The Ruth First Papers team has spent the last year reading and reviewing the Ruth First archive at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS) in London, as part of a project to build an online archive of First's life and work. This has engaged us in the difficult task of selecting, from within a collection that is fascinating in its entirety, the set number of pages that we currently have funding to digitise. This is challenging because everything feels relevant, all of the papers interconnected. Our practice is to avoid separating clusters of papers that relate directly to one another, but it is often excruciating to draw the line and to make a decision about where the internal relationship in a set of papers dissipates. The papers include documents from First's early life as a journalist and activist in South Africa, from her time in London and Durham, in Dar es Salaam, and from her last years, in Mozambique, at the Centre for African Studies. They contain extensive research reports, teaching materials, journalistic pieces, photographs, highly personal letters and the equally intimate notes that illuminate First's particular habits of thought, work and method.
After Ruth First's murder in Mozambique in 1982, friends and comrades issued a call for her papers to be gathered and for an archive to be created. Thanks to the initiative of Shula Marks and others, a large proportion of the archive was housed at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, where it remains to this day. Other materials are held at the Centro de Estudos Africanos in Maputo and at the Mayibuye archive in Cape Town. Until 2012, the London collection was accessible only to academics and researchers who were able to visit the archive.
In early 2012, the Ruth First Papers Project was launched, with the aim of providing open and universal access to the archive, by digitising material and creating an unrestricted, online archive. Despite the limitations of funding, the project has been immensely rewarding and successful. Of particular note was the Ruth First Memorial Symposium held in June 2012, which is the subject of this special issue. In addition to the wealth of material already in the Ruth First archive at ICwS, we have been moved, excited and encouraged by the response from those who knew and worked with Ruth First, many of whom have contacted us to share additional documents and recordings, all of which help to build the scope and richness of the archive.
A highlight of the collection, from First's early adulthood, are the beautiful scrapbooks of news clippings she compiled, which chart activism and oppression as they unfolded on a daily basis in South Africa (see Figures 11 and 12, before article by Gentili). In this same period, there are notes from her work on books by Govan Mbeki, Nelson Mandela and Oginga Odinga, as well as her own biography of Olive Schreiner.
Included in this ROAPE collection are articles relating to the miners' strike of 1946. It was this event that led Ruth into her early journalism and activism. In 117 Days, published in 1965, she explains how she quit her job at the Johannesburg City Council in protest:
When the African miners' strike of 1946 broke out and was dealt with by the Smuts Government as though it were red insurrection and not a claim by poverty-stricken migrant workers for a minimum wage of ten shillings a day, I asked for an interview with the Director and told him that I wanted to leave the department – without serving the customary notice laid down by the municipal terms of employment. Then he asked, ‘Have you another job? What will you do if you leave here?’ ‘A political job,’ I said. (First 1965/2006)
From this period in England we find material related to key texts by First: 117 Days, The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa, Libya: the Elusive Revolution and The South African Connection: Western Investment in Apartheid. There is also fantastic material from her work in the Department of Sociology in Durham, where she founded their first Women's Studies programme.
The extract from her correspondence with Colonel Gaddafi included here illustrates that even in exile, Ruth was still formidably connected to African politics (see Figure 14, after article by Zeilig). She was one of the first to question the legitimacy of the Gaddafi regime despite its widespread support from the international Left; one of the proposed and rejected subtitles for Libya was Lumpen Militariat in Charge.
Also, typically of her extraordinary productivity and energy, this period in England generated dozens of ideas for new research projects. Some of the ideas that emerged in this time grew, eventually, into completed projects, which we can see develop within her notes. There are also, here, one or two projects that First never completed, to our knowledge, which are enticing, and the cause of some regret. One of these, for example, was to be a study of London and Londoners as seen by new immigrants.
A brief but important interlude in Ruth First's life during the years she spent in England was the semester during which she taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1975.
In 1977, after the liberation of Mozambique, Ruth First was invited to the newly created Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) in Maputo to conduct a research project on Mozambican migrant labour to the South African mines, work that led to The Mozambican Miner. During that year, the seeds were sown for her relocation to Maputo in early 1979 as Research Director of the Centre. It was here that she was able to bring her work out of the classroom and to apply it in extraordinarily dynamic and revolutionary ways as she built a major group to work on the social transition in Mozambique in the context of southern Africa. Despite extensive correspondence, sharing of ideas and the discussion of a few joint projects, there is a sense that First's period in London was a comparatively solitary one in her work. Certainly there is a dramatic difference between these papers and those from the Mozambique/CEA years that followed. From the time of the move to Mozambique, the papers reflect such collaborative work that the ‘Author’ field in our digitisation preparation spreadsheet becomes challenging – or perhaps simple – to populate: Most of the materials from 1977 onwards were authored by the CEA as a whole.
