Assassination
Ruth First was killed by a letter bomb on 17 August 1982. It was dispatched to her at the Centre of African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique, where she was Research Director. Ruth's death followed a series of murders of ANC activists by the South African security forces. Some took place in South Africa itself. In Durban, academic Rick Turner was shot dead in 1978 and last year (1981) civil rights lawyer, Griffiths Mxenge, was brutally murdered. A large number of political detainees have been killed in police custody. Each of South Africa's neighbours has been the scene of assassination attempts against South African refugees. In 1974 Ongopotse Tiro was killed by a parcel bomb in Botswana, and John Dube by one in Zambia. ANC representatives have been assassinated in Zimbabwe, where Joe Gqabi was shot dead and Swaziland, where Petrus and Jabu Nzima were killed by a car bomb, in 1981 and 1982 respectively. Parcel bombs were sent to ANC members in Lesotho in 1979. Like many other governments, the South African regime does not regard itself as bound by its own laws, or anybody else's, not least in the matter of murder. It is sadly appropriate that we should pay tribute to Ruth at a lecture in a series in memory of Walter Rodney, another great socialist and scholar, killed by the government of his own country.†
As Joe Hanlon wrote from Mozambique in The New Statesman (August 27, 1982),
Most British academics would find it hard to believe they could ever do anything important enough to be killed for. Thus many must accept the explanation of the BBC Johannesburg correspondent that Ruth was killed because she had been helping to direct African National Congress (ANC) actions inside South Africa.
However, as the South African Special Branch and most other people familiar with Ruth and her work well knew, Ruth was not engaged in organising revolutionary incursions into South Africa, but directing research in Mozambique. Mozambique currently faces a severe crisis – of production, of distribution and of policies. Under Ruth's direction, the Centre was carrying out research into the most critical problems facing FRELIMO in Mozambique and, in the case of their common dependence on and vulnerability to South African power, the other countries of Southern Africa as well. At this critical juncture, Ruth and the Centre provided FRELIMO a source of hard-headed and independent advice from people who shared the party's socialist goals. Ruth was determined to make this advice accessible to them, and to see that it was heard, if not always heeded. Ruth, and research by colleagues at the Centre, also brought to the ANC an independent socialist viewpoint on developments within South Africa and strategies for liberation. Her independence of mind, and the frank and direct way in which she expressed her criticisms, were not always welcomed within FRELIMO or the ANC. But as Hanlon says ‘they were always listened to … she was a militant insider, speaking a language people understood.’
Not only did the South Africans deprive Mozambique and the South African liberation movement of an able and independent thinker, they also demonstrated again their capacity to attack their enemies, and the friends of their enemies, wherever they are. In this way they hope to convince neighbouring governments that they have no choice but to cooperate with Pretoria on South Africa's terms and, in the case of Mozambique, discourage foreign cooperantes from working for FRELIMO's socialist government.
As Ronald Segal said at the memorial meeting for Ruth in London, ‘her whole life was a political act.’ Most of her political life was as a journalist, a writer, a teacher and a scholar. She was killed because of her ability to carry out and promote research, to muster argument and to expose and explain iniquities.
This lecture is a preliminary attempt to provide an outline of Ruth's life and work, and to say something of its breadth of scope, its political commitment and its coherence of purpose. I believe it will show something of her achievement as a scholar and of the grievous loss which her death has caused to us, in the academic world.
Forms and themes
Several distinct features and themes characterise Ruth's work. They give a coherence to a body of work otherwise notable for its diverse subject matter.
Ruth began her writing career as a journalist, and as a campaigning journalist. She was concerned first of all to get to the facts and to get them right, as far as she could. Not for Ruth a prior concern with establishing a correct theoretical problematic with which to read the facts. The facts are out there. But they won't speak up for themselves. You have to get out and find them out – from interviews and documents, from books and personal observation.
Facts have to be interpreted and communicated. Ruth always wrote to reach the widest possible audience. This required the interpretive skill of the essayist. Arguments must be built on evidence, but are also presented through illustrations. Ruth enjoyed the narrative form. It structures an account, even when all the causal connections can't be established. And, typically, Ruth added facts on to her account with sentences starting ‘And … ’ and ‘But … ’. Her sentences were direct and – except when interrupted by parentheses – short. At times she set them out in series in short clauses, broken by semi-colons. These stylistic features were not incidental to her writing. They were the medium for clear and concrete expositions.
Ruth was always curious about people, how they thought, what they did, why they did it. She wrote skilfully and with understanding about individuals, whether they were powerful people or lived mundane lives. 117 Days gives us shrewd and evocative pictures of the women warders in charge of the prisoners – Raucous, Shrill, Pained and Competent. They remain in the reader's mind along with her portraits of her police interrogators, of her own vulnerabilities and her evident courage, and her lively appreciations of comrades in the struggle. Her judgements are sharp and her comments are often biting, but they are not ungenerous.
However, for Ruth, it is not individuals who make history or, at least, when they do, it is the context which makes this possible. She insists that social explanations must go behind the actions and motives of individuals to institutions, interest groups and social classes. Marxists, it seems to me, have too readily abandoned the study of institutions to scholars on the right, preferring to deal with the ‘great social forces’, classes or modes of production. We forgot that these abstract forces take institutional forms and are shaped by them as, at the opposite level of analysis, are the actions of individuals. Ruth wanted to know how institutions worked, and was thus well placed to understand, to criticise and to appreciate the importance of the workings of institutions like armies and bureaucracies.
Typically, Ruth's texts are peppered, at strategic points, with questions, strings of them. She always had more questions than answers and answers anyway raise new questions. There is always more to be known and more to be done. The most important task is to ask the right questions, not to provide the correct answers. Consequently, the form of the argument is always open-ended.
