During her time at the African Studies Centre in Maputo, Ruth First was finishing a biography of Olive Schreiner, co-written with Ann Scott in London (First and Scott 1980). She told me once that finding an extraordinary person was not sufficient reason to write a biography; she wanted to choose a subject whose life illustrated the dilemmas and possibilities of the world and times in which they lived. First and Scott identified with Olive Schreiner's ‘ … conscious struggles for self-definition, in productive and sexual terms’ (First and Scott 1980, 333). Yet Ruth also told me she found the book difficult to write. Along the way she realised that she did not like Schreiner very much. She worried that her lack of empathy would become obvious to the reader and eventually compromise her broader objective – recasting the tensions between the social, sexual and personal that were then of such concern to the socialist women's movement, in a way that took the southern African context into account.1
Reading the biography, I understood Ruth's ambivalence towards Olive Schreiner – haunted by her sense of personal failure and so unhappy throughout most of her life that it is painful to accompany her repeated personal crises. As a feminist it is hard to understand how she could be so enthralled by such self-important figures as Havelock Ellis and Cecil Rhodes. Schreiner's was perhaps a revolutionary life, but a sad one. She is very different to the Ruth I knew in Maputo, so easy to like – charismatic, beautiful, an acute interlocutor, a generous friend, a creative organiser of research and teaching. Ruth was usually self-confident, as clear and convincing in public lectures or interviews as in the classroom. She was a good listener and could charm people into giving her information and resources they never intended to provide. Yet she was also capable of aggressive argument, sharp critique, mighty rows, witty asides and very cool rebuff. She knew herself well but was not paralysed by self-absorption, as Schreiner seems sometimes to have been. She got on with things, despite self-doubts, and she aimed high.
In Conversations With Myself, Nelson Mandela recalls both Ruth's brilliance and her ease with herself and her life in South Africa:
… she was among the brightest stars of the country in the proper sense of the word. I … [had] known Ruth from our university days. We were in the same university and she was progressive, and she was not the type of white who was progressive when she was with you in a room or away from the public. If she met you in one of the corridors of the university or in the street, Ruth will stand and talk to you, very comfortable, in a very relaxed manner and she was brilliant … [S]he did not suffer fools, had no patience towards fools and she was energetic, systematic, hard-working and she would tax you on any type of job that you undertook and she would … make the maximum effort to produce the best result. She was fearless, she could criticize anybody and she rubbed people, you know … in the wrong way at times. She was direct and outspoken. But at the same time she was very broad, just like her husband, Joe [Slovo], very broad. In those days when [they] were young communists, and very radical, they had friends amongst the Liberals and amongst prominent businessmen, and her house was a crossroad of people of different political persuasions … I loved and respected [her] very much and I was very sorry when I heard from prison that she had passed away. (Mandela 2010, 54)
Nelson Mandela captures here the radiance and energy that Ruth projected throughout her life.
Much of this essay is drawn from what I learned from Ruth First, working under her direction at the Centre of African Studies (CEA), Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. The period from 1979 to 1982 was a time of socialist revolution in Mozambique and heightened nationalist militancy in the region. I never interviewed Ruth or wrote down what I learnt from her, nor can I always clearly distinguish what was hers and what was mine in the conversations2 we had about revolution in southern Africa during these years. Some of the memorable stories she told about her earlier life were just anecdotes – like travelling by road with her father in Sofala (Mozambique) as he bought wood for the family furniture factory, or daring weekend trips from Johannesburg to the less socially rigid Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). One of the least thorny discussions I heard between Joe and her in Maputo was after a film, probably The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (till the film archive burned down we saw many first-rate films in Maputo). They puzzled over similarities in the experience of Eastern European Jewish immigrants across continents and class differences. These are moments from ordinary lives, but they were lived in extraordinary times by people who made revolutionary projects imaginable and doable.
The political turbulence of the middle years of the twentieth century in southern Africa
In the early twentieth century, the political economy of southern Africa saw the expulsion of black farmers and herders from the best commercial farming land, the consolidation of mining capital and the flow of black workers between farms and mining compounds. By the 1940s, however, South Africa had a diversified industrial structure and large working class. It included young Afrikaner women employed in the textile and clothing industries and, more importantly, increasing numbers of black families with permanent urban jobs and fixed residence in large sprawling townships circling the main cities. South African involvement in World War II forced greater flexibility in systems of labour recruitment and control. The black labour movement was growing accordingly and challenging the quiescent leadership of the nationalist ANC (African National Congress). Militant educated black youth began joining the ANC youth league. Returning migrants took nationalist projects to other countries of the region.
By the end of World War II, the colonial world was crumbling, with armed and successful campaigns for independence in Indonesia and North Vietnam. The independence of India in 1947 was particularly noted in South Africa. Across Africa independence movements emerged and by the early 1960s most of Africa was politically independent. However the major capitalist countries were reluctant to see destabilisation in southern Africa and hence tolerated the South African regime, the settler-based unilateral declaration of Independence in then Rhodesia, the continuation of the South African mandate in Namibia and extended Portuguese settlement in Angola and Mozambique.
