Louisville Newspaper Review

Early foes of apartheid cut broad swath

Dec. 12, 2013 3:53 PM   |  

Written by

Catherine Fosl

Special to the Courier-Journal

Until the recent commentary surrounding the death of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president, many Americans knew little about apartheid, the brutal system of racial separation and subjugation that governed that nation for nearly half of the 20th century, or about how and why it ended.

Beginning with dissent inside the country and spreading to become global by the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid is one of modern history’s most dramatic social justice movements. Thousands of resisters suffered extreme reprisals — imprisonment, banning, exile, torture, even murder — at the hands of a regime increasingly desperate to maintain white control.

“Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid” by Alan Weider confirms that the battle against apartheid was headed by blacks, most notably Mandela, who spent 27 years imprisoned for his unyielding dissent. Yet the movement also had a small core of dedicated white leaders, many of whom were also Communists who saw racism and colonialism as the front lines of a wider attack on capitalism.

Journalist Ruth First and her attorney-husband Joe Slovo were particular thorns in the side of the apartheid government not only because they were white but also because they were among its most articulate, affluent, totally committed, and radical critics. Both also were longtime members of the South African Communist Party. Their quest to end apartheid began in the 1940s at its inception.

For First, living in exile in Mozambique, it ended in 1982 when South African security forces sent her a plain brown envelope that exploded when she opened it, killing her instantly. A question lingers in this volume and generally as to why First and not Slovo was the target. He was surely the more threatening, by then a leading strategist of the movement’s campaign of armed border incursions that ultimately proved instrumental in bringing the apartheid government to the negotiating table.

White in a black-led movement, a woman in a man’s world, and an elite who sought to end inequality of wealth, Ruth First used her typewriter as her sword but was rarely at ease with herself or others. Although Wieder devotes considerable attention to her extraordinary, complex persona, he draws a fuller portrait of the more affable Slovo, and the book flows most easily through Slovo’s later years, when he remarried and became minister of housing under Mandela in the new South Africa.

This is the first joint biography of Slovo and First, but there are other books about them. Notable among these is “Every Secret Thing,” a 1997 memoir by Gillian Slovo, their middle daughter. Readers interested in the entwining of the political and personal may find it a more accessible introduction to the couple because Wieder’s focus on their work and thought makes for a drier read.

Catherine Fosl is an associate professor of women’s and gender studies and director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville.

December Book of the Month - Cape Jewish Chronicle

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was named book of the month in the Cape Jewish Chronicle. Ironically, the other first mention in South Africa was also a Cape Town publication, Muslim Views.

Cape Jewish Chronicle December 2013

Book of the month
Ruth First And Joe Slovo In
The War Against Apartheid
By Alan Wieder

A superbly written biography of the two activists. It looks at their roots in the Eastern European shtetl, from where they transferred their socialist leanings to this county , lifting the shrouds of
myth and hagiography around them.

The deeply human angle of their personalities, their turbulent relationship and passionate disagreements are lovingly unearthed, whilst due justice is done to their intense courage, honesty, integrity and intellect, underscored by their passionate zest for life.

Their intimate connection with the other giants of the movement turns this book into a compulsory history of the South African struggle.

Teaching for Change

Teaching for Change

Do you read the columns by John Nichols of The Nation Magazine? Now find out what he is reading. Nichols stopped by our Teaching for Change bookstore at Busboys and Poets today and got a copy the timely and fantastic book "Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid" (Monthly Review) by Alan Wieder. Have you got a copy yet? If not, please order from us here: http://bit.ly/16cvMut Photo by Don Allen. — with Ruth First, Alan Wieder and Joe Slovo.

Stephen Ellman's blog Now Without Hesitation

The "Camelot" years in the anti-apartheid struggle

A fascinating feature of Alan Wieder's biography, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid (2013), is his reference to the 1950s as "Camelot" for white people who were part of the struggle against apartheid. As Wieder says, it was Gillian Slovo, one of the children of First and Slovo, who applied this term, and, one senses, she didn't do so entirely approvingly. The Slovo children clearly suffered from their parents' intense commitment to the struggle, as the children of other public men and women have often struggled, and Gillian Slovo's perhaps unhappy characterization of her parents' world should be understood against this background.