How is this tendency to raise more questions than she answers to be reconciled with Ruth's political activism? I shall return to this question in concluding the paper. For the moment, two points can be made. We can never know enough to be sure of things, to be certain of the consequences of our actions. There are always gaps between our knowledge and reality. No amount of self-reflection will close them. Similarly, there are gaps between our goals and the means of accomplishing them. If we are to get things done, there is always a time when we have to decide. For better or worse, we have to close these gaps through action.
Secondly, an open-ended view of things allows scope for a qualified optimism. Ruth's materialism was always historical. Most of her books had a contemporary focus, but she always elucidated the problems of the present by identifying their origins in the past. However, she was no historical determinist. The future is constrained. Indeed, the whole point of social analysis is to identify those constraints. But it is not pre-determined. It is thus possible to observe the tragedies of independent Africa and to recognise the failures of socialist states without abandoning the commitment to try to realise the possibilities of political liberation and of the construction of socialism.
This brings me sharply from form to content. Three themes seem to me to run through Ruth's work. The first is that the proper focus of social explanation should be on capitalism, in all its complex forms. Ruth does not discount the importance of religion or nationalism or racism, nor does she assert that ultimately they are to be reduced to, secondary to, or to be explained in terms of class. She was always much too close to the events themselves to do that. What she does argue is that all these phenomena are shaped by and acquire much of their significance from their situation in a social structure which has in turn, been moulded by the development of capitalism, in its different national forms, and its international expansion. From her early experience with mineworkers and farm labourers she saw racism in South Africa, in particular, as the product of a structure through which mine owners and farmers gained control over labour.
The second theme is her commitment to socialism, and her recognition of its problematic relations to nationalism, and to feminism. We shall see how in the 1950s the Congress Alliance united communists and nationalists behind a common programme of national liberation and democratic rights. Did this programme, embodied in the 1955 Freedom Charter, resolve the question of ‘nationalism’ or ‘socialism’ or evade it? Is it enough for women to share in the resistance, and even, in the campaign against passes for women, come to the forefront and be promised equal rights with men?
The third theme is Ruth's view that there are times when the masses are able to seize the political initiative from the hands of their rulers and shape the political agenda. If socialism is to be liberation, it depends on the exploited coming together to bring an end to their exploitation. As Rosa Luxemburg realised, revolutionary politics requires both revolutionary leadership and revolutionary theory, but both must be addressed to the class (or classes) who are to make the revolution.
Communist and journalist
Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925. Her parents Julius First (d.1980) and Matilda (Tilly) First were Jewish immigrants to South Africa who were active in the International Socialist League and, from its foundation in 1921, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Ruth attended Jeppe High School for Girls and entered the University of Witwatersrand in 1942, where she helped to found the Federation of Progressive Students. At the time, the Federation found little resonance among African students, who were more attracted by nationalist than socialist ideas.
After graduating with a degree in sociology and social work, Ruth took a job in the Research Division of the Department of Social Welfare of the Johannesburg City Council, while teaching Africans at night schools and being active in the Communist Party. ‘Research’ turned out to mean collecting routine statistics and writing the section on ‘social welfare’ for the city's jubilee album.
In 1946, the African mineworkers on the Rand went on strike for a dramatic week. J. B. Marks, President of the African Mine Workers Union (and a prominent member both of the CPSA and of the African National Congress), and all the union's officials were being hunted by the police, and the entire executive of the Johannesburg district of the CPSA was arrested. Ruth left her job immediately and was active duplicating pamphlets and helping African union organisers to distribute them to the mine compounds. Briefly, she acted as secretary of the Johannesburg CPSA.
Ruth now turned to journalism and became Johannesburg editor of the left-wing weekly newspaper The Guardian. In 1947 with Gert Sibande and Rev. Michae1 Scott, she investigated and exposed the brutal treatment and forced confinement of labourers on the potato farms and in the farm compounds of the Bethal district in the Eastern Transvaal. ‘Bethal’ became a national scandal – and would remain so, as abuses continued and even took new forms as Ruth, and other journalists, returned to investigate conditions. In 1958 Ruth wrote drily in Africa South of the manufacturer who advertised:
What Ruth does not write about is her own part in the investigations and the risks of violence to which she, as well as Sibande and Scott, were exposed on this, and other investigations.
Within a year Ruth had confronted South African capital's methods of controlling labour in its two most fundamental and brutal forms, on the mines and on the Bethal farms. These experiences confirmed and informed her Marxist understanding of South African society. She returned to these questions in her writing in the 1950s and again, in the case of mine workers, from a very different vantage point in the 1970s.
In 1949, Ruth married Joe Slovo, an advocate and fellow member of the CPSA. They had three daughters, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn, whose childhood would be savagely interrupted by the repeated attention to their parents of the security police.
Ruth attended the founding conferences of the pro-communist International Union of Students and World Federation of Democratic Youth. The Communist Party was declared illegal and Ruth herself was ‘named’ under the Suppression of Communism Act. Nevertheless, she was able to go on writing and editing left-wing periodicals.
The Guardian continued until 1952 when it was banned, to be followed in quick succession by Clarion and People's World, each of which lasted for two months, Advance, which survived for two years and New Age, which was not banned until October 1962. In 1954 Fighting Talk, formerly the journal of the Springbok Legion, was reconstituted and Ruth became its editor. Fighting Talk carried new fiction and literary articles as well as political comment (not that the literature was apolitical), and provided an important outlet for the dramatic burst of fictional writing in South Africa in the 1950s.
