishop Desmond Tutu called the “pigmentocracy” was a relatively easy, palliative move; the ANC, unlike other anti-colonial movements around the continent, having also contained an admirable mix of trusted Europeans, Coloureds and South Asians.

First and Slovo spent their lives destroying South Africa’s status quo.

It is known that the SACP not only wanted to end apartheid, but also to create a communist state. In the transition from colonial capitalism to a daringly re-imagined alternative society, what were the plan(s), policies or even ideals envisaged?

The infinitely greater challenge to overcome economic desperation that needed bold, often unpopular decisions on income inequality, land restitution and resource nationalism was ignored. Why were none of these goals or aims pursued during his presidency?

More First-Slovo multiple marriage memoir than engaged political history, Wieder’s work is informative, entertaining and emotionally open. But he might have taken a cue from First’s own university course “Politics of Class Alliances” where students read Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Ernest Mandel, Eduardo Galeano, Rosa Luxemburg and others.

Wieder misses the moment for presenting their world in a salutary manner that connects it to the many ongoing struggles for social justice today.

London Talk II

Review of African Political Economy 40th Anniversary

Since 1974 ROAPE has provided radical analysis of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change. It sustains a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa in the context of capitalist globalisation.

Ruth First: Não Vamos Esquecer (We Will Not Forget)

The South African revolutionary Ruth First made an extraordinary contribution to activism and radical writing and research on Africa. She worked as a journalist in South Africa from 1946 until her exile in the UK in 1964. She then became an editor, co-author and author of a large number of books, as well as a lecturer. She was also one of the founding members of the Review of African Political Economy (RoAPE) in 1974, a radical journal committed to transforming (and understanding) Africa’s political economy.

In the late 1970s First moved to Mozambique as Director of Research at the Centro de Estudos Africanos at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. In 1982 she was murdered in Maputo by the apartheid state. Drawing on papers presented at the 2012 Ruth First Papers Project symposium, RoAPE has produced a special issue that

includes contributions from Anne-Marie Gentili, Gavin Williams and Alpheus Manghezi. The special issue on Ruth First is the story of First’s life in Mozambique, and her broad and substantial contribution to radical African studies. Much of Ruth First’s work and life remains unknown to a new generation yet her work was of such impressive scope, her activism so courageous. Join us to celebrate the extraordinary life of Ruth First and the launch of the Ruth First Special Issue.

Institute of Commonwealth Studies 1 May, 2014

Venue:

Senate Room (First floor, Senate

House, Malet Street,London WC1E 7HU)

Panel -17:00 –18:30

Ruth First: activism and research

Welcome by Gillian Slovo

‘Writing Ruth First’s biography’ Alan Wieder (Wieder is the author of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid published to wide acclaim last year).

Gavin Williams

‘Setting up RoAPE: Ruth and the first years of the Review’

Chair

Professor Philip Murphy (Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

Launch -18.30 –20.00

Ruth First: Não Vamos Esquecer Review of African Political Economy with Gary Littlejohn and Janet Bujra

Convenor: Dr Leo Zeilig, Project Manager

All Welcome

RSVP to olga.jimenez@sas.ac.uk

London Book Talk

BOOK TALK at Housmans Bookshop London, UK
‘Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War to End Apartheid’
with Alan Wieder

Wednesday 30th April, 7pm

On a rare visit from America, distinguished academic Alan Wieder discusses his new book ‘Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War to End Apartheid’, the first extended biography of the husband and wife who committed their lives to the war to end apartheid in South Africa.  Communists, scholars, parents, and uncompromising militants, they were the perfect enemies for the white police state. Together they were swept up in the growing resistance to apartheid, and together they experienced repression and exile.

Their contributions to the liberation struggle, as individuals and as a couple, are undeniable. Ruth agitated tirelessly for the overthrow of apartheid, first in South Africa and then from abroad, and Joe directed much of the armed struggle carried out by the infamous Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated as MK, translated as "Spear of the Nation"). Only one of them, however, would survive to see the fall of the old regime and the founding of a new, democratic South Africa. 

Wieder’s heavily researched work draws on the usual primary and secondary sources but also an extensive oral history that he has collected over many years. By intertwining the documentary record with personal interviews, he portrays the complexities and contradictions of this extraordinary couple and their efforts to navigate a time of great tension, upheaval, and revolutionary hope. 

Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. He is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina and has also taught at the University of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He has written widely on South Africans who fought against the apartheid regime.

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Mail & Guardian Review

Bedfellows of a different feather

28 Feb 2014 00:00 Gavin Evans

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Joe Slovo and Ruth First quarrelled about major political issues, yet their marriage lasted 34 years.

RUTH FIRST AND JOE SLOVO IN THE WAR AGAINST APARTHEID by Alan Wieder (Jacana)
Back in 1989, with the Berlin Wall about to fall, I enjoyed a long and leisurely dinner with Joe Slovo at his Lusaka home. The youngest of his three daughters, Robyn, popped in, but mostly it was just Joe, his friend Pallo Jordan and me, and it ended with a fine bottle of red wine.
"A gift," Joe said after absorbing our compliments, pausing for effect, "from Erich Honecker."
Jordan, an independent-minded leftist and no admirer of the ailing East German leader whose fortunes were taking a tumble, offered a raised eyebrow. I offered a nervous smile. Slovo burst into laughter, clearly relishing the irony of it all.
In Cape Town seven years earlier I had attended a memorial for Ruth First, who had just been assassinated by a parcel bomb. One of her comrades from the 1950s addressed us on First's remarkable struggle contributions over the decades, and rounded it off by telling us that "they were the glamour couple of the left".
She then turned her attention to the scruffier women activists of the student left, pointedly informing them that Ruth took "great care" about personal grooming.
Reading Alan Wieder's biography of this rather extraordinary couple, these moments came to mind. With their very different personalities, regular rows and often opposing views, they emerge as two of the most compelling characters within the ANC's historical cast.
First was known as an open-minded Marxist who refused to toe the pro-Soviet line. But she was also something of a martinet – the cliché "doesn't suffer fools gladly" pops up from several of Wieder's interviewees. Then again, her fierce intellectual rigour and clarity in debate seemed to disguise an underlying self-doubt and shyness. As her close friend Ronald Segal put it in a eulogy: "She was fascinatingly full of paradoxes: seemingly less concerned with the risks to her life than with having her hair done …"
The apartheid state did its utmost to demonise Slovo, portraying him as a ruthless KGB colonel and all-purpose bogeyman. But the mensch I briefly knew, and who emerges from the pages of this book, was warm, witty and charming – and, in private, a lot less doctrinaire than most other South African Communist Party (SACP) leaders I encountered.
Their close friend Wolfie Kodesh is quoted as describing Slovo as a down-to-earth and funny working-class intellectual.
First is portrayed as more complex. "She didn't have a rapport with ordinary working-class blokes … and yet she would give her life to protect them and their rights – of course, she did give her life," he said.
Wieder traces their parallel lives, moving from one to the other, blending the narrative with extracts from 78 interviews.
Inevitably, there will be significant details omitted in a book of this kind. For example, there's no mention of Slovo's role in securing Jordan's release from an ANC detention camp. Yet the book provides a rigorous account of their lives, mainly positive but never descending into hagiography. It is perhaps too detailed to appeal to casual readers, but for historians and anyone who engaged in anti-apartheid politics, it makes for a compelling read.
First, who came from a well-to-do Johannesburg Jewish communist family, threw herself into the struggle as a teenager, invariably emerging in leadership positions despite the patriarchal milieu of the time.

                                            Ruth First in Jack Gold's film on her imprisonment.Courtesy of Ruth First Papers Projects                                                                                                                             