Nevertheless, the word may be apt. Nadine Gordimer's book Burger's Daughter -- a work of fiction, but connected to the actual life of a leading South African anti-apartheid lawyer, Bram Fischer -- vividly describes the partying of the day. It was, it seems, exciting to oppose apartheid in those years. And why shouldn't it have been? The whole world was moving away from doctrines of racial inequality, and surely South Africa would not sustain its isolation from this progressive trend indefinitely. Victory was coming. Meanwhile, though there were risks and consequences, they were much less severe than they would soon become. In the 1950s, of the many anti-apartheid leaders and activists who were accused in the Treason Trial, not one was convicted. And when police raided your house (as I think Stephen Clingman recounted in his biography of Fischer, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (2000)), you offered them tea -- if you were white. A measure of the romantic flavor of the time is that many people apparently didn't take the precautions their clandestine efforts really called for. And, while the political struggle went on, the opponents of apartheid were able to live a life that crossed racial lines -- lines that no other South Africans dared cross.

Things would soon grow worse. A state of emergency and a host of laws that made emergency rule part of regular life, a series of successful prosecutions (including of Bram Fischer), and the institutionalization of police torture changed the world of anti-apartheid opposition. It would take till the 1970s for a spirit of opposition to begin to flourish again. It's all the easier to understand how powerful the state oppression of those years was, when we know how much had been dreamt of and lost from the 1950s.

Paul Buhle Review -- Swans Magazine

Of Champions And Martyrs

 

by Paul Buhle

Book Review

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid, by Alan Wieder, Foreword by Nadine Gordimer. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013, 356pp, ISBN 978-1583673560, $23.95 paperback.

(Swans - November 18, 2013)   This remarkable book bears the tale of two South African (white) Communists who threw their lives into the cause of overthrowing the tyrannical system so effectively supported by the U.S. and Israel (among others) until the veritable end. To say they were courageous is a vast understatement. They were prepared to die, a hundred times over, and they suffered all manner of persecution over the decades. Today, people in South Africa with historical sense regard them as champions and martyrs.

Outside of South Africa and the networks of anti-Apartheid activists now aging, most especially in the U.S., they are more likely to be forgotten or treated as a mere discrepancy in the upward march of freedom (that is, meritocracy), anti-American to boot. But world-famous Nadine Gordimer, one of the small crew of revolutionary novelists at the top rank of living literary figures in any language, is among the rememberers.

We learn from here, in the condensed version of what is to follow, that the two were Jewish, Joe a military veteran of the anti-fascist war when they met. The war had produced a wave of anti-fascism with an anti-racist undertone, and it made sense to be a Communist as well as an ardent supporter of the African National Congress. Joe was a proletarian of Lithuanian immigrant parents, Ruth a typical middle class South African Jew who, however, had a college affair with a rebel of Indian origins. By the time Ruth and Joe connected, they were deeply into Communist politics. There hangs a tale.

Much as in the U.S., the postwar South African Communist Party (SACP) was under terrific government pressure, but unlike the U.S., the SACP dissolved, with hardly more sense than American Communist leaders had of what it meant to go underground in a society with a formal democratic structure, elections, and so on. Black South Africans actually rushed to join, the movement was effectively transformed, and the left's future set, it seemed, on anti-capitalism joined to anti-racism. Ruth and Joe sunk all their energies into making it turn out that way.

