‘Today is Human Rights Day,’ began Ruth First, in her typed notes towards a speech she was to present in London on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in December 1968. First's notes included an introductory comment that already anticipated the continuing quandary, if not outright dispute, regarding the history (and its correlated historiography) of what would come to be denominated as the ‘human rights movement’: ‘We live’, she typed in 1968 (and Ruth First was a magnificently and notoriously adept typist),
in an age of human rights declarations. Wordy, declamatory. High sounding proclamations, capital letters, stilted phrases. It's not what they say that is wrong, or unimportant, but the glaring fact of the contradictions between the principles, the gaps between what we say about human rights and what is done.
Ruth First delivered two ‘human rights day’ speeches (the second in 1970), together with another public address presented on the occasion of United Nations Day in 1969. Contemporary historiographies of the ‘human rights movement’ show it to have an uncertain relation to historic processes of decolonisation and political demands for national self-determination. In her speeches First critically signposted the world-historical example set by the anti-apartheid struggle in the late 1960s through the 1970s and sets it against international humanitarian propositions and human rights exercises. She raises too the vexed question of the continuing (ir)relevance of the United Nations to the management and prosecution of international relations, conflict resolution, social justice and economic development as well as human rights.
In his memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace (2012), former UN Secretary General (1997–2006) Kofi Annan reviewed the history of the re-workings of the UN over its nearly seven decades-long lifespan – from post-war through Cold War and into a still-raging post-9/11 ‘global war on terror’, from decolonisation to globalisation, and the attendant cartographic realignments and their affiliated slogans, such as the ‘three worlds’, East versus West, global north versus global south, ‘clashing civilizations’, as well as blocs, regions, and their related competing interests and compromised investments. His conclusion was pessimistic. In the 1960s and 1970s, according to Annan, ‘we … watched the UN launch its first “development decades”. However, in the rich world’, Annan continued, emphasising a geopolitical bifurcation that prevails today,
it was not with poverty but violence that international attention and political efforts became transfixed. East and West were embroiling themselves in the explosion of civil wars of that time resulting from the struggles for national power following the retreat of Europe's empires. Among the great powers, which were fueling these civil wars in the hope of securing victory for their favored faction, there was little care for development. (Annan 2012, 212)
Ruth First's engagement in the 1970s, with both human rights discourse and powerful international institutions such as the United Nations, raised questions as to the platforms and slogans which were to be accessed, adopted or adapted in the struggle for African liberation and national development.
1964–1972: courting world opinion before the international institutions
In addition to her public declamations on human rights and the United Nations in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, First served as a consultant for at least six inquiries conducted by the United Nations into human rights and economic and social (development) issues. This relatively short but decisive period was critical both to her own biographical narrative and to the history of anti-apartheid struggle by the African National Congress (ANC) and its international supporters. The assigned topics of these UN-initiated inquiries reflected First's own political and investigative credentials, grounded already in her reputation for research and journalism as well as her personal and political experiences. Work on the UN inquiries would continue to inform her research, writing and pedagogy until her death by assassination in Maputo in 1982 – via a letter bomb delivered to her university office while preparing, coincidentally or not, a celebratory party to conclude an academic conference sponsored by the United Nations.
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Ruth's first engagement with the UN goes back to the apartheid period and her 117 days of solitary confinement in Johannesburg (and Pretoria), having been arrested and detained under the notoriously wide provisions of South Africa's infamous 1963 Ninety-Day Detention Law. Although no charges were ever pressed against her, she recalls an irksomely forgotten copy of Fighting Talk, a banned publication that she edited, that had been discovered when the arresting officers searched her house – and which ominously resurfaced more than once in the course of her interrogations during her detention. An extended account of that gruelling experience would be narrated in the acclaimed autobiographical 117 Days, published in 1965 at the behest, not least, of her friend and mentor, the late Ronald Segal. In April 1964, however, by which time First had joined her husband, Joe Slovo, in exile in London, she had already elected to testify before the UN's Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid of the Government of the Republic of South Africa on its inhumane prison conditions. First delivered her testimony to the UN as a former political prisoner, ‘one of the casualties’, she told the hearing, of ‘apartheid rule’. She thereby signalled her implicit acknowledgement of the critical relevance of international institutions such as the UN, as well as the courts of world opinion that she would address in turn in her prison memoir. Ruth First was not alone among her ANC comrades in recognising the options presented by both the discourse of ‘human rights’ and the institution of the United Nations. Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC-in-exile, made this clear in his own 1 June 1968 ‘Statement on Human Rights Year’:
For the oppressed people of South Africa the commemoration of the twentieth year of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bears a very poignant meaning. In our country the Declaration of Human Rights is a ‘treasonable’ document – a crying indictment of all the practices, policies and laws of the South African State. (Tambo 1968)