The Congress Alliance
In the 1940s the ANC, under Dr A. B. Xuma as President-General, had cooperated with communists, among them ANC members like J. B. Marks. In 1947 Dr Xuma signed an agreement with Dr Yusuf Dadoo of the Transvaal Indian Congress and also a leading communist, and M. P. Naicker for the Natal Indian Congress. This collaboration with communists was viewed with distrust by the militant African nationalists of the ANC Youth League, among them Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu. In 1949, the Youth League persuaded Congress to adopt their ‘Programme of Action’, which advocated the use of extra-constitutional actions such as strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience. Dr Xuma was replaced by Dr Moroka and Sisulu became Secretary-General. Ironically, the nationalists’ new ANC programme took it into closer alliance with the Indian Congresses and former CPSA members. In 1952 the Congresses jointly launched the Defiance Campaign, with Mandela as volunteer-in-chief.
In 1953 the Congress of Democrats (COD) was formed to organise white supporters (communists and others) of what became the Congress Alliance (ANC, South African Indian Congress, COD and South African Coloured Peoples Organisation, SACPO) and organised the multi-racial Congress of the People at Kliptown, Transvaal, which adopted the Freedom Charter on 26 June 1955. Joe Slovo was active in organising the Congress of the People, and Ruth had a hand in drafting the Freedom Charter out of the demands submitted to the Congress. Ruth was prominent in COD as a speaker and journalist. She was active in the Transvaal and South African Peace Council, where she worked with Walter Sisulu among others, and the left-wing Youth Movement.
Between July and August 1954, Ruth attended the World Peace Council in Berlin, visited Europe and the Soviet Union and went on to the meeting of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in China. On her return she spoke about her visit to China to a number of meetings. This was too much for the government, which banned her from attending any gatherings. Joe Slovo too was among those banned that year. Ruth edited a pamphlet by South Africans who had visited the Soviet Union and put together a series of articles on China in a booklet. Both were widely read by Congress activists.
Texts and notes of Ruth's speeches were kept by the security police and produced later during the ‘treason trial’. Ruth linked the question of peace, and thus the policies of the Western powers towards the Soviet Union and China, with the liberation struggles in Indo-China, Malaya and Kenya:
Everywhere in the world colony-owning powers, to preserve their rule and keep their people in bondage, engage in wars against their subjects. Such a war against a subject people is being waged in Kenya today.
Thus, peace could not be established until freedom was won. At the same time, freedom could not be enjoyed unless the world was at peace. There is thus a need for ‘peace for freedom’. To this end, it was essential for people to work together, as Africans and Indians in South Africa had done during the Defiance Campaign:
In 1953, the left-wing journal Liberation published an attack by Nelson Mandela on the first constitution of the Liberal Party, which stipulated that the franchise be ‘extended to all suitably qualified persons’ and that the party would use only democratic and constitutional means and will oppose all forms of totalitarianism and fascism. Professor Price replied for the Liberal Party and opened himself to Ruth's acid polemic:
He advises against ‘storming of bastilles’. Presumably a petition to the King of France would have been more constitutional … The non-European political movements do not scorn argument and organization. They are daily engaged in these tasks. But there comes a time in the growth of every political movement when consistent organisation produces militant peoples' actions in defence of rights under attack or for improvements in conditions … Mr. Price's acquaintance with political campaigns seems acutely academic and remote. Political campaigns are not carefully rehearsed theatrical performances in which the stage manager orders … ‘no side-tracking by incidents or provocation’. Provocateurs and the government don't take their cues from the producer.
All who have read any history must surely recognise that Parliament or the existing constitutional authority is never the only, or the most important fountainhead of political change, and that those who have political power in their hands are the watchdogs of the old order and not the group that advocates social change … From the earliest days the liberals with their talk of using constitutional means sought political respectability and announced their intention of divorcing themselves from the mass movements of the non-European people. By doing so they closed their eyes to the fact that the constitutional rights of privileged white citizens are fast diminishing.
The article brings out the central argument of Ruth's political thinking in the 1950s. The exploited people themselves are the main base for resistance to oppression and the struggle for freedom. Behind that struggle, the broadest possible support should be mobilised. Liberals were attacked because of their unwillingness to support unequivocally the demands of Congress and the campaigns of resistance.
For their part, liberals were nervous of collaboration with the revived SACP. It was the middle of the Cold War, and McCarthyism. In March 1954 Fighting Talk carried a fulsome tribute on the first anniversary of the death of Stalin, who, it said, ‘is now the most alive of all living, our knowledge, our weapon, our power’. The Liberals did move to support universal suffrage and extra-constitutional resistance, as Ruth duly acknowledged, though they continued to keep a certain distance from Congress-initiated campaigns.
Ruth, and indeed the Congress Alliance, did not repudiate constitutional politics. The question of whether to boycott all racist institutions, including Parliament itself, rather than to choose where to fight on strategic grounds, was the major issue in the bitter dispute between Congress and the Non-European Unity Movement, Congress's only real ideological and political rival on the left.
In June 1962 the editor of Fighting Talk (apparently Ruth herself) would argue that protests against the censorship and ‘sabotage’ bills were important, despite the Nationalists’ parliamentary majority. There are two strands to the argument:
… in standing up and speaking out against these Bills, the opposition – the Congress supporters, the Black Sash women, the Progressive Party, the clergymen, barristers and students, the Rand Daily Mail and other newspapers – were doing something fundamental and significant. They were setting an example of moral and physical courage whose value and importance it would be difficult to overestimate …
Will that passing the bills mean an end to political life in South Africa, to democratic opposition and resistance? No, it will not.
… the will and strivings of the South African people for freedom and democracy are like an elemental force that cannot be thwarted and checked by a minority-based dictatorship. The struggle will keep breaking out in new forms and in unexpected places …
This editorial was written after Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) had begun a campaign of sabotaging strategic installations. However, this last sentence unknowingly anticipates the workers’ and students’ struggles of the 1970s.
