Reports on the Brutal Murder of Ruth First

Reports on the Brutal Murder of Ruth First

On 18 August 1982, South African newspapers reported that Heloise Ruth First, the wife of Joe Slovo, the Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was killed by a parcel bomb at her office in Eduardo Mondlane University, in Maputo, Mozambique, the previous day, on 17 August 1982. Ruth First was since 1977 the Research Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University.

Three other people were taken to the Hospital in more or less serious condition because they had been next to her when she opened what looked to be a parcel with books. These included Aquino de Braganza, the Director of the Centre, Bridget O’Laughlin, who was her close colleague, as well as Pallo Jordan, a visiting ANC researcher who had participated in a UNESCO seminar organised by the Centre. Speaking at the Ruth First Memorial lecture, on 28 August 2000, Pallo Jordan bemoaned that the “lecture does not mark a happy occasion. In fact it marks a murder. The death of the comrade whom we are honouring this evening was the result of a vile deed.”

The parcel bomb had been created as an instruction from apartheid police officer, Major Craig Williamson, who was then a member of the Security Branch’s G Section, which was responsible for foreign intelligence. According to Williamson, he received instructions from his section head, Captain Piet ‘Biko’ Goosen, to arrange for the preparation of the bombs and then he ordered Warrant Officer Jerry Raven of the police technical section, who was involved in the manufacturing of the explosive device, with the assistance of another Security Branch policeman, Sergeant Steve Bosch.

Apartheid spy Craig Williamson killed Ruth First out of frustration because the security forces were unable to assassinate her husband, Joe Slovo, despite many attempts. Williamson conceded at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in Pretoria on 17 September 1998 that he had been exasperated by Slovo’s ability to elude the security force strikes against him. The former apartheid spy was applying for amnesty, together with Brigadier Piet Goosen and Roger Raven, for his part in arranging the letter bombs that killed Ruth First in Mozambique in 1982 and Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter Katryn in Angola in 1984.

However, Pallo Jordan disputed that the target was Joe Slovo, as he was in the same room at the time, but suffered no serious injury. He said the bomb “said a great deal about how desperate the regime was” at that time. According to Jordan, “I know afterwards the people who did it, Craig Williamson and them, claimed that Joe Slovo was the target, but that was an outright lie. I say with absolute confidence because Ruth would not have opened Joe’s mail, and in case anyone who targeted Joe would not have sent his mail to the Eduardo Mondlane University, they would have sent it either to his own address or the ANC or somewhere else. They were targeting Ruth.”

Heloise Ruth First was born on 4 May 1925 in Johannesburg, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Julius First and Matilda Levetan, who immigrated to South Africa from Latvia and Lithuania respectively in 1906. Both parents were founder members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Ruth and her brother Ronald grew up in a household in which political debate between people of all races and classes often took place. Ruth attended Jeppe High School for Girls and then went to the University of the Witwatersrand, where she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Social Studies in 1946.

After graduating, Ruth worked for the Johannesburg City Council and later became the editor of the “The Guardian” newspaper. Through investigative journalism, she exposed apartheid racial policies. Her pieces on slave-like conditions on Bethal potato farms, migrant labour, bus boycotts and the women’s anti-pass campaign became classics of the 1950s social and labour reporting. She also did support work for the 1946 mineworkers strike, the Indian Passive Resistance Campaign of 1950, and protests surrounding the banning of communism under the 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. In her journalism, Ruth confronted South African capitalism in the cities and in its most brutal forms, on farms and in the mines.

Ruth was a Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective, as she travelled to China, the Soviet Union (USSR) and several countries in Africa, which she enthusiastically conveyed to a liberation movement eager to learn about alternatives to capitalism and racist rule and were experiences she analysed and published. She was central to the formation of the underground South African Communist Party (SACP) and established closer links with the African National Congress (ANC). Her reputation grew by leaps and bounds and she became trusted and admired in Congress circles. In 1949, Ruth married Joe Slovo, and in addition to her work with “The Guardian”, she co-founded the South African Congress of Democrats (COD), a white-only wing of the Congress Alliance, which was founded in 1953.

In 1955, she assumed the position of editor of a radical political journal called “Fighting Talk”, a literary journal that carried political comment and created spaces for new fictional writing, wherein she published three particularly incisive analyses of the brutality of capitalism and apartheid in South Africa. The first was an account of the bus boycotts that began in Alexandra, a black township north of Johannesburg, and spread through the Reef, down to Port Elizabeth. Second, was the recruitment of contract labour and the rounding up of “foreign natives,” supplemented by private farm prisons to labour on Bethal potato farms. The third presented a compelling account of the emergence of the political economy of Southern African labour migration since the turn of the twentieth century that preceded later abstract Marxist analyses.

With regard to the political economy of Southern African labour migration, Ruth explained that mining companies found labour that was “abundant” and cheap” by “using only contracted migrant labour at cut-throat wages, on the assumption that African mineworkers – brought from their rural homes to the Reef for stipulated contract periods – were really peasants, able to subsidise mine wages from the land” by establishing “a labour recruiting monopoly and (reducing) costs of wages, food and quarters by setting up a highly centralised system for controlling wages.”

Along with Slovo, she served on the drafting committee of the Freedom Charter but could not attend the Congress of the People because of her banning order. In 1956 she was arrested and charged in the Treason Trial, after which, all 156 accused were acquitted in 1961. After the declaration of the state of emergency that followed the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, she was banned. Ruth then fled to Swaziland with her children, returning after the emergency was lifted as editor of “New Age”. She also helped to organise the first broadcasts of Radio Freedom from a mobile transmitter. Walter Sisulu’s radio broadcast message from underground was partly her writing.