First's own bio-bibliography – from her first book on South West Africa through to the posthumously published Black Gold (1983) on migrant labour in Mozambique, from human rights to development – might be read in its own way as a critical commentary on that institutional historical narrative. That the United Nations did not intervene to resolve the dilemma of South Africa's claim to trusteeship over South West Africa, and its nefarious contribution to the death of Patrice Lumumba in newly independent Congo in 1960, could hardly go unremarked. As First wrote in her study of ‘political power and the coup d’état’, Barrel of a Gun (1970, see First, Papers) – at much the same time that she was embarking on her engagement as a UN consultant –
This [the coup that overthrew Lumumba] was the first time that the legitimacy of the colonial inheritance was defied and denied. And it was done with the connivance – where not the collaboration – of the West and even of the United Nations. (First 1967, 20–21, see First, Papers)
First's public excoriations of individuals and governments who were deemed to have engaged in ‘gross human rights violations’, whether civil and political on the one hand or economic and social on the other, had long distinguished her engagement with the multiple and variously seated courts of world opinion. Her positioning was founded on her prolific editorial and investigative journalism in 1950s South Africa on topics ranging from farm labour abuses (itself an example of ‘prisoner’ abuse) to women's bus boycotts and pass laws. It continued through her substantive reporting and editorial commentaries with the British-based Anti-Apartheid News in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in other venues and outlets, from the Review of African Political Economy (of which she was a founding editor) to the political ephemera that attached to struggles from Mozambique or Eritrea (an issue on which First was decidedly at odds with the majority ANC-SACP position, which defended the territorial boundaries of Africa drawn up a century earlier at the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885). Myriad drafts, clippings and correspondence associated with these writings litter her collected papers and give their collection a particular piquancy as well as a persistent sense of immediate urgency – not to mention testifying to the fluency of her typewriting, as well as her famously cutting tongue!
Ruth First's typewritten notes, occasionally glossed by her spidery, sometimes near indecipherable script, offer searching and provocative annotations to the complicated contemporary histories of a new and revised ‘global anti-apartheid era’. Notes for the two speeches on Human Rights Day (1968 and 1970) as well as the complementary intervening address on United Nations Day (1969) also include post-apartheid considerations, including contemporary questions of national sovereignty and the ‘right to petition’ the UN for redress of wrongs. This claim was especially urgent at the time in the case of South West Africa/Namibia, whose protests against South African trusteeship, a remnant of the post-World War One League of Nations and negotiations at Versailles, demanded representation. First's UN consultancies were largely under the supervision of Enuga S. Reddy, an Indian national who served as Principal Secretary of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid from 1963 to 1967 and subsequently as Chief of Section for African Questions (1967–1975), Director of the UN Center against Apartheid (1976–1984) and Assistant Secretary-General (1983–1985). According to Ryan Irwin, the ‘language of anti-apartheid criticism’ was seen to ‘shift from African nationalism to universal human rights’ (Irwin 2013, 145) during this period and thus First's remits varied broadly, but were not without regional focus and their own political coherence. Ruth First contributed to several reports over the course of her UN ‘service’ – on the treatment of political prisoners in South African jails (including her own personal testimony), the recruitment of African workers in South West Africa (Namibia) or the deplorable living conditions in the ‘native reserves’ and ‘transit camps’ across southern Africa. She illustrated her already expanded grasp of the opportunistic usefulness of human rights discourse – and its limitations when compartmentalising those diversified rights into their respective individual and collective boxes.
Ruth demonstrated her awareness of and wariness toward these machinations, even as she scripted the notes for her public comments for the occasion of UN Day in 1969. ‘We have come to light a candle for a birthday of the United Nations,’ she proclaimed. ‘Not everyone agrees on what kind of birthday person or creature this is, but as someone said, it is better to argue over the United Nations than to shelve it politely.’
Human Rights Day and United Nations Day speeches (1968–1970)
While First is cautiously guarded against any too fulsome endorsement of an unreconstructed human rights agenda, she is also adamantly and unrelentingly outspoken in condemning South Africa for its almost unique disregard of the international community of nations for the entire roster of rights that had been embedded in the 1948 Universal Declaration. In her 1968 notes for Human Rights Day, for example, she reminds herself: ‘Unlikely that any country in the world could claim that all the articles of the UN Decl of Human Rights applies to all its citizens at all times.’ But, she goes on, ‘There is at least one country where not one of the articles of the Decl, not a single one, apply to most of its citizens all the time. This is South Africa, where discrimination, race discrim, [are] written into its laws and proclaimed as the cornerstone of official policy.’ That summary condemnation of her native land also specifies a set of the UDHR's articles with particular relevance to the South African situation under apartheid, reflecting perhaps the speaker's own recent experience as a political detainee. These specified articles expose the systemic humanitarian abuses inherent in apartheid's arcane legal apparatus, including: 1. all human beings are born free and equal; 2. everyone is entitled to the rights and freedoms set forth in the UDHR; 3. and 4. right to life, liberty, and freedom from slavery; 6. recognition as a person before the law; 7. and 8. equality before the law and effective remedy in national tribunals; 9. freedom from arbitrary arrest; 10. and 11. fair and public hearings and presumption of innocence; 12. no arbitrary detention; 13. freedom of movement; 18. freedom of thought; 19. and 20. freedom of opinion and right to peaceful assembly.