Aside from her work in the SACP and the Congress of Democrats, her prime role came as an editor and writer for the pro-communist South African Guardian and its various successor titles, tirelessly campaigning, exposing slavery on white farms, championing causes, quizzing activists, always careful to check her facts.
Slovo, born to a Lithuanian family who emigrated to South Africa when he was nine, grew up in rougher circumstances – a working-class Jewish lad who left school at 15, joined the communists, forged his birth certificate to fight the Nazis and returned from war to get an ex-combatant's pass to study at the University of the Witwatersrand,where he completed his first-class law degree, while rapidly rising to become a party leader, a founder member of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) and a well-heeled advocate.
Both were defendants in the 1956 Treason Trial. First was listed and then banned. She was also detained without trial for 117 days (the first white woman to be detained under the 90-Day Detention law). She attempted suicide while in detention, and later wrote a book about her experiences, one of nine she authored or edited.
The great love of First's youthful life was her fellow party leader Ismail Meer, but that affair was doomed by the racial politics of the era, and later she and Slovo began their combative 34-year relationship. Both had affairs, although Wieder treads lightly in this area; for example, he does not mention the son Slovo had with another party activist.
First remoulded herself as a Marxist academic after joining Slovo in exile in London in 1963, and was open to the anti-Soviet views of the new left. Hardline party members demanded her expulsion and Slovo acknowledged that they would have succeeded had she not been his wife. They constantly quarrelled about major political issues (including the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia), but Slovo later admitted he was strongly influenced by her views.
His public orthodoxy was secured by the Soviet Union's role in bankrolling the SACP and the ANC, with Slovo regularly visiting Moscow and East Berlin, besides liaising with suspected KGB officers. He welcomed Gorbachev's reforms but only voiced criticisms of the party's paymasters after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The odd couple relocated to Mozambique in the late 1970s, where First took up a post as training director of the Centre of African Studies, which she relished, although some of her colleagues criticised her "democratic centralism" and her refusal to allow them to criticise Frelimo.
In those final four years she lived relatively frugally, let her hair frizz out, became more consciously feminist and regarded the time as the most fulfilling of her life.
The last third covers Joe's final years: his second marriage to Helena Dolny and his ever-increasing political and military role – chief of staff and head of special operations in MK (responsible for the key "armed propaganda" attacks on power stations and military bases in the early 1980s, and the key point man in Operation Vula in the late 1980s).
It also covers his major part in the Convention for a Democratic South Africa negotiations where, as SACP leader, Slovo astonished friends and enemies by proposing the "Sunset Clauses" that helped to close the deal —and finally his 21 months as minister of housing.
The book ends soon after Nelson Mandela bids his old comrade and friend goodbye.
Writing after Madiba's death, it's hard to avoid wondering what Joe Slovo would have made of the 19 years that have followed and whether he would have been able to maintain his avuncular optimism.
Ruth First, I am sure, would have been scandalised.

The People's Morning Star Review

A new book on Joe Slovo and Ruth First pays due tribute to an inspirational couple in the struggle for liberation in South Africa, says JOHN HAYLETT

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Ruth First And Joe Slovo In The War Against Apartheid by Alan Wieder (Monthly Review Press, £14.50)

Alan Wieder has put his oral history expertise together with already existing material on Ruth First and Joe Slovo to construct a remarkable record of these two heroes of South African emancipation. When Nelson Mandela went to Camden Town's Lyme Street to unveil a blue plaque on the house where they lived in exile from 1966 to 1978, he noted their description as freedom fighters. "This means they were Communists," he explained to his audience, for some of whom this bluntly positive assessment of a political current that was supposed to be over and done was a little disquieting. Communist politics brought this couple together and provided the material for fierce discussions, often played out in company.

Both had their Jewish roots in the Russian empire - Slovo being born in Lithuania while First's parents found their way to South Africa from Lithuania and Latvia. Working class, he became a despatch clerk at a pharmaceutical firm, where he helped unionise the African workforce and was elected a shop steward. Slovo benefited from a scheme for second world war veterans to go to university, studying law before representing liberation movement comrades in a succession of cases.

First was a precocious and bright child of the bourgeoisie who became a brilliant journalist for left-wing publications before developing into a gifted academic after leaving South Africa.
Their political rows often revolved around what she viewed as his Stalinist orthodoxy and what he dubbed her willingness to adopt whatever ideas were in vogue. Despite First's disagreement with party policy, not least over the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia amid suggestions that she risked expulsion, she remained an SACP member until her parcel-bomb murder in Mozambique by the apartheid regime in 1982. Speaking at his wife's graveside, Slovo referred to their no-holds-barred discussions, recalling her wish in a letter to him during one of their enforced separations, "Oh for a good row in close proximity."