Ruth First was of recent Eastern European immigrant background. Her parents were Marxists, early members of the South African Communist Party (SACP), proudly aligned with the Third International, looking to the Soviet experience of collectivisation and rapid industrialisation as possible models for South Africa. As the black working class grew in South Africa, the party recruited more black workers. Those like Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki, active in the ANC, the labour movement and the SACP, pushed the party to become more militant in the nationalist struggle and urged the ANC to work selectively with the SACP on joint campaigns.
In Ruth's life all these strands of an exceptional moment in southern Africa coincided. By her teens she already had a robust political education – extensive reading on South Africa and the Soviet Union, exposure to debates on strategy and tactics, and involvement in protests against racial injustice. Her close relationship with the intense, intelligent law student Ismael Meer led to serious study of issues in Marxist theory. She debated the future of South Africa with politically committed students from diverse backgrounds, including Nelson Mandela. Ties of friendship, trust and understanding were forged in Meer's flat between many who became important thinkers in the Congress Alliance (Pinnock 2012, 8–9).
After university Ruth was almost immediately pulled into the support movement for the explosive African miners' strike of 1946 and a career of left journalism, writing and editing, working with comrades like Govan Mbeki on a series of left newspapers and pamphlets. She became a political writer. Work around the strike strengthened the links between the SACP, the labour movement and the ANC. Ruth met and married Joe Slovo, a young veteran studying law at Wits, with a pre-war history in the labour movement and involvement with the SACP.
When the jacaranda bloomed in Maputo, it reminded Ruth of Johannesburg. She sometimes talked then about her life there, before banning, trials, detention and exile. She mocked herself gently. Despite his intensive political work, Joe also had a thriving legal practice. There was money to spend. Their three daughters were born in quick succession but she had domestic help so her own political activities and social life were not curtailed. She loved Hillbrow, the parties, the clothes, the friendships. As Nelson Mandela (2010, 42) mentions, the line between parties and political recruitment was sometimes fuzzy in the SACP.
The dilemmas of privilege: class suicide or the momentum of struggle
Within the socialist tradition, revolution is the outcome of class struggle, which has made the educated petty-bourgeois character of much of its leadership problematic. Middle-class participants in revolutionary socialist movements are distanced by their histories, work and everyday routines from the working people they consider the makers of socialist revolution. In exploring the reasons why the most militant student groups in the Soweto uprising did not initially originate in the nationalist movement, Archie Mafeje (1978) pointed out that the early generation of ANC students attended rural boarding schools and were the children of petty-bourgeois teachers, clergy and richer peasants. Subsequently, the most militant student groups in the Soweto uprising did not originate in the nationalist movement, but had their origin in the black urban working class. In South Africa, this class cleavage is reinforced by racial divides, tracing fault lines within the wider movement. In Cabral's (1969) classic response to this quandary, the imperative of class suicide construed the question as an ethical dilemma; the concept of class suicide connotes a kind of conversion experience. For a Marxist, this response is not entirely satisfactory, perhaps even underlining the political vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie.
Ruth First was conversant with these discussions of class origin, but she did not think that either individual or collective deprivation resolved the problem. Many have observed how much she loved wearing good Italian shoes, but she also held onto other small things of beauty and pleasure in her life in Maputo: inviting people to eat Stilton cheese that Joe brought back from London, drinking coffee after lunch in Burleigh espresso cups transported carefully from her London flat, finding someone to cover her cushions in Shweshwe blue calico print.
She was notoriously generous and considered hoarding an abuse, a particular issue in the socialist period in Mozambique where prices were low, but goods scarce. During rural fieldwork in Zambezia, Ruth stubbornly rejected the entirely justified complaints of other researchers about the failures of one local cadre assigned to work with us, until she discovered that he was bumming her cigarettes while keeping his own secret stash. Then she sent him home.
Her generosity had nothing to do with assuaging guilt. Ruth would not have accepted, I think, the usefulness of Cabral's division between the political and the ethical. Being a revolutionary implied no resignation from the pleasures of life: beauty, sensuality, love and being loved; it also gave no dispensation from the pain of guilt, loss and inadequacy. The latter had particularly to do with the ways she felt that she failed her family, particularly her daughters, but also her demanding mother and even Joe. For Ruth, however, there was no question of abandoning the struggle. The only basis for a revolutionary life was to live it. Class consciousness was contingent, not a quality to be suddenly acquired and forever maintained, nor a state of enlightenment impervious to error or despair.
Describing the period during and after the treason trial, when the declaration of martial law blocked the forms of political struggle developed by the Congress Alliance, Ruth wrote:
Our consciences were healthy in a society riddled with guilt. Yet as the years went by our small band led a more and more schizophrenic existence. There was the good living that white privilege brought, but simultaneously complete absorption in revolutionary politics and defiance of all the values of our racial group. As the struggle grew sharper the privileges of membership in the white group were overwhelmed by the penalties of political participation. (First 2010, 11)
Not all stayed with the struggle and its terms of arbitrary arrest and extra-judicial controls.