Two years later, in the notes for her second public speech commemorating Human Rights Day, First seemed to have grown even more heedful of the depoliticising potential of ‘high sounding proclamations, capital letters, stuffy pompour [sic], stilted phrases’. She now cites the emerging ‘contradiction between the principles and the people of human rights’, even while lamenting the fact that too often the ‘principles obscure the people, dehumanise them, so the words, not the people become the object of the exercise’. Not unlike ‘(STUFFED BIRDS IN A CAGE)’, she bemoans parenthetically, albeit using the very same exclamatory ‘capital letters’ that she had derided but a few lines earlier! First now notes the ever-present dangers lurking in a self-indulgently maudlin or sentimental humanitarianism that threatens to incapacitate political organisation and/or popular movement-building. Having just poignantly but pointedly cited the ‘clamour often roused over one case, one child, the victim of polio or cancer, rather than the generation of Vietnamese threatened with napalm’, she adds that:
The people must be saved, especially the children, but the principles must be grasped too, and grappled with, for it should not [be] a case of dispensing sympathy and charity, but of grasping the principles at the root so we can reconcile the needs of principles and of people.
A similar politicising ambivalence can be discerned as underwriting First's celebration of the United Nations on the occasion of its birthday, noting as she does the institution's occasional negative reputation as the ‘best club in New York for those who could not join the Harvard or Yale Clubs’ or as a ‘parliament of diplomats and their windy wordy rhetorics’. Nonetheless, in 1969, Ruth First argues, if not in quite the same breath, at least in the same speech, that: ‘For Africa I would say that the United Nations and its machinery represented the first phase of Africa's decolonisation, when alien colonial admins withdrew for the most part.’ The year 1960, for example, saw the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, declaring, among other things, that the ‘subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, [and] is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation’ (UN General Assembly 1960, emphasis added). The Declaration added that: ‘All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (UN General Assembly, 14 December 1960, emphasis added). Five years later, in December 1965, the UN General Assembly had gone on to adopt the more elaborate International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. But still by 1969, according to First, there was much work to be done, not least in southern Africa, in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa. First confirms her previous UN birthday well-wishing comment as to the first phase of the UN's role in the process of decolonisation, but notes that it did not yet extend to ‘the embattled areas of the South, where entrenched white minorities are in power’. She went on to document this position through a number of consultancies, writing reports for the United Nations and its various committees and commissions relating in particular to southern Africa.
Ruth First at the United Nations 1969–1972
In the three years between 1969 and 1972 Ruth First undertook to write – or collaborate in the writing of – at least six reports for the already burgeoning United Nations bureaucracy's select committees and special agencies. She was relatively well remunerated for her research and drafting work as someone well qualified, in E.S. Reddy's words, with ‘knowledge of the South African situation, some training in research, and almost a fanatical concern for accuracy’. In April 1965 Reddy, then Principal Secretary of the UN's Special Committee against Apartheid, had written to his colleague and friend Ambrose Reeves, the former Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, deported from South Africa in September 1960 for his critically principled stance in opposition to the apartheid government, of his ‘most desperate need right now … for someone to prepare a draft of a report to the next session of the General Assembly’ (First, Papers). Ruth First seemed to fit the specifications. Her certifications and bona fides included not only her personal experience of an apartheid prison but also first-hand research into the history and contemporary circumstances of South West Africa, published as her first book, South West Africa (1963) in the critically important Penguin African Library series edited by her fellow exile in London, Ronald Segal. There were also her meticulous 1950s investigations into farm labour scandals in South Africa, to cite but a few examples from her remarkably wide-ranging curriculum vitae.
Reddy duly copied his letter to Bishop Reeves to the exiled former political detainee, who had by then been in London for just over a year. Some four years later, in 1969 – and albeit not without prior intermittent work for the United Nations – First began her contractual obligations with the UN. She reported in particular to the Division of Human Rights and the Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, but also had specific remits variously concerning ‘conditions of Africans in the so-called transit camps’, ‘wages and working conditions in South Africa’ and the ‘role of foreign investment in South Africa’. First would indeed soon publish, together with Christabel Gurney and Jonathan Steele, The South African Connection: Western Investment in Apartheid (1972).