Separation was inevitable given Slovo's leading role in the SACP and in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the movement's military wing. Escalating mass activity in South Africa, married to more frequent successful MK operations and ever-tighter international anti-apartheid sanctions, led to the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations to replace racist dictatorship with democracy. Slovo was an integral part of the ANC negotiating team, instrumental in drafting the "sunset" clauses that ensured public servants' co-operation in building the new South Africa. He turned a critical eye to his party's earlier positions, concluding that socialism without democracy was inconceivable, prompting his wife's close friend Hilda Bernstein to accuse him of belatedly coming round to their way of thinking.

South African communists hold an annual event at Slovo's grave in Soweto's Avalon cemetery, where they dedicate themselves to continuing his work.

Controversially, Wieder poses the revolutionary examples of these two great South Africans against the current situation, quoting suspended trade union leader Zwelinzima Vavi's view that First would be fighting against the Jacob Zuma government. This attempt to mobilise the dead against the living should not detract from a major work that sheds light on two people who dedicated their lives to a better world.

Ruth First: Não Vamos Esqueçer (We Will Not Forget)

Review of African Political Economy 40th Anniversary

Since 1974 ROAPE has provided radical analysis of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change. It sustains a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa in the context of capitalist globalisation.

Ruth First: Não Vamos Esqueçer (We Will Not Forget)

The South African revolutionary Ruth First made an extraordinary contribution to activism and radical writing and research on Africa. She worked as a journalist in South Africa from 1946 until her exile in the UK in 1964. She then became an editor, co-author and author of a large number of books, as well as a lecturer. She was also one of the founding members of the Review of African Political Economy (RoAPE) in 1974, a radical journal committed to transforming (and understanding) Africa’s political economy.

In the late 1970s First moved to Mozambique as Director of Research at the Centro de Estudos Africanos at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. In 1982 she was murdered in Maputo by the apartheid state. Drawing on papers presented at the 2012 Ruth First Papers Project symposium, RoAPE has produced a special issue that includes contributions from Anne-Marie Gentili, Gavin Williams and Alpheus Manghezi. The special issue on Ruth First is the story of First’s life in Mozambique, and her broad and substantial contribution to radical African studies.

Much of Ruth First’s work and life remains unknown to a new generation yet her work was of such impressive scope, her activism so courageous. Join us to celebrate the extraordinary life of Ruth First and the launch of the Ruth First Special Issue.

Institute of Commonwealth Studies 1 May, 2014

Venue: Senate Room (First floor, Senate House, Malet Street,London WC1E 7HU)

Panel - 17:00 – 18:30

Ruth First: activism and research

Welcome by Gillian Slovo

‘Writing Ruth First’s biography’ Alan Wieder (Wieder is the author

of Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid published

to wide acclaim last year).

Gavin Williams ‘Setting up RoAPE: Ruth and the first years of the

Review’

Chair Professor Philip Murphy (Director of the Institute of

Commonwealth Studies)

Launch - 18.30 – 20.00

Ruth First: Não Vamos Esqueçer Review of African

Political Economy

with Gary Littlejohn and Janet Bujra

Ruth First Papers Project www.ruthfirstpapers.org.uk

Convenor: Dr Leo Zeilig, Project Manager

All Welcome RSVP to olga.jimenez@sas.ac.uk

                       

Daily Maverick (Johannesburg) Review

Your ‘to read’ list: Two set texts for all South Africans
As 2013 bled into 2014, I read two books that on the surface, had nothing to do with each other. Yet they led me to a startling realisation that made me think perhaps they should be set reading for all South Africans. By MARK HEYWOOD.

The idea that children should be educated has existed for thousands of years. The idea that all children have a right to a quality education is, however, a more recent idea, several hundred years old in some European countries, but only just turning twenty in ours. More recent, too, is the notion that education has more than just a utilitarian and practical objective. Education is about sustaining and deepening cultures and about building communities and nations.

Learning about literature (for a long time imperiously just called ‘English’) is an essential component of education, long a stock part of the syllabi. And so it should be. But how much organised thought, or debate, do we invest in understanding the role that literature can actually play in nation building or creating capable citizens? How do we inspire our teachers to teach literature and our learners to receive it? Is reading to be perceived as an onerous Dickensian chore of plot and quote learning, or can we make it into a gateway to creating national solidarity, empathy and social justice?

Two books I read over the holidays made me rethink these questions.