Involvement in collective organisation, uniting and connecting struggles, was central to Ruth's conception of a revolutionary process. Her response to Archie Mafeje's class analysis of Soweto was a firm defence of ANC strategy and a harsh rebuke of his approach to the politics of class alliance:
And if the article's first problem is the mechanistic, reductionist use of class categories, a second problem, and one intimately connected with the first, moving from an analysis of social forces to political strategy and practice, is the absence of any conception of forms of political struggle for immediate and for longer-term demands, and the relation between these. (First 1978, 96)
She invoked the history of the Defiance Campaign of the early 1950s against the institution of the apartheid laws to illustrate her point. Its demands were universal, not class based, calling for the creation of conditions which would restore human dignity, equality and freedom to every South African.
Questioning the place of the petty bourgeoisie in revolutionary struggle recurred throughout Ruth's life. We were joint tutors in one of the discussion groups of the Development Course in Mozambique, discussing the relevance of class analysis to socialist transformation. Ruth made a casual reference to the fact that we were all members of the petty bourgeoisie. The students often had major differences among themselves, but here they formed a united front against us: ‘But we are all workers in the worker–peasant alliance!’ they objected, expressing their evident doubts as to Ruth's and my class identity. Ruth tried to convince them that socialist revolution was a process of transforming class structure, not just a declaration of intent, but she made little headway.
The place of formal membership-based organisations in revolutionary struggles
Ruth First's exchange with Archie Mafeje (cited above) highlighted the importance she gave to political organisations – the ANC and the SACP to which she belonged, and those like Frelimo, a self-declared Marxist–Leninist party. She supported vanguard parties, and did not expect that political pluralism or multi-party democracy would necessarily turn out a more satisfactory consensus than party debate. She took very seriously the proposition that the masses make history but she was not a populist. She was an interventionist, a modernist, concerned with building fronts around particular questions and having strategies of struggle. She knew that struggles can unify and propel change but saw that they can also divide and immobilise. She saw political leadership having a central role in identifying the right issues and in assessing the outcomes of struggle. She did not think that the masses are always right or shy away from the tasks of demystification and persuasion.
Ruth was a realist and a critical one; she saw no certainties. Revolutionaries work within collective processes that are hardly predictable. It had probably been a long time (if ever) since she had thrilled to the apocalyptical inevitability of socialist revolution in the Communist Manifesto. Making history but living with unknown outcomes was for her an acceptable part of a revolutionary life. Nor did Ruth think that Marxist theory was a fixed set of propositions from which one could deduce general laws that all revolutions would follow.
Twentieth-century socialists confronted the increasing rigidity of Soviet Marxism and the contradictions of its history; they did so in various ways. In an informal email to a question I asked about theoretical differences between Ruth and Aquino de Brangança, her old friend, comrade and director of the CEA,3 Immanuel Wallerstein replied:
… Ruth was by no means an ‘orthodox’ traditional Marxist. … Ruth considered herself, I believe, a communist (with a small ‘c’) and she remained, as far as I know, a member of the SACP as well as the ANC, but a quite independent one. So, after all, was Joe, who engineered quite some shift in SACP's line. … for a long time, and certainly since 1956 (because of Suez, Hungary, and above all Khrushchev's speech to the XXth party congress of the CPSU), the whole world of Marxists and marxisant intellectuals has been in intellectual turmoil and evolution. To describe anyone's thought – say Aquino's or Ruth's – one would have to ask of what year are we talking? Everyone was in evolution – to a revised version of Marxism, away from Marxism altogether, etc.4
The South African Communist Party maintained strict loyalty to the Soviet Union, but there was also a strong Trotskyist tradition among South African Marxists that infused debates in the labour movement. The show-trials of the 1930s, shifting World War II alliances, revolts against Soviet domination in eastern Europe and the polemics of the Sino-Soviet split contributed to debates among comrades (including those who remained within the SACP) around Marxist theory and the nature of the Soviet Union. Discipline and unity were demanded by a banned underground party, and the launching of the armed struggle hindered internal democracy and discussion, closing down the range of permitted debate. Material support and training for MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) from the Soviet Union and the GDR reinforced dogmatism.
In his 1992 interview with Don Pinnock, Joe Slovo confirmed that Ruth had remained a member of the South African Communist Party until her death, but also noted that her connection to him protected her against those within the party who thought she should be expelled for the positions she took on a wide variety of subjects. While in Mozambique, she thought that the SACP failed to distance itself from the Soviet Union in its views of other countries (such as China) and struggles (such as that for Zimbabwe). When COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) was being formed she was critical of the SACP's reluctance to recognise independent trade union organisations. She worried that the ANC's armed struggle was taking priority over its involvement in political struggles in South Africa.
