I began my talk at the Ruth First Symposium in June 2012 by thanking Leo Zeilig and his wonderful team at the University of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies for their work in putting such an important event together and also Gillian Slovo, Ruth's daughter (there with her two sisters, Shawn and Robin), who was present as a fellow speaker that day – while greeting others in the audience, many of them my old friends and comrades whom I was particularly pleased to see. Indeed, as I then said, this would have been quite a glorious occasion – if our thoughts were not at the same time so bitter and painful.
Ruth's death and our memories
I continued my contribution in London by looking backwards. For, on my return from Maputo 30 years before, I received, almost at once, an invitation to present a eulogy to Ruth First at the American African Studies' Association's annual meeting. A difficult task but an appropriate occasion. The setting: Washington's Capitol Hilton Hotel, just down the road from Reagan's White House and in a vast ballroom which only minutes before had seen Chester Crocker, the administration's senior Africa-hand, flabbily rationalising the United States' kid-gloves treatment of apartheid South Africa to another panel session of the same ASA meeting. Now I had the rostrum to say something of the other side of that struggle. And Ruth's friend Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress, the pre-eminent force for positive change in that country, was to follow me to first speak briefly of Ruth, but then, eloquently, of the present state of his movement's struggle against white-minority rule and racial capitalism. As I said on that occasion, Tambo's very presence
reminded us of Ruth First's own role in the front ranks of that revolutionary struggle since the 1940s: as an editor (with such important publications, ultimately banned, as The Guardian and Fighting Talk), as a writer, as a political organizer, and as a mobilizer of the freedom struggle both within and without South Africa. (Saul 1983a)
As I was certain that Comrade Tambo would have something more to say on this score, I proceeded to speak of a second important dimension of her work, that being
her intellectual contribution not only to the Southern African revolution but also to raising the intellectual and moral level of our own discourse. Consider, among many other writings, her early exposé of South Africa's role in Namibia (South-West Africa, 1963), her harrowing personal account of her own period of solitary confinement in a South African jail (117 Days, 1965), her revelations, with her co-authors, as to The South African Connection (1972) with western capitalism, her landmark study of militarism in independent Africa (The Barrel of a Gun, 1970) her recent blending of socialist and feminist perspectives in the biography of Olive Schreiner which she co-authored (Olive Schreiner, 1980). (Saul 1983a)
But there was of course one further aspect of her career, its most recent phase, one that produced, among other things, her book on Mozambique, Black Gold, and it was also one that I could speak about most confidently and at first hand: this was her role at the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique where, friends for some years previously, we became colleagues. Indeed, in the end, I was two minutes late for a farewell party which she had arranged in my honour, and in those two minutes, in her office in the Centre of African Studies, she died, opening a parcel-bomb, at South Africa's hand.
I continued my Washington speech by underscoring the importance of Ruth's Maputo years, and their broader significance – but, as I said at the London Symposium, we had a whole panel of her co-workers there with us to do just that. What I could say, however, was that the last years of her involvement in the southern African struggle spent participating in the attempt to build socialism in Mozambique very much paralleled her involvement in the continuing struggle for South African freedom – though, of course, she would have made no such distinction between the two struggles.
In this regard it continues to bear emphasising that Ruth First was a brilliant social scientist – albeit a revolutionary social scientist (and, again, she would have made no real distinction between the two, between her roles as revolutionary and as social scientist). For, as a social scientist, she knew that there was no substitute for clear thinking and hard work – for a genuine science. And she knew that solidly grounded revolutionary endeavour required and demanded no less.
I then struck, in my aforementioned Washington speech, a more personal note:
I doubt that there is anyone who knew Ruth First well who didn't have difficult moments with her. She was tough, demanding, even occasionally domineering. She was forged in a hard school, a revolutionary socialist and a woman fighting consistently and unflaggingly against racism, chauvinism and capitalist exploitation in the teeth of one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen and, fortunately for us all, she was ready to fight back for what she believed in.
Besides, even when one looked back at moments of inter-personal tension one had had with her it was also with the realization that such tensions were not arbitrary ones, that almost invariably something important, intellectually and politically, was at stake. The seriousness of her engagement, the intensity of her concern, could never be doubted. Nor, if you were struggling to be as serious yourself, could such moments cast any doubt upon her personal concern, her compassion, her continuing solidarity in the next round of whatever struggle, public or personal, was in train.
Now [as I then wrote] almost two months have passed since that August day in Maputo and, strangely, I still hear, from time to time, her voice echoing quite clearly and tangibly in my ears, snatches of earlier conversations and the like. I know this reflects the strength and continuing impact of her vibrant and powerful personality.
Perhaps others here will have experienced this as well and, of course, for each of us who hears it this will be a private voice. Yet, knowing Ruth, we need not doubt that it is also a political voice, a voice exhorting all of us, here and elsewhere, as ‘Africanists’, as scientists, as activists, to continue the struggle for which she gave her life.