The number of projects they engaged, some legal, some illegal, the people they worked with (including top African National Congress leaders, Nelson Mandela among them), the complications and contradictions of the SACP's loyalty to Moscow -- these are beyond the scope of any reasonably-sized book review. Suffice it to say there was nothing easy for the couple put on trial for treason in 1956, prosecuted by a near-Nazi, and despised as Jews hardly less than as anti-racist Communists. The Party re-emerged, they beat the rap, faced new crackdowns with courage and resolve, and life went on. Ruth went into exile in 1964, as alternatives narrowed, joining Joe in London and setting themselves upon another phase of struggle: the protest and support movements from abroad. Much of Joe's work turned out to be clandestine, with meetings in various places, sometimes Moscow. Ruth would teach at Durham University, and become a theorist as well as a scholar of note, sometimes reaching wide popular audiences (The Barrel of a Gun, about coups in Africa, was read from continent to continent). Joe was ever the strategist, and the training of cadres to return to illegal work in South Africa was naturally his. She paid the heavier price: assassinated in 1982 in Mozambique. Almost certainly, the CIA had a hand in providing intelligence to the South African murderers.

In the end, of course, the collapse of the East Bloc allowed US leaders to accept and even press for a post-Apartheid government with longtime collaborators with Communists at its apex. The AFL-CIO, ever collaborating with the CIA (this eased after the overthrow of the longtime leadership in 1995, but only to a degree), typified the strategy of the West, separating South African labor leaders from their membership with temptations of all kinds, fame to riches. The choice between compromise and bloodbath, in any case, was made carefully, after much discussion, Joe in particular part of the discussion. To say the outcome has been bitter is too simple. As housing minister in the new government, Joe, the undaunted Communist, continued the march to democracy. He was hailed at his funeral in 1995 by Nelson Mandela and a host of ANC officials, buried in the Soweto cemetery along with only one other white South African.

The telling of their story is an achievement for which author Alan Wieder deserves great credit. Writing as an oral history field worker and teacher, I conclude that the book could not have been done by someone who lacked the skill and patience of an oral historian such as Wieder. The entirety of this book has the personal touch and will reward reading and rereading.

Review in Muslim Views

Socialist Review

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid 

Book Review by Jeff Jackson

Alan Wieder, Monthly Review Press, 14.79GB

The fight against the inhuman brutality of the apartheid South African regime became one of the defining struggles of the second half of the 20th century. When Nelson Mandela walked free in February 1990, after 27 years in prison, it marked the end game for a government that was by then reviled as a pariah state by almost everyone save the most rabid right wing conservative racists.

That this was the case was due largely to the heroic bravery and continued resistance of black African workers and peasants who stood up to and continually defied the deeply oppressive regime of apartheid segregation that South African capitalism had imposed on the country after the election of the National Party in 1948 until it was forced out in 1994.

Ruth First and Joe Slovo were two central figures. They were from the minority of white South Africans who from the outset fought alongside black Africans in opposing apartheid. Their bravery and commitment would come at a high price. Both would be imprisoned and forced into exile. Ruth First would pay with her life when the South African regime assassinated her in Mozambique in 1982. After fleeing in 1963 Joe Slovo would not set foot in his country until the regime was on its last legs, when he would be central to the negotiations that lead to the first post-apartheid election.

First and Slovo met each other in 1946 at Witwatersrand University. Both members of the Communist Party of South Africa, they were married in 1949. Alan Wieder's well written and enjoyable biography, largely garnered from a number of interviews he conducted between 2010 and 2012 with people who worked with or knew them, is a fitting tribute. He paints a vivid picture of their life, weaving together a portrait that captures the "flesh and blood of human beings facing monumentally difficult decisions".

This is in no way an uncritical account of First and Slovo's pivotal role in the development of the struggle by the African National Congress and the Anti-Apartheid Movement - for example, Wieder stresses the problems of the CP's often slavish following of Soviet foreign policy and the tensions this caused.

But there is not enough detailed engagement with the important political disagreements that developed in the long struggle against apartheid, the split with the Pan African Congress, the move to armed guerrilla warfare to highlight just two. However, it would be trite to end a short review on a sour note. This is a book that should be recommended reading to anyone who is interested in how, in the face of overwhelming state repression, ordinary people can show extraordinary bravery in fighting for a democratic and non-racist society.

In the preface to Goven Mobeki's book The Peasants Revolt, which Ruth First helped to complete, it states, "This book has had a painful birth." Achieving a post-apartheid society would have a painful labour and eventual birth and this volume evokes that struggle and can help us understand it better through the vortex of the lives of two of its key revolutionaries.