Every era and most nations have outstanding novelists and historians - the great writers who capture the spirit of the age, who labour over the intersections of life, embedding the personal in the political and vice versa. Great writers don’t lecture. They allow the accumulation of layers and colours until a picture begins to emerge. The great novelist or historian is able to portray the tectonic movement of social forces, the evils caused by some men (for it is usually men), and its impact on other men, women and children.

And then bang – suddenly a canvas exists where it all makes sense.

Although there is a tendency to separate fiction from non-fiction, the definitive history is also a work of art - pieced together by the meticulous and committed researcher, presumably aware of the higher end of history. A great work of history is a text that when all the cloth and button finding is done, sews together something that always was, but never would be – but for his or her dedication.

In many countries’ literary traditions the names of the great novelists and historians – or their hybrid, what we might call histovelists - come quickly to hand: there was Dickens, Tolstoy, Trotsky, Orwell, E P Thompson, Austen, Fitzgerald and maybe Salinger, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Roy and Rushdie... the list goes on and on.

But, surprisingly, one does not easily or immediately come up with the names of South Africa’s great historical works and their partners in fiction. Histovelists do not yet form a part of our national consciousness or indeed character.

Universities and schools still have a task to identify, excavate, elevate and embed our writers. Perhaps Paton, Schreiner or Mphalelele; Gordimer or Serote. But who else?

When they do – on the basis of the luxury of recent reading - I would argue that one little-known novel that must be given its place is The Lotus People by Aziz Hassim, first published in 2002. Similarly a ‘history’ that should be recognised as a definitive account of the struggle era and some of its key actors, is the recently published Joe Slovo and Ruth First in the War against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder.

Although very different books, unaware of each other, they intersect and draw from the same raw material, particularly the history of dispossession of the last 150 years.  And, as with all histories, they tell us a great deal about our present.

Hassim fictionalises the experience of Indian people in South Africa and describes the rise and demise of Durban as the port city that most gave expression to Indian people’s entrepreneurship, creativity and culture. In the course of a grand narrative that sweeps up 150 years, I understood how - but for Apartheid and its cruel bureaucratically enforced decision to reroute and physically relocate the Indian experience in South Africa - Durban might have evolved as quite a different city.

What has subsequently been made its periphery may well have been its heart.

The book buzzes with the life of the old Durban Casbah. It makes the reader want to retrieve maps of the old Durban it describes (alas, not easily done). But it is in its modest, patient, slowly created cast of family characters and their friends, and the story of how an apolitical family largely intent on going about its own business, bore the nonsensical depredations of Apartheid, that the book’s tragedy and nobility is found. Through it is possible to rage against the oppressors’ wrong that was inflicted on a segment of our country’s population. It is a rare book that after 500 pages maintains a momentum to its last page.

Wieder, by contrast, brings real people back to life from their fictions, both hagiographic and demonic. Through their own words he assists Ruth First and Joe Slovo to become real people once more, rather than cardboard cut-outs made of them in either their demon years, as depicted by Apartheid, or their angel years, as depicted by comrades. As I write both remain the subject of appropriation and contest in the battles raging in the Tripartite ‘Alliance’.

Ostensibly the two books appear quite different – their only coincidence that I read them as one year slipped into another.

But actually there is a great deal of overlap. On one level, the intersection occurs during years in the 1940s and 1950s when Hassim describes the reawakening of the Congress movement in Durban and its impact on the Suleiman household, its sons in particular. From the vantage point of their (soon to be no more) home in Verbena Road we encounter a range of real and imagined-real characters, including Dr Goonum, Fatima Meer, and others who came from Johannesburg to try to organise and conscientise the anguish that was being felt by the Indian community as the Ghetto Bill-process of ejection from their homes and communities gathered force.

Joe Slovo’s great friend and comrade Yusuf Dadoo makes a brief appearance in Hassim’s novel. Which character, I wonder, may have been based on Ismail Meer, Ruth First’s first lover?

But on another level the pages of both books recreate the spirit of age and the outrage that made “mensch” like Slovo and First into outstanding revolutionaries and catapulted them into a life they never intended or imagined.

What also links the two books is their enormous descriptive power. Hassim achieves it by weaving a family story around the sons and daughters of two nineteenth century émigrés from India, Yahya Suleiman and Pravin Naran. Wieder achieves it by building into the heart of a well-known history 77 oral interviews, which capture the anecdote that is the real stuff of life and the diversity that comes with multiple voices and memories.