Nationalism, socialism and the Freedom Charter
Congress outlined its political programme in the Freedom Charter. It is a remarkable document which lays out in simple language the immediate and democratic demands of the majority of South Africans. Its headings summarise it well:
Its programme is clearly democratic, rather than socialist. It does demand that mineral wealth, banks and monopoly industry be ‘transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole’ and ‘all the land redivided amongst those who work it’. These are rightly recognised to be conditions for creating a democratic society – as is clear from the way in which mining and agrarian capital, in particular, have shaped as well as profited from the system of racial oppression.
The Charter is uncompromising on the issue of multi-racialism, and widened the split between the ANC leadership and the ‘Africanists' who split to form the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959 (though opposition to the influence of the SACP within the Congress Alliance was a stronger motivation than unwillingness to collaborate with non-Africans or even whites, as PAC association with leading Liberals would show). Beyond this, it is a flexible document. It did not commit Congress to socialist or communist strategies, but offers socialists arguments for nationalisation of mining, finance and industry, and a radical land reform. More importantly, it was consistent with the communist theory of the ‘national democratic’ revolution preceding the socialist revolution. This theory allows communists to collaborate with nationalists unencumbered by immediate commitments to socialism. In due course the SACP (in exile) would claim to represent the working class within that national alliance, a claim which is metaphysical rather than sociological.
The strategy of the ‘national democratic’ revolution found theoretical support in the theory of ‘internal colonialism’, to which the SACP still appears to be committed. Ruth takes it up in concluding her 1963 study of South West Africa. The peculiarities of South Africa's history are explained as a ‘unique form of colonialism’ ‘defending itself by force from an independence revolution within’. The articulation of capitalism with this form of colonialism is used to explain the irony that ‘the richest, most developed country in Africa should adhere to feudal labour relations and the most outworn of political ideas.’ ‘Cheap labour is … all conveniently African … The White artisan class were given a stake in the system … every White man … has been turned into a colonist and given a stake in the survival of his racial rule.’ Theoretically, the formula of ‘internal colonialism’ appears to resolve the dichotomies of capitalism with ‘feudalism’ and class and race in a higher synthesis. ‘Race has been made the outward sign of status, but the real dividing-line, covered over with colour, is economic.’ The immediate class struggle is thus identical with the national struggle against ‘colonial’ oppression.
However, the paradoxes are only resolved in appearance. There are analogies between ‘race relations’ in South Africa and the ‘colonial situation’ but, like all analogies, they break down, sooner in this case rather than later. The analogy can only be sustained by conceiving the relationship as one between two societies or, in its more sophisticated version, two ‘modes of production’, albeit confined within a single state or ‘social formation’. Ironically, such formulations share the dualistic assumptions of the ideology of the mining industry and of liberal development economists who identify progress with the expansion of free markets.
The best that can be said for Ruth's use of the theory is that she borrowed it because it appeared to meet the case and, in particular, seemed to show that racialism had its origins in the economic structure and did not explain it. As we shall see, Ruth's own work shows a clear conception of the practices of apartheid as a ‘rigid system of labour control’ (to cite a passage which appears amidst the exposition of the theory of internal colonialism), integral to rather than articulated with capitalism.
Capital and labour
Ruth published three important articles in Africa South, which drew on her political activities and her work as a journalist and which showed how apartheid met the needs of capitalists and did not just protect white privileges. This same conception informs her analysis of labour relations in South West Africa.
The first article in Africa South was an account of the 1956 and 1957 bus boycotts which began in Alexandra and spread through the Reef and down to Port Elizabeth. She begins with the boycotts of 1943 and 1944. She shows that ‘[s]ince 1944 the gulf between income and bare subsistence needs has widened.’ Apartheid requires the siting of African townships at the outskirts of cities, and fare increases imposed the cost of this policy on its victims. Ruth argues that:
Throughout the long weeks of the boycott, the political initiative in South Africa passed out of the hands of the Government and the Cabinet and into the hands of the African people. Political controversy moved away from the sterile debates in the House of Assembly … and nation-wide attention was focussed on this demonstration by a voteless, voiceless people.
Here it was the employers who sought a solution and government which forced the issue into a long confrontation. The relations of government and employers were closer in the other cases.
Ruth's article on Bethal is more than a catalogue of floggings, murders and forced labour, though it details enough of these. She also sets out to explain them:
… while the Bethal area is one of intensive cultivation, it suffers from an acute and perpetual shortage of labour. Look at the map of South Africa and you will see why. Bethal is plumb in the centre of the Transvaal farming area furthest from any African reserve.
Hence the recruitment of contract workers from beyond South Africa's boundaries, and the rounding up of ‘foreign natives’ in the towns and their transfer to farm work. When this did not suffice, ‘the Minister of Justice … opened the private jail for farm labourers in the area’ in 1949 – though his United Party predecessor, Harry Lawrence, had mentioned the idea to local farmers in 1947, just after the Guardian exposés. In 1957 a court case revealed that men arrested for pass offences were handed over to the Labour Bureaux and induced, by threat of prosecution, or merely sent to work on farms. Ruth subsequently exposed the farm labour scandal in a New Age pamphlet.
‘The Gold of Migrant Labour’ explains how mining capital was able
to find not only abundant supplies of labour, but labour that was cheap. … The first way was to use only contracted migrant labour at cut-throat wages, on the assumption that African mineworkers … were really peasants, able to subsidize mine wages from the land. The second was to achieve a labour recruiting monopoly and to reduce costs of wages, food and quarters by setting up a highly centralised system for controlling wages.
A further device
… When there is a shortage of labour in the Union, the mines do not raise wages to compete for labour with other fields of employment, but recruit further and further afield. When any shrinking of the economy in the Union forces more African workers into low paid jobs on the mines, less labour is drawn from the extra-Union pool.
