FIRST, RUTH

Ruth First (May 4, 1925-August 17, 1982), writer, academic and revolutionary, was a creative force and influence at the heart of South Africa’s liberation struggle.

PHOTO CAPTION: First Ruth. SOURCE: EA Library

Born in Johannesburg, she was the daughter of radical socialists from the Baltic. While studying social science at Witwatersrand University she joined the Communist Party, and was among the handful of whites who assisted black mine strikers in 1946. Soon after, she was appointed Johannesburg editor of a series of radical journals through their successive bannings. These included the Guardian and New Age, as well as the literary magazine, Fighting Talk. She proved an incisive journalist, exposing in story after story the conditions under which “non-whites” existed in the apartheid society.

In 1949, she married Joe Slovo, a Communist defense lawyer who was active in political trials. The couple were subjected to increasing harassment by the police. Together with their close friends Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, they were among defendants in the mammoth treason trial of 1956-61.

Ruth First was the only woman in the inner circle of the sabotage group formed under Mandela’s leadership but was not charged along with him and the other defendants in the 1963-64 Rivonia Trial. Instead, she was taken into 90-day detention, which meant prolonged interrogation while being held in solitary confinement. Released after 117 days, she joined her husband and three daughters in exile in London.

Exile meant writing, lecturing, advising, and traveling widely. Then, after a stint teaching sociology at Durham University, she returned to the front line as research director of the Centre for African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. It was there that she was killed by a letter bomb, sent through the South African mails.

Brilliant, impatient, generous, she was at the peak of her powers. Her death was a great loss to the liberation movement and to her country.

MARY BENSON