When Ruth First was assassinated in August 1982, I knew who she was but had never read anything by her. Every word she had written had been banned in South Africa. At the time I was teaching journalism at Rhodes University in South Africa's Eastern Cape and trying to work out the media's position within the strategy and tactics for mass mobilisation. I had learned my trade in the commercial press – objective, non-writer-involved, ideology-free – Who? What? Where? When? How? – and occasionally Why? But now we on the Left were learning how to report and mobilise at the same time.
Throughout the 1970s resistance to apartheid had been building – first through a series of strikes and then, in 1976, the uprising by school children in Soweto against being taught in Afrikaans. By 1980 the youth was getting more organised but there was no ideological coherence. Then, in mid 1981, something happened that was politically electrifying.
A modest campaign was started to oppose the attempt by the government to hold a racially segregated election for a South African Indian Council (SAIC). I had arrived at a protest meeting in Athlone, Cape Town, and found the hall surrounded by police and army vehicles. Inside, the banned Freedom Charter was strung around the perimeter on large banners. The audience of about a thousand soon became aware that this meeting went far beyond the Anti-SAIC campaign. Marshalls who ushered people to their seats wore khaki uniforms with green, black and gold ribbons. Speakers reminded people of the traditions of resistance born out of the Congress Alliance (the African National Congress, ANC), about the need for unity and the necessity to boycott undemocratic state institutions. They affirmed their commitment to work towards a united democratic society as enshrined in the Freedom Charter. As the meeting ended, a large ANC flag was unfurled behind the rostrum. The police, unsure what to do and perhaps as startled as we were, did nothing.
In many ways, the Anti-SAIC gathering paralleled earlier political events such as the 1955 Kliptown Congress meeting. The key document at both was the Freedom Charter. A tabloid newspaper, The Call, was distributed to the crowd in Athlone and surprised us in its strong and frequent references to the struggles of the 1950s and the Congress Alliance. ‘The call’, it said, ‘is for all democratic forces to unite on the basis of the Freedom Charter … for unity in action on a broad front … for us to build on the lessons learnt in the 1950s – the decade of mass struggle – and to march forward without hesitation.’ It became clear that the forms of struggle battered into silence in the early 1960s were springing back to life in the 1980s.
I am an African historian by training, but the 50s were not my period. I had to remind myself that the period between the South African mineworkers strike of 1946 when Ruth First left university and 1964 when she was deported from the country was hugely politically volatile.
The National Party came into power in 1948 and voted into law a welter of repressive legislation that divided people and the country along racist lines. It also banned the Communist Party, of which Ruth was a member, staged a massive Treason Trial, killed pass protesters at Sharpeville, called a state of emergency, then banned the African National Congress and Pan African Congress and jailed Nelson Mandela and others for nearly three decades.
Reaction to this onslaught included the Defiance Campaign, the Congress of the People, the Freedom Charter, anti-pass campaigns, the Women's March on the Union Buildings, the formation of the South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD) and Congress Alliance, the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Rivonia Trial, where Mandela and others were served sentences of life imprisonment.
During that time Ruth, as a journalist on The Guardian/New Age and other Left publications and through her political links, was involved in almost every organised resistance to apartheid. She went on trial for treason and, later, was held in solitary confinement for 117 days. I managed to get a photocopy of her book 117 Days, and it shook me. To lay bare her own attempted suicide, an attempt to kill herself rather than betray her comrades, must have taken considerable courage.
It soon became clear that the political period she was writing about – the way she was writing it – was happening all over again in South Africa. The political Left, with increasing consciousness, was re-running the 1950s at both a political and an emotional level and, as the activists of that time had been, we were in danger of being annihilated. For me, discovering the lives of the Guardian/New Age journalists was déjà vu. Coming across Ruth's writing (it was amazing what you could discover in those days, even without Google), I recognised ‘That's it!’ She had clearly worked out the relationship between factual reporting and mass mobilisation. I was fascinated by this educated, fashionable, white and clearly extremely intelligent opstooker (agitator) whose ideas and writing, forged in the crucible of the time, returned to capture my world 30 years later. And then, in 1982, she was assassinated in Mozambique.