Ruth took all these issues as questions for debate within the SACP and the ANC. She took care not to undercut Joe's legitimacy within such debates. She once gave me a book written by a working-class French couple who had gone as members of the French Communist Party to work in a factory in the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev years. The book recounted their disillusion but it was detailed and matter of fact in tone. They described the alcoholism of the Soviet workers, the conflicts between party leaders and workers at shop-floor level and the political cynicism they encountered.5 She thought it was a good book but feared she could compromise Joe if she kept it in the house. During my time in the CEA, there was some collaboration with competent researchers from the GDR, but there were also a few embarrassing Soviet visitors. One went around with pockets full of badges with Lenin's face on them to distribute in the countryside, and a visiting professor lectured on ethnicity using concepts from 1950s American social psychology. Aquino joked about them openly, but Ruth guarded her tongue in public.
Ruth extended her stance of disciplined critique to her relations with the Frelimo party in Mozambique, a more difficult problem. Though she was not a member of this party, she had known many of its leaders personally for years, during which time Frelimo had shifted from being a movement of national liberation to a party in power. The nature of the CEA's dilemma was thoughtfully probed by Harold Wolpe (1985) in this journal. In opposition, socialists necessarily oppose attempts by government to limit critical research. ‘Does this mean, conversely that where the regime is a regime of national liberation and perhaps, socialist in orientation, intellectuals and institutions of research and learning must give up their role, restrict their research and writing to practical and other problems defined by party and state?’ (Wolpe 1985).
Wolpe's answer to his question is a complex negative, and so I think would Ruth's have been. Yet the ambivalence Wolpe detected in the CEA's position implies further qualification. I expect Ruth would have repeated a line that she and Aquino shared: ‘Finding a good question is more important than finding the answer,’ i.e. she would probably have asked Harold to rethink his question. Her concern was rather: ‘How can social research inform a process of socialist transformation in a context where socialism is a possibility?’ Becoming research director of the CEA made sense because Ruth thought that there was a revolutionary process to be consolidated in Mozambique – a process that was unpredictable, that could fail. She thought that the education of knowledgeable cadres and the production of solid and timely research would be crucial for continuing momentum. She also thought that the prospects for socialist revolution in South Africa were tied to what would happen in Mozambique. In short, whereas Wolpe's question was about limits, Ruth's was about possibilities.
In those first years of independence in Mozambique, things were changing quickly and ordinary people were doing extraordinary things. Maputo streets at night thronged with workers walking home after evening night classes. When they returned from the fields, rural women in Gaza sat under cashew trees for literacy classes though few spoke Portuguese and there was little reading material available. A very young economist had somehow found the gravitas and expertise to manage the Development Bank. Workers in Zambezia ran a small cotton-ginning plant on their own after managers failed to return from extended holidays. Students went to the countryside for literacy or vaccination campaigns. Doctors, nurses and patients called each other comrade. Neighbours cooperated to clear rubbish from the streets. Revolutionary murals – some planned and others improvised – decorated free spaces. Ruth was critical but she was not cynical. She was enthused by the possibilities of combining socialist politics and research in new ways.
Once her decision to join the CEA was made, Ruth leapt into it running, her enthusiasm, pace and discipline making the project of socialist transformation exciting and imaginable for those who worked with her.6 She drew on a broad range of reading, experiences and contacts. Robert Linhart (1976) was invited to the CEA by Ruth and Aquino to discuss similarities between Taylorism and Lenin's conception of ‘socialist emulation’, then being rather mechanically introduced in the port of Maputo by a young Frelimo cadre trained in Rostock and an Italian cooperante.7 A Cuban economist working in the Planning Commission lectured CEA staff and students on the political rigidity of the Cuban system of food rationing, then being introduced into urban areas in Mozambique. After Zimbabwean independence, Nelson Moyo came with Ann Seidman to discuss possible collaboration between the CEA and the Faculty of Economics of the University of Zimbabwe in a project on the restructuring of southern African transport.
The existence of the CEA and indeed Ruth's presence in Mozambique depended on political support from Frelimo, but neither she nor Aquino let that stand in the way of critical challenges to Frelimo policies that our research exposed as extremely problematic, e.g. the investment priority given to large-scale state farms, dependence on political mobilisation of seasonal labour by state farms and goods starvation in the countryside. She trusted that Aquino as director of the CEA and Fernando Ganhão, the rector of Eduardo Mondlane University, would be able to protect the CEA's space for critical research, but she knew there was a tightrope along which we would have to walk and limits to what could be said. Sometimes Ruth retreated. The first limited distribution of reports on a state-intervened cotton plantation in Nampula province included a moving photograph of child cotton-pickers waiting to be paid their piece-wage. An irate Minister of Agriculture phoned to say that the report would cause an international scandal for Mozambique if the International Labour Organization saw the photo. The text of the report, which described recruitment of children, remained unaltered but the photo ceased to be distributed with it.
How can research inform revolutionary process in a socialist context?
This question, the one that Ruth tried to answer in practice in the CEA, is thus a narrower one than Wolpe (1985) posed about the relation between researchers and power in revolutionary contexts. The dilemmas of revolutionary research were, as Wolpe observed, also relevant to liberation movements (such as the ANC) that had not yet come to power. Arguably they continue to be relevant to researchers linked to organised political movements that need critical research yet do not wish their failings to be broadly disseminated.