Critical to this flexible supply of ‘foreign’ labour was the supply of labour from Mozambique. The Mozambican labour code gave Africans the option of signing a labour contract or being conscripted as a xibalo or forced worker. As Ruth put it: ‘The Portuguese Authorities net the fish, while the mines just take delivery.’ Thus it was that:
From Portuguese East Africa the mines get a contingent of labour that could not be bettered for regularity, that can be shunted to the worst and most unpopular mines, that remains in the mines for longer contract periods than any other group of workers.
Ruth laid out the evidence and arguments on the ways in which the mining industry, with state support, has secured its supply of labour since its inception while reducing the real wages paid to its black workers. In South West Africa, Ruth tells us that ‘[l]abour recruitment is a national institution.’
The legal code of the country has been shaped to overcome the labour shortage; but except in time of drought, when farmers need less labour, the shortage has become endemic. Compulsion, whether covert or open, has always been the accepted method of raising the labour supply.
Ovambo workers left their ‘reserves’ only as contract workers. Other Africans
… are handcuffed by slips of paper. They must have permits to seek work, permits to be in the area for any purpose other than to seek work, service contracts to prove they are working, passes to prove that they are schoolboys and too young to carry passes, certificates of registration authorizing residence in the area, permits to travel, tax receipts, exemptions from night curfew.
‘Unfree labour’ is common to capitalist societies, not peculiar to South Africa or other, colonial or exceptional cases. In her concrete analyses of mine labour, farm labour and the pass system, Ruth showed how capitalism generated various forms of unfree labour in South Africa to meet its needs.
The treason trial to the sabotage campaign
On 5 December 1956 Ruth and her husband, Joe Slovo, were, among other people, eventually numbering 156, arrested on charges of high treason and of contravening the Suppression of Communism Act. They were released on bail on 21 December, but the trial would hang over them for another four and a quarter years. On 30 January 1958, after a preparatory examination lasting more than a year, Ruth and Joe were among the 95 accused (later reduced to 91) committed to stand trial. On 14 November 1958 the Attorney-General announced that the trial would proceed against 30 of the accused. The other 61, including Ruth and Joe, would be tried later. On 20 April 1959 the Court dismissed the indictment against the ‘second’ 61, but they faced the possibility of re-indictment if the charges against the ‘first’ 30 proved successful.
Ruth and Joe were not now absent from the trial proceedings. They were still among the 129 ‘co-conspirators’ listed in the indictment, which cited, as part of the alleged conspiracy, the formation of the Fighting Talk committee, including Ruth. Ruth makes a large number of appearances in the treason trial record. On numerous occasions her pamphlets on China and the Soviet Union are cited as being in the possession of various activists. Her riposte to Price in Liberation was put to a series of witnesses to invite them to agree to its allegedly revolutionary arguments.
In 1960 the breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress pre-empted an ANC campaign against passes by initiating one of its own. On 21 March 1960 police shot and killed 69 peaceful demonstrators at Sharpeville. Chief Luthuli, the President-General of the ANC, publicly burned his pass. On 30 March the government declared a state of emergency. Knowing that, as always, trouble was the work of agitators, but unsure where it was coming from, the government ‘round[ed] up the usual suspects’, some 1800 people of widely different political outlooks, including Joe Slovo. Ruth fled to Swaziland, returning clandestinely before the emergency was lifted in July. In April, Parliament had banned the ANC and PAC. It brought the period of open resistance to a sharp end. The treason trial continued until 29 March 1961 when the Court interrupted the defence argument to announce a unanimous verdict of not guilty.
The Congress movement and the Communist Party were now forced to try and organise secretly. On 25–26 March 1961, African leaders, not all of them ANC supporters, held an All-in African Conference. Nelson Mandela emerged from hiding and defied his bans by delivering the keynote speech. The Conference called for a National Convention, failing a response to which it organised a three-day strike on 29–31 May to mark South Africa becoming a Republic on 31 May. Mandela continued to work underground until he was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for organising the 1961 strike and leaving the country illegally to address a conference in Addis Ababa.
Militant non-violence had given way to a campaign of sabotage against government installations. In October 1961 power pylons were blown up. On 16 December 1961 Umkhonto we Sizwe, recruited from ANC and Communist Party activists, announced itself with explosions in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban.
Namibia
Ruth continued to write for New Age and to edit Fighting Talk, which, even in 1962, identified explicitly with the Congress movement. Ruth visited Namibia to study the territory, investigate conditions there and make contact with political activists. Thus began her close involvement with the liberation struggle in Namibia, which continued up to her death. It also provided the material for her first book. Hitherto, and for some time to come, most writing on Namibia concentrated on the legal dispute over the status of the Mandate after the demise of the League of Nations, which had granted it to South Africa. Ruth's book was the first general study of the history and politics of the country. Though it is now dated by the political struggles of the 1970s, it is still the most accessible introduction to the study of Namibia.
South West Africa starts from an account of the different, though converging, histories of the peoples of the country, their subjugation to alien rule, their experience of it and resistance to it. From this, Ruth proceeds to examine contemporary conditions and the development of nationalist political organisations before concluding where most others began, with the question of the Mandate. She notes the political leadership of the Herero in the nationalist movement, particularly in SWANU. The largest group in the country, the Ovambo, have a different history from others, having not been conquered, and worked, throughout the country, as migrants on contract. Officials then saw Ovamboland ‘as an untroubled tribal back-water’! As Ruth says: ‘The effects of labour migration, of taxation, of government interference in tribal rule … and of contacts with the wider world are only now beginning to be seen.’ They would be seen, dramatically and unexpectedly, in 1971 when Ovambo workers throughout the country went on strike and returned home in protest against the twin pillars of ‘stability’ in Ovamboland, the government-appointed chiefs and contract labour. This opened the way for SWAPO to replace SWANU as the dominant political force in Namibia.