From the point of First's arrival at the Centre, there are drafts and drafts of research reports, letters sent to colleagues along with these drafts, soliciting review and criticism, and detailed replies and subsequent debates. Abundant material was generated as the Development Course took form, and the papers trace the intense questioning and innovation, the constant adaptation, that the Centre employed in building a new way of teaching and conducting research through the Course. Among these papers we can observe the process of refinement and constant redirection that the research took, how forms and outcomes of analysis changed with experience.
One of the most important products of the Mozambique period, and of Ruth First's research overall, was The Mozambican Miner, a study of migrant labour from Mozambique into the mines of apartheid-era South Africa. You will find in this volume documents from the pioneering Development Course project, including a course outline, and an example of the questionnaires researchers used during their fieldwork for the Miner in rural Mozambique (see Figure 4, after article by Williams, and Figure 7, after article by Wuyts).
Experience and access
The strongest impression derived from seeing the way Ruth First worked out her ideas on paper, on her own, and in correspondence with others, is of the remarkable openness of her thinking. The instinctive but also deliberate effort with which she examined her work is vividly felt here. She would put an idea down – often a single sentence – and then beneath it she would unfurl a ribbon of questions down to the end of the page, picking apart her idea and connecting it outward; simultaneously building it up and dismantling it, after which, presumably, she took its pulse to see if it had survived. First's relentless self-questioning, and the intimate interaction she was conscious of between the personal and the political, are reflected in the notes she made in advance of a speech for South African Women's Day, reproduced here. ‘Convinced I was liberated as a person through my political commitment; beginning only now – late in the day – to think through problems of re-definition of women's issues,’ she wrote (see Figure 6, after article by O'Laughlin).
The physical form of the papers is almost as personal as the letters and research notes. You learn, as you grow accustomed to the collection, to recognise the fragments of paper, meticulously cut out and assembled into a new whole. The cramped, efficient handwriting becomes – mostly – decipherable, the abbreviations interpretable. The e or a regularly offset by mechanical faults with her typewriter is familiar across the hundreds of pages she typed with it.
These personal elements of the collection take on particular value because they are attached to such brilliant work, and there is a wealth of the mechanics and products of this work in the papers. They reveal First's humanity and a level of detail in her work and methodology, the value of which cannot be overestimated. These papers allow us to take advantage of the incredible intellectual and political contribution Ruth First made – still of extreme and global relevance now – especially right now, looking at Marikana, for example. As well as providing the chance to keep applying First's work to contemporary struggles, the papers give us the opportunity to complicate, interrogate and challenge her work, in the tradition that First herself so much valued.
The sense of opportunity that we feel in working with these papers is always accompanied by an awareness that the privilege of our access to this material is problematic – and this is what drives the digitisation project. It is essential that Ruth First's papers are made truly accessible and that they are put in a context that allows them to be transformative. Her work provides revolutionary tools with which social justice might be fought for. These tools should be in the hands of all of those she intended them for.
The selection of materials included in this volume is not intended to give an overview of Ruth's life and work, or to illustrate the breadth of the collection. The papers are too broad and too detailed for that to be possible. Instead, a few highlights from the collection are intended to illustrate the papers and articles (from Anna Maria Gentili, Alpheus Manghezi, Marc Wuyts, Bridget O'Laughlin, Don Pinnock, Barbara Harlow and Gavin Williams) and to encourage researchers to explore the collection online.
As rewarding as it is to sit in the archive at Senate House with the original pages in our hands, it is a travesty to have First's papers languishing where they can be used only by a few academics and researchers who are able to travel to London. It is inexplicable that books like The Barrel of a Gun and Libya are out of print, and as painful as it is to see the spine cut off first editions that we have tracked down in order for them to be digitised, it is a source of joy as well.
When friends and colleagues of Ruth First speak and write about her, one of the recurrent points raised is the futility of guessing what she would think about aspects of the world we inhabit today – about the state South Africa is in, about the contemporary ANC, about Mozambique and FRELIMO now. This is, ultimately, an expression of the wish to hear that voice, to have access to her analytical and brilliant critical input as we grapple with the problems she encountered and with new struggles that have emerged since her death. While there is indeed little purpose in positing what Ruth First would have said, we are able to extend her thoughts and aspirations into the present by making her work available and by introducing new generations to it. We envision the Ruth First Papers work as a long-term project, involving ongoing digitisation over the course of five years. Having completed two years of this work, we are eager to carry on. Although we have exceeded our goals in terms of the volume of papers that we have been able to put online, the vast majority of the archive remains undigitised, and our current funding has come to an end. We appeal for your support and ideas in finding ways to continue this vital work of sharing and preserving Ruth First's legacy.