Ruth First's contractual and consultancy obligations to the UN, while exhibiting some of the current pitfalls of what Mahmood Mamdani (2011) has since denounced as a ‘consultancy culture’, nonetheless betoken the earlier era's opportune – and sometimes opportunistic – approach to such outreach. The very contracts themselves, signed by Ruth First, are illustrative not only of UN priorities, but illuminating too with regard to First's own positioning. They suggest the advantages of remunerated opportunities that accrued to exiled Third World intellectuals who sought to find employment with the international institution, not to mention the juncture of circumstances that might well allow those same intellectuals to contribute to, if not influence, the deliberations of the world body over the changing distribution of power and division of labour in a now largely decolonised world order. Even a limited sampling of the details from those contracts, bureaucratic as they are, is perhaps worth rehearsing, for the organisational description that they provide of the prescribed services to be rendered, the apparent rhetorical dullness, even apathy, of the assignment's wording, and the rigid formatting protocols and page count limitations, not to mention the pay scales tacitly estimating the exchange value that attached to the respective topics to be presented before the ‘official’ courts of world opinion:
Prepare a paper of approximately 5,000 words on “Wages and Working Conditions in South Africa” in accordance with the following outline:
Nature of Services: Prepare, for the draft report of the Ad Hoc Working Group of Experts established under resolution 2 (XXIII) of the Commission on Human Rights (a) a paper of approximately 15 pages on the conditions of Africans in the so-called transit camps, as well as on the so-called native reserves, in Namibia and (b) in co-operation with Mr. Alexander Hepple, a paper of approximately 15 pages on the conditions of Africans in the so-called transit camps as well as on the so-called native reserves, in the Republic of South Africa. The two papers are subject to editing by Mr. Hepple prior to submission to the United Nations.
To prepare, for a draft report of the Ad Hoc Working Group of Experts established under resolution 2 (XXIII) of the Commission on Human Rights, (a) a paper of approximately 15 pages on the conditions of Africans in the so-called Native reserves and transit camps in Namibia; and (b) in co-operation with Mr. Alexander Hepple, a paper of approximately 25 pages on the conditions of Africans in transit camps and Native reserves in South Africa. The two papers should concentrate on developments after 1 December except as regards the police powers and the educational system in the reserves concerning which prior developments should also be analyzed. The papers are subject to editing by Mr. Hepple prior to submission to the United Nations.
To prepare a paper of approximately 7,500 words on The “Bantustans” in South Africa in accordance with the attached outline.
To prepare approximately 7,000 words on the “Role of Foreign Investment in South Africa”, with special reference to the policy of apartheid, especially in recent years, in accordance with the following outline: Extent of foreign investment in South Africa (especially from the United Kingdom, the United States, Federal Republic of Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium and Japan); direct and indirect investment, role of joint venture and relation of foreign investment with State-owned enterprises. An examination of the role played by foreign investment in various sectors of the economy, with special reference to new growth areas such as automobile industry, oil prospecting, electronics and computers, chemicals, and nuclear research. The effect of this investment in strengthening the position of the South African Government in implementing apartheid.
1. Prepare for the draft reports of [see above]: (a) a paper of approximately 50 pages (1 ½ spaces) dealing with recent developments in South Africa and Namibia as regards the following questions: (i) Capital punishment; (ii) Treatment of political prisoners and captured freedom fighters; (iii) Conditions of Africans in “native reserves” and “transit camps”; (iv) Grave manifestations of apartheid (in South Africa) and of colonialism and racial discrimination (in Namibia); (b) another paper of approximately 15 pages (1 ½ spaces) dealing with the system of recruitment of African workers in Namibia. The two papers should consist for each question of a brief historical background and a survey of legislation, concentrating on developments after 1 December 1970 …
2. Assume responsibility for editing and co-ordinating, with respect to uniformity of style and presentation required for United Nations, the above papers and two others prepared by Mr. Francis Nehwati covering the same questions for Southern Rhodesia.
Critically wary and probing as Ruth First's collaboration with the United Nations' agenda may have been in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she had nonetheless written bluntly to Reddy in March 1965, regarding the UN and South Africa specifically, that ‘United Nations action will be rescue action. For the conflict now dawning in South Africa, outside forces will inevitably be drawn. This is not a dry constitutional argument,’ she insisted, ‘but the fate of the Africans in South Africa involves deep affairs of principle and deep passions. South Africa is the test case for all Africa and a crucial test of the United Nations’ (emphasis added).