Ruth concluded that South Africa's
record shows that she is unfit to rule and cannot mend her ways. She may try, under pressure, to strike a deal, but it will be a dishonest deal, like all the phoney negotiations in the last sixteen years that circumvented the international authority of U.N. over the territory.
Twenty years later, Ruth held much the same view of South Africa's continuing, but abortive, negotiations, through or without the Western ‘five-nation’ contact group, over the future of Namibia.
Peasants and politics
In 1962, Ruth began work on a different book, editing the manuscripts of Govan Mbeki's study of the Transkei. Mbeki's first book on the Transkei had been published in 1939. He was a central figure in Transkeian politics in the 1940s. From 1955 he was a reporter for New Age and ANC organiser in Port Elizabeth. Completion of the first draft of his manuscript was interrupted when he was arrested during the emergency. Much of the second was written on toilet paper when he was imprisoned on a charge of instructing people to make bombs in 1962, for which he was acquitted.
New Age was finally banned in 1962. In January 1963, Fighting Talk carried an article on the Transkei which largely reappears in the final chapter of Mbeki's book. Its final issue, the next month, was headed ‘SANCTIONS AGAINST SOUTH AFRICA – The ANC team abroad – ’ with photos of five ANC leaders in exile. Spark, successor to New Age, had to cease publication when all its staff were banned from working for publications. Ruth and Govan continued work on the book, at risk of prosecution for defying bans which prohibited them from writing for publication, and from communicating with one another as banned persons. Ruth retained for Govan Mbeki an especial affection and admiration.
Ruth would only be able to complete the editing of the book in London in 1964. It outlines the development of the Nationalists’ ‘Bantustan’ policies and conditions in the reserves. It contains a fine analysis of the Nationalists’ plans to restructure the reserves:
The first aim … would be to reduce the number of people dependent on small-scale farming as a livelihood;
the third, to remove from the land all those who had no arable allotments, and place them in special settlements consisting of the landless and the dispossessed;
The Nationalists continue today [1982] the policies Mbeki outlined – though they have never been able to move off the land enough people to make small-scale farming ‘viable’, and have dumped in the ‘Bantustans’ hundreds of thousands more who have been ‘endorsed out’ of white areas. Mbeki explains why and how peasants resisted ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘betterment’ (of their farms) and the arbitrary authority of government-appointed chiefs in all the provinces of South Africa. The most dramatic of these took place in the Transkei and in Pondoland, thought, like Ovamboland in Namibia, to be especially conservative under a regime of chiefly power and migrant labour. The Transkei, which Mandela, himself from the Transkei, described in 1956 as ‘the least politically organised area in the Union’, became in 1960 the centre of a sustained movement of popular resistance. Regrettably, the book does not go back to attempts to organise rural resistance in the Ciskei and Transkei in the 1940s, in which Mbeki himself was a key figure, as were supporters of the ANC's main rival on the left, the Non-European Unity Movement.
Mbeki is forthright about the lessons of Pondoland:
The Pondo movement succeeded by example in accomplishing what discussion had failed to do in a generation – convincing the leadership of the importance of the peasants in the reserves to the entire national struggle. … The urban-based campaign, which starts on a high note after very intensive and costly propaganda work, consumes itself by the intense energy it generates to carry the masses to the climax – usually a general strike. … The struggles of the peasants start from smaller beginnings, build up to a crescendo over a much longer time, are capable of pinning down large government forces, and are maintained at comparatively much lower cost.
However, the perspective he criticises reappears in the penultimate passage of the book, itself taken from Fighting Talk and quite probably penned by Ruth First:
If … the Nationalists try to push ahead with industrialisation and urbanization, they will create in the Transkei, faster than ever, new forces that will rise to destroy them … : African workers, removed from the land and based on factories, who will turn from Chiefs and tribal loyalties to trade unions and political parties.
Despite the Pondo revolt, and rural resistance at Witzieshoek (now Qwa Qwa), Sekukuniland, Marico, and Mbeki's own pleas, this vision is still caught in a left-wing version of urban progress and rural backwardness.
Detention without trial
In June 1963, Joe Slovo left South Africa illegally on the instructions of the Congress movement. In July, several Congress leaders, including Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, were arrested at Rivonia, near Johannesburg. Mandela, already in prison, joined them in the dock. On 10 August 1963 Ruth herself was arrested at the University of the Witwatersrand where she was taking a course in librarianship to provide a new job, now that she was prohibited from writing.
Ruth was detained under the ‘90-day’ Act, which provided for the police to hold anybody for 90 days without having to charge them in court. While Ruth was in detention her father, Julius First, fled the country and her mother looked after Ruth's daughters. The police briefly arrested her brother, Ronnie. After 89 days she was released and immediately re-arrested. Ruth had herself attended meetings at Rivonia and the security police knew this. After her re-arrest she made a statement, which revealed no secrets to the police. Ruth feared the statement could be used to suggest she had betrayed others. Fearing she could not continue, she swallowed all her pills, but her doctor had not left her with anything like enough to kill herself. Interrogations resumed. On 5 December, she was released without being prosecuted – even for possessing a copy of Fighting Talk which the police found in her home the day she was arrested. As she concluded 117 Days:
When they left me in my own house at least I was convinced that it was not the end, that they would come again.
As we now know, they did come again.
Ruth was reluctant to write an account of her imprisonment after she had fled the country successfully. Forceful and commanding in public debate, she was a shy and private person who did not like to expose much of her inner self. She knew that others had suffered more in detention than she had, and had paid greater penalties for their activities. Ronald Segal persuaded her of the political importance of writing 117 Days.