In conditions decidedly precarious, I began looking up old comrades who had known Ruth and – given that many were from the then-banned South African Communist Party (SACP) – found more than I had expected. I conducted what was to be the last interview with Pieter Byleveld of SACOD before he died, tracked down Ruth's brother Ronald, spent time with her mother, Tilly, and with friends Bill and Miriam Hepner, Rowly Arenstein, Yetta Barenblad, Amina and Yusuf Cachalia, Mary Benson, Baruch Hirson, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Harold Wolpe, Rusty Bernstein and many others in South Africa, Moscow and London.1 I talked to Joe Slovo – then ‘public enemy number one’ in South Africa – about Stalinism, the 1950s and Ruth's taste in clothes and Italian shoes. In Cape Town I located New Age printer Fred Carnison, who dug up a chest buried in his garden to show me treasured records, and I interviewed a still extremely handsome Ismael Meer who was one of Ruth's first lovers. Facts and 50s gossip came fast, but all with deep respect for Ruth's privacy. In the archives of the University of Cape Town I pestered librarians until they located what I knew to be there (but which had been misplaced): the Guardian/New Age archives (now in the Amy Thornton Collection).
In between, I was reading Ruth's writing in the various Left newspapers of the time and in Fighting Talk, which she edited. What she was doing is something I came to describe as insider journalism. It was building an alternative consensus by breaking the ‘common sense’ myth of reporting. The mimetic undergirding of her journalism was: Whose common sense? The way she wrote was not propaganda as the Treason Trial tried to assert. It asked questions within a different conceptual paradigm. I loved her interrogative way of writing, her questioning and the way she forced the reader to complete the thought, to ask their own questions. This was precisely the form of journalism I was looking for. She became my guide into the struggle journalism of the 1980s and, by default, the hundreds of journalism students I was teaching at Rhodes University. Eventually I produced two books about Ruth's inspiration, Voices of Liberation and Writing Left.
During this period I became involved in the United Democratic Front – formed in 1983 by a broad range of popular organisations which became in effect a new, wider, Congress Alliance (I think rather to the surprise of the ANC in exile). It spread like wildfire and widened and deepened the Congress tradition through marches, banners, pamphlets, T-shirts, lapel buttons, hand signals and robust new publications churned out on newly arrived desktop computers and plain-paper copiers. It constituted a blizzard of media that the journalists of The Guardian, with their cumbersome technology, would have relished.
I was also a member of the Grahamstown Rural Committee and the Surplus Peoples' Project. In the Eastern Cape, the state had created vast reserves of people removed from white-declared areas and was using them as labour pools. I was part of a struggle to keep black peasant farmers from being evicted by drawing local and international attention to human dumping grounds like Sada and Thornhill. We were infuriating white farmers whose labour supply was being threatened and Bantustan officials who were being shown up as state lackeys.
At the same time, I was reading Ruth's writing on the inhuman conditions on the potato farms at Bethal which she and Michael Scott had exposed in 1947. Pass offenders were then being ‘sold’ to farmers. Their work led to the Potato Boycott and the eventual release of hundreds of pass-enslaved farm labourers. In my reporting in Grassroots, Work in Progress and Ilizwe LaseRini in the 1980s, I found I was using Ruth's interrogative style and phrasing of that campaign. These parallels followed me throughout the 1980s. Here are just some of those connections.
In the 1950s, through New Age and the Congress Alliance, The Call was distributed, inviting everyone to contribute to the drafting of a Charter. Being the journalist of the group, Ruth was given the task of assembling the thousands of demands into a coherent document. The clarity of the Freedom Charter has Ruth's signature style written all over it. In the UDF campaigns, the clauses of the Freedom Charter became our minimum demands.
After the declaration of states of emergency in the 1980s there were rolling consumer boycotts in which I was involved while reading Ruth's brilliant analysis of the Alexander Bus Boycotts in 1957 and using her perspectives.
I studied the way Ruth helped to build awareness around the women's anti-pass campaigns in the 1950s while taking part in marches and large gatherings and then mass funerals when the marches were banned and people were killed. The Grahamstown Rural Committee was working with Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkonto and Fort Calata when they were murdered by police. More than 100,000 people attended their funeral in Cradock. On the way there from Grahamstown we passed farm workers in rags standing at the fences with their fists raised.
In the 1980s journalists and newspapers were again being banned and the struggle was over how words were intended and interpreted and whether they were seditious. It was a constant legal battle over language. That is exactly what the marathon 1956 Treason Trial was about. Ruth, Joe Slovo and 154 others were in court for four years over the Freedom Charter and whether it, and thousands of other documents including most of what Ruth wrote, fostered communism, violence and treason. The accused won, too, and the charges were dropped. But this did not prevent the ANC from being banned after Sharpeville.