Revolutionary research demands critical reflection on how the boundaries of analysis are drawn
Frelimo was deeply concerned with rapid economic development. Its slogan for this was classically modernist, following not just Soviet models but western development thought at that time: agriculture as the base, industry as the dynamising element. Within agriculture, the focus was on state farms and cooperatives. In the CEA's research projects in the Development Course, we focused on the relation between agriculture and industry and within agriculture on the relation between state farms, cooperatives and family farming. We did a lot of rural fieldwork, including spending time interviewing farming families, visiting fields, recording the prices and availability of goods in shops and looking at patterns of off-farm labour. For this, the CEA researchers were referred to by some in the university as ‘peasant lovers’, protectors of underdevelopment.
The importance Ruth gave to rural research on family agriculture had nothing to do with her own personal preferences or celebration of a traditional peasant way of life. During the Nampula research, with only slight exaggeration, she confessed that she developed a migraine as soon as she set foot in the countryside. But she thought it was important for our students, most of whom were Frelimo cadres working in government or party, to discount judgements based on their professional roles or political positions, and to look, listen and record. For some it was difficult not to give advice; a student who worked in planning, for example, got ensnared in directing where the village shop should be built instead of finding out why the prospective site was generating local conflict.
The emphasis Ruth placed on linking agriculture and industry, her programmatic anti-dualism, was brought from her history of investigative journalism in South Africa. Her work around the miners' strike of 1946 and the editing of Govan Mbeki's (1984) book on rural struggles in the Transkei (South Africa: The Peasants' Revolt) had sharpened her awareness of the importance of migrant labour for both industry and rural livelihoods. In 1961, she argued that rural poverty resulted from the peculiar forms and terms of integration of the peasantry in the circuit of capital:
The mines claim that they generate economic growth; that ‘the economic distress of the (Union) Reserves is in part relieved by the gold mining industry’; that ‘they stimulate and stabilize the economy of tribal territories.’ But then the mining industry always has been a past master at turning economic arguments on their head.
The truth is that migrant labour, the basis for the prosperity of the gold mining industry, has ruined the Reserves and African agriculture and has been responsible for the most blatant exploitation of the largest single labour force in South Africa. Migrant labour impedes agricultural development, keeps wages to rock-bottom levels, and is an excuse for not training a stable force of skilled labour. (First 1961, 30)
Moreover, Ruth knew that migrant labour crossed national boundaries, linking the dynamics of accumulation in South African industry to the organisation of rural life across the region. She knew that a common history was also reflected in the infrastructures of transport, the organisation of commodity markets, the location of industry and patterns of political administration. Ruth organised the curriculum of the Development Course to make sure that our students knew of this common history. She felt that ANC cadres were also insufficiently aware of the consequences of this shared history and thus unable to see the interdependence between the Mozambican revolution and theirs. Her insight on these questions went beyond the theorisation of these questions by the ANC, the SACP and the Frelimo party. It was a product of the confrontation between theory and investigative research.
Revolutionary research can be organised collectively
Most CEA activities were organised collectively – teaching, research and the shorter (unpaid) advisory work we did for particular ministries or institutions such as the OMM (Mozambican Women's Organisation). We did not have individually run courses and most of our publications appeared under the authorship of the CEA. The collectives Ruth organised did not involve everyone in everything; there was a clear division of labour, with space for individual creativity and improvisation under Ruth's general coordination. We had general CEA seminars and meetings at the beginning of new courses and research projects at key points along the way.
There were sometimes quite sharp debates between CEA staff at these seminars, particularly at the end of field research where themes and arguments were identified. Two emerged in our work around tea production in upper Zambezia province. One was over the relative emphasis to be given in the report to conditions of labour, particularly protective clothing, versus seasonal patterns of recruitment on the tea estates. A second was over the extent to which wages from tea were sufficient to fuel internal differentiation among the peasantry in recruitment areas. Some debates went unsettled and carried over into the writing and editing of the final reports, where Ruth made the final decisions.
Different people wrote different parts of the report. Ruth taught me how to cut, pin and paste, to write new transition paragraphs or shift a topic sentence to produce a concise and coherent draft. The process was easier with drafts in English. Written Portuguese has very long paragraphs that rarely begin with topic sentences. We also wrote one-page summaries, which was about all that she thought many of our readers would manage to digest. I found the process she followed liberating; I wrote much more quickly and with fewer qualifications when I knew that someone else and eventually Ruth herself would be checking my draft. Others found the discarding of parts of their work very disturbing. A more transparent process of editing might have led to more subtle argumentation, but Ruth opted for simplicity and timeliness.
Ruth's way of organising collective writing was for me both extremely productive and innovative. Now, after reading Pinnock's (2012) introductory essay in Ruth First: Voices of Liberation, I recognise that it was the distillation of years of experience of political writing. Pinnock describes the drafting process for the Freedom Charter, in which members of the drafting committee, including Ruth, read through thousands of responses to the appeal of the Congress Alliance for descriptions of what the New South Africa should be and crafted from them a single coherent document – the 1955 Freedom Charter.