Ruth describes people, situations and the prison environment clearly, directly and with great economy. Even her self-reflections are presented in a matter-of-fact style. She is curious as ever about everything around her. She sketches brilliantly the institutional life and weekly routines of Marshall Square, the central Johannesburg police station where she was originally detained, and the relations of white wardresses, white prisoners (mainly prostitutes and drunks) and black male prisoners brought over to the women's section to clean up. In this world, she and other women detainees were anomalous. She wrote:
I, a prisoner held under top security conditions, was forbidden books, visitors, contact with any other prisoner; but like any white South African Madam I sat in bed each morning and Africans did the cleaning for the ‘missus’.
Ruth makes no claims to bravery and does not indulge in self-pity. Her account is interspersed with accounts by other detainees of their experiences, and accounts of what happened to others, like Looksmart Ngudle, who was tortured and killed and Isaac Tlale, who was also tortured, and whose testimony exposed Ngudle's murder. Ruth reveals her own vulnerability in a moving passage about the time after she had made a statement:
It would be impossible to explain such an act, to live it down. Joe had always told me that my weakness was my extreme susceptibility to acceptance and fear of rejection and criticism: were these the qualities that had propelled me to make a statement? Or was it again my arrogance, my conceit that pooled experiences and rules of conduct (under interrogation) were for other people, and that I was different and could try my own way? My air of confidence had always been useful in keeping others from knowing how easily assailed and self-consciously vulnerable I was; it had worked many a time, but it could do nothing for me now … .
Ruth's account is extremely modest about her own achievements as a journalist. Her courage in detention is revealed only by the factualness of her account of how she resisted the pressures and blandishments of her interrogators to reveal the activities of comrades.
Exile and solidarity
In exile Ruth settled with her husband and children in London, as did her parents. Ruth was immediately active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement and in support of the liberation movement in South Africa, Namibia and the Portuguese colonies. Ruth was again free to use her considerable talents as a public speaker and she became as well known in London as she had been in Johannesburg. Not that this gave her secure employment. She was excluded because of her Marxist views and her Communist Party background. As she put it in an interview in 1970: ‘You find all the time the attitude “she can't be expected to think constructively, she's got to be true to the dogma”.’ Ruth did not adhere to any dogma. But she did not repudiate Marxism, or her own political past. Her disagreements with the South African Communist Party were not public. She knew from her own experiences what uses anti-communism was, and is, put to and saw no need to compromise with its exponents.
London is both an intellectual and an international centre, and Ruth took full advantage of both. She developed an extraordinarily wide network of friends: writers, journalists, academics and political activists. She remained a private person who mixed with others most easily when engaged in common intellectual or political pursuits. In other contexts she seemed domineering or stand-offish. She filled her diary and was always impatient with people who would never come to the point. She was also, as many of us have good cause to know, a loyal and supportive friend, though she always felt she had too little time to give to her family and to the needs of her friends.
In London she edited Mandela's speeches and completed the publication of Mbeki's book, as well as her own 117 Days. In 1960 and 1964 Ronald Segal had organised international conferences in London on economic sanctions against South Africa, editing the papers from the second as a Penguin book Sanctions against South Africa. In 1966, a new conference was organised in Oxford on South West Africa (Namibia) to strengthen the case for international intervention to remove the territory from South African control. Ruth was responsible for organising the papers by historians, economists, journalists and Namibian activists. The published proceedings added substantially to the meagre literature on the country. Ruth published pamphlets on wages and on foreign investment in South Africa and on the wars against Portuguese colonialism.
With Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele and Christabel Gurney of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, she collaborated on a more ambitious study of Western investment in apartheid. The South African Connection was written in the context of campaigns to get churches, universities and other bodies to disinvest from companies with investments in South Africa, which, as the book shows, means most major British companies. The book goes beyond the debate over disinvestment and identifies some of the dynamic changes in South African capitalism.
First et al. argue that, despite the rapid economic growth of the 1960s, the poor continued to get poorer. (That judgement would have to be qualified for workers in jobs in the l970s, which saw, among other events, a new surge of workers’ militancy and trade union membership.) They argue that changes have taken place, notably the ‘floating colour bar’, the regrading of ‘white’ jobs so that blacks can fill them, in order to meet the needs of capital. Since the Second World War, multinationals have invested extensively in South Africa, particularly in the manufacturing industry, as they have in the industrial economies of Europe, Canada, Australia and South America. Their critical contribution to South African firms has been to supply skills and technology.
As a series of investigations by South Africans reported in The Guardian by Dennis Herbstein (on whose work First et al. were able to draw) were to show, foreign firms often paid abysmal wages and certainly did not lead South African-owned companies in their wage or labour relations policies. Investment is South Africa has proved very profitable, and especially for British firms:
Britain's investments in South Africa constitute over ten per cent of its foreign assets and produce over 13 per cent of its direct foreign investment income. For its part, South Africa is heavily dependent on Britain for capital, technological knowledge, goods, markets for her exports and for political and moral support in the face of world condemnation. As Britain enters the 1970s and British capitalism goes into decline, with a fierce rise in unemployment and a falling rate of profit at home, the natural reaction of British capital is to invest abroad …
They therefore question the conclusion in British Secretary of State William Rogers’ 1970s policy statement on Africa that ‘it would be in Britain's economic interests to review the relationship with South Africa.’ Nor do they expect Western capital to be persuaded to sacrifice its profitable investments in South Africa on moral or political grounds, or to be compelled to do so by their governments. Rather solidarity work should focus on ‘supporting the South African freedom struggle’.