Both books are an emotional roller-coaster. Anger and outrage at the murder of Ruth First in 1982 is revived as a result of now knowing more about her ideals, ambitions, quirks and contradictions. A similar anger and despair wells up with the description of the murder of Jake, one of Hassim’s main characters.  Sadness surges as Wieder describes Slovo coming to terms with his unavoidable death as a result of cancer at the very time when his intellectual and imagination was at its greatest.

But as I travelled both books’ pages they surfaced and then resolved an issue that has puzzled me over a long time.

Our country is universally praised for having faced down the past, for its Truth and Reconciliation. Yet those of us who live here know it remains fragmented and vrot. To First, Slovo or Suleiman it would seem inconceivable that those who benefitted materially from the past could benefit most from the present (although neither Joe nor Ruth would have made peace with it or wallowed in its material fruits as some of their followers have). But more worrying to me is why so many of those who live and luxuriate in the fruits of the democracy continue to show so little empathy or interest in the lot of those whose lives were blighted by Apartheid.

Why? Why? Why?

The answer lies in these books. It is found in the idea of identity.

At Slovo’s funeral the then Chief Rabbi, Cyril Harris, attributed Joe’s political commitment partly to his “humanitarianism” which, he said, “springs from a deep sense of identification with the oppressed, the ability to hear their cry, an acute awareness of the realities of poverty, a personal anguish at the suffering of fellow human beings.”

Those words ring true. They contain a universal truth. South Africa might have gone through a process of truth and reconciliation, but without identifying with the lives that were destroyed it seems impossible for those who directly benefited from their destruction (as most white people did) to feel empathy or solidarity.

Both books make “identification” possible by bringing the adversity and nobility in life to life.

At Slovo’s memorial parts of his favourite symphonies from Beethoven and Mahler were played. 

Towards the end of Hassim’s book, the main characters reflect on life of ‘Jake’ Yacoob Suleiman, murdered by the security police, and recall what they were taught from sections of Tennyson’s grand poem Ulysses. When Hassim’s character quips: “But you can’t make a bullet proof vest out of Tennyson’s poems” you can almost see Slovo nodding in agreement.

As we go into our 20^th year of freedom, those people who were on the safe side of the Apartheid fence would do well to try and understand how devastating Apartheid was for the lives of people on the dark side. These two great books can help you get there. That is why they should not just be set texts for school and university students, but for all citizens of the new South Africa.

The Lotus People by Aziz Hassim is published by STE Publishers.
Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid by Alan Wieder is published by Jacana.

Leo Zeilig's review in International Socialism

Fighters against apartheid

Issue: 141
Posted: 9 January 14

Leo Zeilig

Alan Wieder, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid (Jacana Media, 2013), £20

Joe Slovo and Ruth First were South Africans who spent their lives (and in Ruth’s case gave her life) in the struggle against apartheid. They were also members of the South African Communist Party (SACP) for most of their adult lives. They married in the late 1940s and despite a stormy relationship remained together until Ruth First was murdered in Mozambique’s capital Maputo in 1982. Their lives are worthy of celebration (and study) and Alan Wieder has written the first thorough account of their lives. The book details the struggle in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and their life in exile in Britain, and across sub-Saharan Africa. Wieder presents the politics of this revolutionary couple with the sympathetic though critical attention they deserve.

Both Joe and Ruth were exceptional activists. Ruth grew up in a privileged household in Johannesburg with left wing parents. Radicalised by the famous miners’ strikes in 1946, she wrote afterwards:

When the African miners’ strike…broke out…a great squad of volunteers of all colours helped them set up strike HQ in the most unlikely places, and from lodging rooms like the one I shared with a girlfriend, the handles of duplicating machines were turned through the night, while in the early hours before dawn white volunteers drove cars to the vicinity of the mine compounds and African organisers, hiding in their city suits their bundles of strike leaflets under colourful tribal blankets, wormed their way into the compounds.

When the strike was over she gave up her civil service job and became a journalist.