In the division of labour behind the CEA's work, Ruth took responsibility for most of the administrative management. In addition to her intellectual leadership of research, editing, teaching and receiving visiting delegations, she did the budget, maintained accounts with a series of different envelopes, secured new funding, organised recruitment of new staff, arranged translations, and found office supplies and furniture for the classrooms and documentation centre. She was particularly concerned with improving the conditions (income, health and food provisioning) of our core support staff: driver and translator Salomão Zandamela, driver and messenger Luciano Jossefa and the meticulous organiser of the reprographic section Vasco Muthisse, who produced our neatly covered mimeographed teaching texts and reports. I never heard Ruth complain about not having time for her own writing; she was simply so proud of the CEA. She recharged her energy with very short naps taken after lunch or at the end of the day and sometimes abruptly in the midst of a social conversation that bored or annoyed her. When she woke, she would mumble an apology and mention her very real thyroid condition.
Revolutionary research must respond to different audiences with different genres
In South Africa Ruth had done different kinds of political writing and editing: investigative journalism, pamphleteering, drafting internal discussion documents, the first editing of the toilet rolls smuggled from prison that eventually became Govan Mbeki's book on the Transkei revolts (Mbeki 1984). In exile she extended the kind of writing she did: drafting hundreds of programmatic documents, talks and interviews for anti-apartheid conferences and submissions to international agencies. She also wrote well-researched and argued books, aimed at broad audiences, on issues in African politics. She reworked a BBC film script on her time in detention in South Africa into a probing, self-doubting memoir, again aimed at a broad audience, 117 Days (First 2010). Later, influenced by feminist debates around the intersection of class, race and gender in personal histories, she co-wrote with Ann Scott the academic biography of Olive Schreiner (First and Scott 1980). In all her writing, Ruth matched voice to audience. She could be terse and economical in preparing submissions, more personal and expansive in her memoir, mocking and sarcastic in some of her popular journalism.
In Mozambique Ruth also made us attend to audience and different forms of distribution. We prepared some very short memoranda on particular topics for certain ministries and institutions. Often restricted, these usually elicited an interview between someone high up, Ruth and the authors of the document. The research reports were longer, more open and included both information and analysis. We thought these would be useful to journalists, other teachers, researchers in the university and people working in some ministries, and we expected them to be controversial. We sent copies to provincial officials in the places where the research was done but expected them to be read mainly in Maputo. As our own corpus of research grew, we turned some of it into teaching texts for our courses. There were no explicit references to theory in these texts, even though the research on which they were based was generally theoretically framed. This elicited early debate within the CEA, but I think most agreed with Ruth that our principal audience would not be familiar with nor have access to the work of Althusser, Poulantzas or even Wolpe.
For the students on the Development Course, we did, however, reproduce or translate academic articles on the theory of political economy, African sociology and history. Once the Development Course was running well and research reports appearing regularly, Ruth set up an interdisciplinary journal of Mozambican studies (Estudos Moçambicanos), which published important historical documents and interdisciplinary research on Mozambique done by named academic and non-academic researchers. Copies were distributed to bookshops in all the provincial capitals. The audience was to be a broad swathe of educated Mozambicans with the objective of broadening and deepening debate in Mozambique. A donor provided funds for the translation of the first four issues of the journal into English, but the objective was never to reach an international audience. Ruth was extremely proud of Estudos Moçambicanos and looked after every detail of its publication. It took her some time to get over the remark of a close (and aesthetically informed) friend who suggested that the cover had too many different typefaces.
Revolutionary education of cadres should include field research
Field research was integral to the CEA's Development Course, without any presumption that the students would emerge as specialists in social research. Ruth First felt that democracy within a revolutionary political organisation depended on the continuing education of its cadres in investigative skills and analysis through confrontation with political and economic realities. She found such experience limited in the ANC and the SACP, partly because of the difficulties of organising education within underground movements, but also because both were dependent on the Soviet vision of Marxism as a closed deductive system. Somewhat unexpectedly, since Frelimo was known for its ideological independence, social sciences at Eduardo Mondlane University were equally enmeshed in a Soviet-defined approach to Marxism. All students were required to take courses in historical and dialectical materialism. The introductory course was taught in the form of a catechism, with both questions and answers fixed and to be memorised.
Ruth and the lecturers on the Development Course were Marxists, but they saw Marxism as an open and evolving tradition, responding to changing historical conditions and new political struggles. The problem was how to make this perspective a workable one for our students without provoking political crisis. There were three responses to this dilemma built into the organisation of the Development Course.