They graft their own analysis of the relation of foreign to South African capital to a mechanistic class analysis of (white) South African political history:
The Nationalists and the Labour Party represented those national South African groups which wanted to retain part of the profits of the mining industry inside South Africa and use them to diversify the South African economy. The Unionists represented the interests of the mine owners and international capital, which feared competition from industry for labour and other resources.
This at a time when a South African firm, Anglo-American, was establishing itself as the dominant mining house and when the farmers who voted for the National Party were concerned, above all, with securing their supply of labour. Where they were right is that state policies and direct government investments built up ‘a fully fledged industrial economy under South African control’.
South African firms increased the share of the economy under their control and South Africans came to own more of the shares of foreign companies operating in South Africa. Investment funds were increasingly derived from retained profits and South Africa's external debt declined. Nevertheless, as the fluctuations in the gold price, and in the South African economy, in the 1970s made clear, South African industry imports more goods than it sells abroad and must rely on exports of primary products – gold, diamonds and other minerals, wool and food crops, and on net foreign investment and international bank loans – to cover the foreign exchange deficit.
First et al. also point to the internationalisation of the investments of the Oppenheimer group (Anglo-American, de Beers, Charter Consolidated … ). They ask whether South Africa is ‘still a satellite power or is it, expanding and expansionist, becoming a metropolitan power in its own right?’ Today Anglo-American is the second largest single investor of new funds in the US economy; South African firms have more investments in Canada than Canadian firms in South Africa.
These phenomena raise questions about the relevance of analysing the activities of transnational companies in terms of their national ‘origins’, whether ‘metropolitan’ or ‘satellite’. South Africa's vulnerability to changes in its terms of trade does make it reliant on access to foreign investments and loans, like the recent IMF facility, at critical times. However, disinvestment would only accelerate the trend towards increasing control of the economy in the hands of South African-based firms, themselves organised on an international basis. The purposes of focusing political work abroad on disinvestment from South Africa seem to be purely rhetorical. Support for workers’ organisations in South Africa might be a better way of supporting the freedom struggle.
First et al. point out that:
… it is not racialism as such that is the oppressor but a system of South African capitalism incorporating a particularly virulent strain of racial oppression, and one that is increasingly part of a world economic system.
If it really is capitalism which is the problem rather than the particularly racist South African variant of it, then there is no fundamental difference between capitalism investment in South Africa and in other countries providing cheap labour, state coercion and profitable markets. In that case it is clear that capitalism itself, and not just racial discrimination and oppression, must be the main object of the South African freedom struggle.
Historical interpretation and revolutionary strategy
In the late 1960s, white South African academics in Britain began a revolution in the historiography of South Africa. Its basic proposition was that segregation and apartheid were forms of control over labour. They did not originate in the conflicts between ‘Boer’ and ‘Bantu’ on the Eastern Cape frontier, nor in the atavistic ideology of Afrikaner capitalism, nor in the demands of white workers for protection from competition from cheap black labour. Rather, migrant labour, the pass system and the ‘native reserves’ (since promoted to ‘Bantu homelands’) were created and adapted to meet the needs of capital for labour, on the mines, on the farms and in the factories, to reconcile the conflicting requirements of the different sectors with one another and with their common need for a regulated supply of cheap labour. Far from undermining apartheid, as some liberal economists argued, capitalism in South Africa depends on it and reinforces it. In turn, this new writing gave rise to a variety of theoretical and historical disputes, between Marxists and liberals and among Marxists themselves.
These arguments were already present, in a less complete form, in Ruth's own writings. In the first instance they were used to counter the view that foreign investment, by promoting capitalist development, would contribute to the reform of apartheid. But, like the implications of the analysis of The South African Connection, they raise deeper questions about the liberation struggle. Was it sufficient to define it as a struggle for national liberation? If capitalism was the source of the problem, wasn't socialism the obvious solution?
In the 1970s a new set of questions was posed by more practical developments. Workers, and then students and then black communities renewed their resistance to apartheid in Namibia and in South Africa with strikes, demonstrations and boycotts. The black consciousness movement gave ideas and direction to the students' revolt. The wave of strikes in South Africa led to the formation of independent trade unions organising black workers into different unions and centres. Over the decade, both students and workers showed a capacity to create new forms of resistance in response to state oppression and workers in particular created a new space within which to organise themselves and spread political ideas. In Namibia the experience of the Ovambo strike consolidated the position of SWAPO as the dominant nationalist party. Independence in Angola and Mozambique enabled SWAPO and the ANC to establish themselves in countries bordering on South Africa; South Africa responded by invading and raiding their neighbours. Nevertheless, both SWAPO and the ANC increased their capacity to attack targets within Namibia and South Africa.
What are the implications of these developments for the freedom struggle? Should it seek to base itself on the working class, or on a broader nationalist basis? How does the politicisation of the youth relate to working-class organisations? Should workers organise firstly as trade unionists, or focus on political campaigns? What is the relative significance of the externally directed armed resistance and the internal and largely open organisations of workers and of students? And, typically neglected or dismissed, what is the scope for rural resistance and the questions of land and administration in the reserves?
These questions were posed in the abstract, as general questions of revolutionary theory, and in the changing day-to-day practice of people in South Africa itself. In particular, left-wing critics of the ANC and SACP leadership argued that the struggle was a class struggle, for socialism, which should be based on the revolutionary organisation of the working class. This view challenged the ANC's emphasis on military struggle and on seeking the broadest possible national support (subject to the overall leadership and guidance of the ANC). It also conflicted with the strategy of many of the independent trade unions to build up the unions' industrial base rather than use them as a proxy for political parties.
Ruth recognised the importance of the new historiography for the understanding of South African society. She knew that research is not just a sophisticated form of intelligence gathering, and that historical and sociological enquiry cannot be shaped to give direct answers to immediate political questions.