And of course in the 1980s there were secret meetings, police spies, phone tapping, arrests and detention without trial. As the Left did in the in 50s and 60s, we 80s activists experienced all of this. The present ANC Minister of Rural Affairs spent anxious moments ducking into our Grahamstown cellar whenever someone knocked on our door (his furniture was housed in our garage for two years after police shot his dog and attempted to burn his house).
I interviewed friends of Ruth who talked about her time in Swaziland when her disguise was flaming red hair. In some ways I lived 117 Days and her terrible doubts about possible betrayal. Who were the spies? Who was talking? Had she said too much? How much depended on her? Reading this account while expecting the knock of the security police on my own door could be harrowing.
In 1988 I paused for reflection. It was clear that on the ground, using the tactics and symbols of the 1950s, the mass democratic movement was winning against a state considerably more powerful than the one faced by the Congress Alliance. Why? I attempted to answer this in a seminar at Oxford University that year.2 But what I did not say at the time was that the paper was essentially a discussion with Ruth.
I argued that the apartheid state, caught between making concessions to ease political pressure and to look good internationally, while brutally cracking down on opposition, was simply widening popular understanding of its ideological bankruptcy. The mass democratic movement, using new and unexpected tools of communication, levered open this contradiction and made the country ungovernable.
People in the townships continued to watch TV, listen to the radio and read commercial newspapers. But increasingly the information which informed their choices and action came from elsewhere: from the popular circuits of communication and from understandings drawn from events around them. Together this brought about a fundamental social transformation at the level of popular consciousness.
What Ruth realised in the 1950s – and helped me understand in the 1980s – was the central position of Left media in building an alternative consensus which was to result, in the 1950s, in the massive Treason Trial and the banning of the ANC and SACP and, in the 1980s, the unbanning of these organisations and the freeing of Mandela.
Again, the parallels were almost eerie. In August 1987 the apartheid government fine-tuned tough media restrictions imposed on what it described as the ‘unconventional revolution-supportive press’. Introducing the curbs, the Minister of Home Affairs, Stoffel Botha, said the restrictions were aimed at media which were guilty of ‘systematic or repeated publication’ of material which had the effect of:
promotion of revolution or uprisings in the Republic;
promotion of the breaking down of the public order;
the stirring up of feelings of hatred and hostility toward a local authority or security forces;
promotion of activities of unlawful structures;
promotion of boycott actions and acts of civil disobedience.
The curbs empowered Botha to close down any publication for three months and provided for the appointment of pre-publication censors. ‘Elements of the media’, he told parliament, ‘are generating support for the revolutionary organisations through idolising and propagating their symbols … and their symbols are those of revolution.’3 He was probably unaware that he was virtually repeating the charges of the prosecution at the 1956 Treason Trial.
I have quite often been asked why I was interested in Ruth and her journalism. I never knew her, was not a member of her family and was never in the Communist Party. I suppose, having written a political biography, a selected works and a biography about Ruth for teenagers, that is a fair question to ask. But I have not answered it until now.
There is always a danger, when researching and writing about the life of a person that a biographer – even a partial biographer – gets too close and starts identifying. In writing about Ruth, this was made doubly difficult because the battles she had been part of framing had sprung back to life and were in the streets flying Congress flags all around me.
Like her, journalists on the Left in the 1980s had a sense of making history while reporting it. Like her, we were building an alternative consensus, theorising the form of the state as we went, innovating, experimenting, feeling our way into new political and ideological territories.
The continuation of the unfinished business of the Congress Movement became our context and Ruth my guide. She was there at every turn. I used her insights, copied her style and taught all of this to students who hopefully still use it. Many are now editors and senior journalists in newspapers and magazines.
I had a sense of working to give new life, in a small way, to what Ruth had begun. Her insecurities were endearing. Her bravery was encouraging. And her love of a good party humanised her. But mostly it was what she chose to write about and how she wrote in a period that resonated with my own that captured my attention. And I carried that forward as best as I could.
Standing in the election queue of South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, I wished Ruth could be there. She would have felt such pride, such a sense of accomplishment. She might also have warned us of the route ahead, in the style of her seminal work Barrel of a Gun, and her words remain pertinent:
power in Africa was transferred, through virtually unchanged institutions of government, to largely hand-picked heirs. These heirs are the new ruling groups of Africa … In the words of Franz Fanon, ‘Spoilt children of yesterday's colonialism and of today's governments, they organise the loot of whatever national resources exist.’ (First 1970, 11).
She certainly had a way with words …