The first was to introduce students to a broad range of work on the political economy and history of Africa, southern Africa and Mozambique and to debates on questions of development and socialist development. Ruth's own lectures were informed by her very wide reading. After her death, Joe Slovo gave me two file-boxes of 3 × 5 bibliography cards, mostly typed and some with brief annotations. They are organised by author (e.g. Myrdal, Frank, Rostow), topic (e.g. land reform, modernisation critiques, working class/trade unions) and places (Kenya, Cuba). The references are extremely varied in approach and topic: E. Hobsbawm on Latin American messianic movements, Henry Mapolu on the organisation and participation of workers in Tanzania, Paul Baran on the political economy of growth, Frantz Fanon on African revolution, Lenin on imperialism. Ruth read critical theory, feminist theory, economics, politics and history. Southern Africa was her political focus, but she did not limit her reading to the region. When visitors came to the CEA, Aquino's introduction of her generally ended with, ‘She's from Oxford, you know.’ Though she would just smile benignly, the introduction annoyed me since she never claimed to be from Oxford. I finally realised that Aquino intended his declaration to mean ‘She's a real intellectual you know.’
The second response was to provide structured space for students to discuss, beginning with the reading and the lecture itself. We broke down into groups, each tutored by two of the CEA teaching staff. The course was labour-intensive with the tutors attending all lecture sessions to assure continuity and comparable discussion. Discussion questions were prepared but students could and did redefine questions and introduce their own issues of debate. They were asked, however, to devise arguments and to cite evidence, not just exchange opinions. The groups mixed students with very different educational backgrounds, but this usually facilitated rather than slowed discussion since those with less education often had more work or political experience.
The third response was to make a research project part of the curriculum, beginning with the background to the topic, including its theorisation, proceeding through to the objectives, central questions and main research instruments for study, and finally field research when all students were assigned to a small research group (a brigade) and dispatched to a particular area for a month. Each brigade met at the end of the day to discuss their results, identify new themes and plan the next day's activities. Ruth was usually part of a mobile brigade, moving between groups to analyse the results, triangulate information and coordinate any shifts in the focus of research.8 She also interjected moments of fun. A month of intensive field research, sleeping in tents and making dinner from rice and wormy beans could be wearing. Ruth recognised signs of stress in my research group in Nampula and organised an afternoon and evening off to go to the beach with her in Chocas, a beautiful and then untouristed place on the Indian Ocean.
The Development Course was an experiment in addressing revolutionary education in a context of great educational inequality. Some parts of it worked better than others. Though students were involved in analysis of information from the field research, we never found a way to reconcile student involvement in report writing with our need to get reports out quickly. As shortages increased in Mozambique we found it increasingly difficult to buy food locally for the researchers, or fuel to keep the mobile brigade moving. The eventual incursion of Renamo in more rural areas meant that we could no longer guarantee the safety of our students in many parts of the country. Our last research project before Ruth died was in Angonia, in Tete province, where state farm workers were called at 5 am to do military training. Although our former students are now generally pleased to have the diploma of the Development Course, at the time many complained that it was not equivalent to a university degree. Before Ruth's death, we had already decided that the course would have to change fundamentally.
Living with failure and error
Belonging to a revolutionary movement is no assurance of infallibility. For Ruth, failure, both politically and personally, was extremely painful. She was not the thick-skinned fighter that some took her to be. But philosophically she accepted that failure was sometimes unavoidable and that one simply had to learn from weakness and error and go on. Her most explicit reflection on this is in 117 Days (First 2010), where she describes the despair she felt when she realised she might have been too clever in her sparring with her interrogator. She worried that she might have let slip some information he lacked and was brought close to suicide. One understands why these events came to mark so deeply her understanding of herself and others in a revolutionary struggle. Both she and Joe acknowledged that breaking under interrogation might happen if an MK cadre were captured by the South African Police. If the results were devastating, that was a failure of the collective organisation of security, not the moral failure of a comrade. Hence the importance of no one knowing too much and the ability to reorganise networks rapidly.
On the day of her death, Ruth was recovering and rethinking around a political struggle she had just lost, one far from the most important of many political battles she lost in her life, but one in which she knew she had miscalculated. She had also strained bonds of friendship that were important to her. In the preceding week there had been a regional social sciences conference in Maputo. Fernando Ganhão, the rector of Eduardo Mondlane University, had asked her to organise the meeting and to write his opening speech. There was a sub-text to the meeting; it was to lead eventually to the transfer of the UNESCO regional social science centre from then Zaire to Mozambique. There was substantial Mozambican support for this proposal but Ruth was opposed. Of course she could not say or even imply reluctance in the rector's speech. She thought that dislodging Soviet/GDR hegemony in the Faculty of Marxism–Leninism and the Faculty of Economics should be won before dispersing effort in the setting up of another centre. Though she expected opposition, she thought that our director, Aquino de Bragança, would support her.
It was 1982, shortly after Zimbabwean Independence but 12 years before the end of apartheid, with war ongoing in Namibia and Angola and Renamo expanding its presence in rural Mozambique. The conference went well; there was a lot of networking and good debate on regional issues. On the last day, however, in a session she was chairing, Ruth tentatively voiced the need for caution in pursuing the regional social science centre project. The Mozambican participants had met separately that morning and chosen a young journalist much liked by Ruth as their spokesperson. He opposed her stance and invoked, among other arguments, Mozambique's national interest. Aquino could not easily have defended her in a public gathering; under any circumstances he was a diplomat, preferring negotiated accord to sharp confrontation. He counted on the fact that many awkward questions, if simply left to ambiguity, wither away. Ruth knew that she had pushed a boundary too far, but she and Aquino had known each other since they met as young communists in the late 1940s and she felt abandoned.