As I then concluded a journal article of the time, one that recounted my own return to Maputo a year after the assassination:
Laying to rest Ruth's ghost on my recent visit to Mozambique was, in fact, a prosaic enough moment. I had had to leave Maputo only days after the assassination and before the funeral. Now I was walking down the hall to Ruth's office where I sat so often in the past but had last seen only from the road as a gaping hole in the outer wall of the building. Not surprisingly, I found it humming with activity, the room itself now serving as the office of the Centre's secretariat. How to avoid cliché: life goes on, the struggle continues. I thought of the five people whom I had known well in both political and personal contexts in Africa who had fallen to the assassin: Ruth; Eduardo Mondlane, Frelimo's first president (killed in 1969 in Dar es Salaam, where I was living at the time, by a book bomb sent by the Portuguese); Walter Rodney the Guyanese historian and activist who had been my next-door neighbour for many years in Tanzania, assassinated in his native Guyana after leaving the continent; Samora Machel, killed in the downing of an airplane drawn off course (it now seems clear) and to its destruction by the South African state; and Aquino de Bragança, victim of the same crash who had also been injured in the room when Ruth herself died. Was I, was the movement, ‘stronger at the broken places’ in the wake of such horrors? Probably not. But, of course, there is no real alternative but to act as if we are, to get on with it. We owe such comrades at least that much. (Saul, 1983b, 176–177)
Her work as scholar-activist
In his own book on Ruth and her writings, Don Pinnock took the pains to search out for citation the article of mine referred to above, one otherwise buried in the pages of a magazine I edited in Canada many years ago. Let me return the compliment by referencing an important book of his, part biography, part a selection of major writings by Ruth from over the years. In it, he speaks particularly eloquently to the topic several of us sought to address on a panel at the London Symposium: ‘Ruth First, the Writer and Activist’:
Ruth's involvement in the 1946 mine workers' strike, followed by her farmworker exposés, focussed her writing on the struggle between capital, labour and the State in a way no other journalists of the period were doing. She was therefore best placed to see the implications of the plethora of legislation and regulation which followed the 1948 election and to understand the baggage of labour legislation that the new government has inherited from the old. For Ruth it was not the individuals or the parliamentary Acts that made history, but the context which made them possible … [Of course], she wanted to know how institutions worked, who they were composed of, where the power lay, who benefited from them and how that impacted on individuals. [But] she also wanted to break them open to public scrutiny and action. (Pinnock 2012, 26–27)
Like Berthold Brecht before her, Ruth wrote (Pinnock himself concludes) to provoke her readers to action and also to ‘discredit the legitimacy of the existing regime’. As Brecht once put it in his powerful poem ‘To Posterity’:
But Brecht, like Ruth, did not really ‘despair’, and both continued to offer resistance of their own. As Brecht continues:
Slept more comfortably without Ruth? This is what Craig Williamson and the other killers and terrorists who populated the South African state apparatus (right to its very apex) must have hoped for when they moved so brutally to still her voice in August 32 years ago.
What might she have said?
I needn't dwell on the loss: all of us who are in London today, I then said, must certainly feel it. But I will mention one particular place where her loss particularly gnaws at me. We learn, for example, from Gillian's book, Every Secret Thing, that Ruth quarrelled with Joe about the implications of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, which she condemned (Slovo 1997, 110–111). For she always had something challenging to say. So, I can't help asking myself, just what would Ruth have said, more contemporaneously, about what liberation has come to mean in South Africa – a result that I myself have characterised in recent writing as having seen the country, in effect, ‘recolonised’ by a still dominant Empire of Capital. But I noted that I had written an article on this topic for next year's Socialist Register (Saul 2012) that could be read there if anyone cared to and that, in any case, I had come to celebrate Ruth and not myself. So I concluded, more appropriately, with the close-to final thoughts on post-apartheid developments of a dear friend of Ruth's who outlived her by several decades, a stalwart comrade, Rusty Bernstein. I summon his voice from a letter he wrote to me shortly before his death in 2002, a letter that contained the following words:
The drive towards power has corrupted the political equation in various ways. In the late 1980s, when popular resistance revived again inside the country led by the UDF, it led the ANC to see the UDF as an undesirable factor in the struggle for power, and to fatally undermine it as a rival focus for mass mobilization. It has undermined the ANC's adherence to the path of mass resistance as a way to liberation, and substituted instead a reliance on manipulation of the levers of administrative power. It has paved the way to a steady decline of a mass-membership ANC as an organizer of the people, and turned it into a career opening to public sector employment and the administrative ‘gravy train’. It has reduced the tripartite ANC-COSATU-CP alliance from the centrifugal centre of national political mobilization to an electoral pact between parties who are constantly constrained to subordinate their constituents' fundamental interests to the overriding purpose of holding on to administrative power. It has impoverished the soil in which ideas leaning towards socialist solutions once flourished and allowed the weed of ‘free market’ ideology to take hold. (Bernstein 2007, 144)
Strong words! To what extent would Ruth have wished to second them herself? Obviously we can never know but the extent that such a question haunts us – or, at least, haunts me – is a measure of how courageous, independent-minded and strong a writer-activist she was, and of how much we all still miss her clear and principled voice.