If First was only remembered for her journalism she would still be a remarkable figure. She wrote for papers such as Fighting Talk and The Guardian, writing as both a polemicist for the leading national liberation organisation, the African National Congress (ANC), and the SACP but also as a pioneering investigative journalist exposing the crimes of apartheid. Ruth’s journalism exposed slave labour in the 1950s which involved black South Africans, obliged to carry passbooks, arrested for “pass” offences and then forced to work out their sentences on white-owned farms. For more than 15 years she wrote about the poverty and desperation of black South Africans, but also their campaigns and protests.

Joe and Ruth lived for the struggle, frequently risking their lives. When the ANC called a general strike to protest at the killing of 18 people by the police in 1950, Ruth covered the event in Alexandra township (a huge shantytown in the north of Johannesburg). When the police charged the protesters Joe remembered: “Ruth rushed to the centre with her camera, faced the police and stood squarely taking photos of them charging towards her” (p78).

At the same time Joe became a lawyer, spending most of his time defending black South Africans charged with political crimes. He also became a leading member of the SACP, serving on its Central Committee (with Ruth), and later becoming both chairman and general secretary of the party. There can be little question that the SACP played an important role, with the ANC, in galvanising and leading resistance to apartheid in the 1950s, counting many of the country’s most committed and brave fighters as members.
 

But the party slavishly followed the Soviet Union, bending and twisting its tactics and policies to the wishes of Moscow (where Joe held meetings of the SACP in the 1970s and 1980s). Though the couple differed on the USSR, with Ruth arguing against the party line throughout her life, they were both loyal to the organisation. Towards the end of his life Joe regretted his unquestioning loyalty: “I was a blind defender. I’m deeply ashamed of it now. I feel very angry that I was taken in by what I now consider to be anti-socialist conduct in the name of socialism. You can’t have a cult without worshippers and I was a worshipper” (p57). Both Joe and Ruth were deeply shaped by Stalinised Marxism. Wieder’s exceptionally powerful and moving book describes how the couple were divided by events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, but also shows how they remained party stalwarts.

When Ruth followed her husband into exile in the UK in 1964 after a spell in prison, she wrote a number of extraordinary books including Libya: The Elusive Revolution, denouncing Gaddafi’s so-called Green Revolution when much of the left saw the new regime in Tripoli as an advance for socialism. Many of her books were an attempt to unpick the “failures” of African independence and the regimes that had come to power in the late 1950s and 1960s. Decolonisation, she wrote in 1970, was exposed to be a “bargaining process with cooperative African elites… The former colonial government guarded its options and…the careerist heirs to independence preoccupied themselves with the ‘Africanisation’ of the administration.”

With Joe she hoped that independence in southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s would buck the trend. These were anti-colonial struggles led by “critical” national liberation movements committed to far-reaching socialist change. It was to Mozambique, shortly after independence, that Ruth moved to work at the Centre of African Studies advising and assisting Frelimo, the ruling party.

Yet her writing and life were continuously strained by an ambiguity on the question of whether the revolutionary movement was led from below by the working class and poor (who had inspired her early activism) or “progressive” parties and national liberation movements promising to transform society from above. Sometimes she seemed to point to one of these approaches, then another, and occasionally both at the same time.

When the Berlin Wall collapsed so too did the ideological moorings for a generation. There is a strong sense in Wieder’s book of Joe searching for political alternatives in the early 1990s as the ANC/SACP negotiated with the apartheid state. After a visit to China he returned enamoured of “progressive changes in the Chinese economy” (p329). Joe became one of the most important architects of the new South Africa that emerged in 1994—today that is a decidedly mixed legacy and one clearly marked by his political trajectory in the SACP. Joe did not seriously challenge globalisation; indeed he saw in China the possibility of “adapting” to the market. As Wieder writes, “Joe took much too long to admit the toxic nature of Stalinism as well as the bureaucratic, oppressive reality of the Soviet Union and other communist regimes” (p356).

There is little doubt in Wieder’s book that had Ruth First not been killed by a letter bomb sent by the South African secret service in 1982 she would have become a trenchant critic of the new South Africa. She would have been disgusted at the legacy of apartheid in the poverty, shantytowns, and mass unemployment that have continued effortlessly (and devastatingly) into the new century.

Wieder’s book is a triumph, describing his subjects with compassion and criticism. The book will help, as he concludes, to “remind generations across the board, old and young, of the possibilities when courageous and brave individuals join together to fight oppression” (p356).