By Tuesday afternoon on 17 August, Ruth had regrouped. She decided to have a farewell drink at the CEA for John Saul, who was returning to Canada after a difficult year of teaching in the Faculty of Marxism–Leninism. I met Ruth entering the building with a box of champagne glasses, unofficially borrowed from a government guesthouse. She was wearing the same red blazer, freshly laundered and crisply ironed, that she had worn off and on for moral support throughout the tensions of the previous week. She smiled wryly and I thought, ‘she's still feeling bruised.’
As we waited for John Saul to arrive from another farewell gathering in the Faculty of Marxism–Leninism, Ruth chatted in her office with Pallo Jordan, then head of the ANC's research unit in the Department of Information and Publicity, who had come from Lusaka for the conference. I drifted down later. Aquino blustered in, saying jokingly to Ruth, ‘You've got mail and I never get anything.’ He told her the mail was in our former secretariat, only recently converted to a clippings room. She brightened up and went to fetch the mail while Aquino settled himself down in her chair.
She came back with something that looked to me like a book packet and two junk mail letters from the US information service, one for herself and one for Aquino. She tossed his across the desk and said teasingly, ‘See, you've got mail too.’ We looked on laughing as he opened his envelope while Ruth, standing at the corner of her desk, must have been opening the larger packet that held the bomb. And she died. It seemed like three explosions though there was really only one bomb – the blast, the blowing out of the wall of windows behind her and her office door slamming shut. The room was so silent, the air thick with drifting white dust. Ruth was lying face down, unmoving, that red blazer still bright, her ankles still delicate in beautiful shoes.
It would be utterly wrong to see Ruth's death as inevitable or as the logical outcome of a revolutionary life. Formally, the delivery of the bomb to her university office was a criminal act perpetrated by employees of a criminal state. Though the Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted two people amnesty for the attack, Ruth's teaching and research in the CEA did not satisfy the criteria used to define a ‘legitimate target’. Ruth saw no particular virtue in martyrdom and was definitely not expecting it. She and Joe were both very clear that revolutions are made by the living not by the dead; resistance movements must be organised to avoid unnecessary deaths. They were not careless about their personal security; they knew that in Maputo, so close to South Africa and with so many people moving back and forth, they could easily be located and targeted. They checked their cars for explosive devices, some mail was scanned and they liaised with Mozambican security officials as well as those of the ANC. They moved from a wonderful flat overlooking the sea to a restricted access zone after a South African raid on an MK transit hostel in the outskirts of Maputo. Ruth and Joe could never be fully at ease, but they did not want security to dominate every aspect of their lives, their friendships and their work. They lived probabilistically, trying to minimise threats but accepting there would be lapses and moments of vulnerability.
The tensions of a revolutionary life
Ruth First's struggle for ‘self-definition, in productive and sexual terms’ (First and Scott 1980, 333) was like that of Olive Schreiner, full of tensions and contradictions.9 The consistency and significance of her political struggles and her ease with a revolutionary life in southern Africa were, however, much greater than Schreiner's. Her unwavering engagement with collective struggles and her irreverent answers to the dilemmas they posed made revolutionary life both practical and sustainable for her. Ruth truly was, as Nelson Mandela described her, extraordinarily brilliant, yet I think she was right to insist that the meaning of a life must be written through the times in which it is lived. The divergent experiences of Ruth First and Olive Schreiner as revolutionary South African women have to do not just with personality but with the changing history of southern African resistance, particularly with the emergence of strong nationalist movements linked to socialist projects. This history was made not just by special people but also by many ordinary people who became extraordinary, sometimes only for a moment, through their collective struggles.
In her youth, Soviet Marxism gave Ruth a way of framing the injustices of race and class she confronted in South Africa, just as it did for Ismael Meer, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Joe Slovo, but by the 1970s she had become a leading figure in the struggle to recapture Marxism as an open creative revolutionary tradition in southern Africa. That struggle is not over. The rapid demise of most socialist regimes, the calling into question of the premises of social democratic capitalism by neoliberalism, the decline of organised labour and the rise of new forms of social movements, both global and local, have forced us to rethink old orthodoxies, yet it seems to me misguided to think that contemporary capitalism is a completely new animal or that old questions about how to contest the power of the capitalist state are irrelevant today.
I write as a Marxist and as a feminist, someone who continues to think that capitalism is not the end of history, that socialist revolution is an ongoing political project in southern Africa and elsewhere and that challenging the terms of existing relations between women and men is a necessary part of that project. The dilemmas of revolutionary activists seem to me just as challenging today as they were for Ruth. She, in the company of comrades, made a revolutionary life imaginable, practical and sustainable, a life that was troubled but also joyful, a life that makes sense not just for the bearded rebels of history but for women and men in Southern Africa today.