On 9 August 1963, Ruth was detained at the Wits University library in front of the students, following the arrests of members of the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in Rivonia on 11 July 1963. Ruth was directly involved in the activities of MK, the newly armed wing of the ANC, as part of the underground SACP. She was imprisoned and held in isolation without charge for 117 days under the Ninety-Day Detention Law. After her release, she was immediately re-arrested and held for a further 27 days. Her father fled South Africa and soon after her release Ruth left with her mother and children to join her husband, Joe Slovo, who had already fled the country to Britain.

During the mid-1960s to the 1970s, while in Britain Ruth First became active in anti-apartheid crusading in support of the ANC. Ruth researched, published and edited a number of prominent books, now considered landmarks of Marxist academic debate, including The Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Coups d’Etat in Africa (1970), Libya: the Elusive Revolution (1974), and The Mozambican Miner: A Study in the Export of Labour (1977), also editing Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom (1967), Govan Mbeki’s The Peasant’s Revolt (1967) and Oginda Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru.

Ruth lectured at the University of Durham between 1973 and 1978 focusing on the sociology of underdevelopment where she was an inspiring and demanding teacher. She mixed well with leading left academics together with her comrade and colleague Harold Wolpe, developing new theories about South Africa’s political economy. She showed an interest in the rising New Left and activity, and unlike many in the exile ranks sought to interact with them to test and refresh her Marxism and understand their viewpoint. This drew criticism from within the Communist Party, and she was cold-shouldered by some.

Relocating with Joe Slovo to Mozambique in 1977, Ruth First took up the post of Research Director at the Centre for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. Ruth jumped at the chance to work in Africa, when the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) sought her out to run the Centre in Maputo. This exciting new chapter in her life, from 1977 to 1982, saw her closely involved with the ANC in Maputo, addressing meetings and assisting young cadres involved in reconstructing the underground within South Africa. Ruth was in her prime and living in an apartment with Slovo, as everyone assumed he would be the prime target for the murderous apartheid regime.

Following a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Conference at the Centre for African Studies on 17 August 1982, Ruth was killed by a letter bomb, which was the work of security agencies within South Africa. There was a massive explosion followed by two smaller explosions. The occupants of the room ducked as they thought they were under attack from outside. When the smoke cleared Ruth First lay dead on the floor, facedown, still wearing her white dress, red blazer and Italian shoes. Until her death, she remained a ‘listed’ communist and could not be quoted in South Africa.

“The bomb that took Comrade Ruth’s life,” General-Secretary of the SACP, Moses Mabhida declared at her funeral, “was intended to deprive our movement of the services of one of its most gifted militants. We openly acknowledge the exceptional gravity of the loss to us caused by her death. But we equally proclaim that her immense contribution to our movement will never be lost, but will help to guide our actions and inspire our militants in the years to come.” For Pallo Jordan, “The full weight of the blow struck against us when the apartheid regime ordered the assassination of Ruth First is felt at moments like the present. Her incisive, analytical mind would have greatly enriched the national debate both inside and outside the liberation movement and helped to define the way forward.”

Ronnie Kasrils declared that “Ruth Heloise First was an outstanding revolutionary who, through practical experience, became focused on developing ideas to drive social action. This can be seen in her range of endeavours: as scholar, investigative journalist and researcher, political activist, orator and organiser, and up to her death, in her active membership of the South African Communist Party (SACP). She was interested in organisational methods and the development of critical ideas as drivers of social action. She had the courage and sharpness of intellect to break with conventional wisdom.”

According to Kasrils, “Throughout her life, she sought the dialectical relationship between theory and practise. She was both analyst and activist, set on testing ideas in practise, and made an inestimable contribution in the field of ideas. She was a fierce antagonist of dogma and the substitution of sloganizing and mechanical schema in place of rigorous thinking, never afraid of ruffling the feathers of fellow comrades. … Ruth took to heart Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and the conclusion: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
African National Congress, “Further Submissions and Responses by the African National Congress to Questions Raised by the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation”, 12 May 1997.
SAPA, “Ruth First Killed in Frustration as Slovo Eluded Assassination”, South African Press Association, 17 September 1998.
Pallo Jordan, “The Ruth First Memorial Lecture”, Wits Centre for Journalism, 28 August 2000.
Rhodes University, “History of Ruth First”, Giving to Rhodes University, 01 Jul 2015.
Gregory Houston, “Chapter 15: The Post-Rivonia ANC and SACP underground”, The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Vol. 1, Zebra, 2004.
Gavin Williams, “Long Live Ruth First”, Africasacountry, 17 August 2019.
Ronnie Kasrils, “Remembering Ruth First”, Tribune Mag, 2 September 2020.
Melody Emmett, “Ruth First Remembered 40 Years after Her Death”, Mail & Guardian, 17 August 2022.
Ronnie Kasrils, “Remembering the Revolutionary Life and Times of Ruth First”, Daily Maverick, 31 August 2020.
Milton Shain and Miriam Pimstone, “Ruth First”, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, 27 February 2009.
Obituary, “Comrade Ruth First”, Sechaba, October 1982.
The Presidency, “Ruth First (1925 – 1982): The Order of Luthuli in Gold”, The Presidency Republic of South Africa, 27 April 2014.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report”, Vol. 2, 29 October 1998.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report”, Vol. 6, 21 March 2003.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.
Robin Binckes, “Vlakplaas: Apartheid Death Squads, 1979 – 1994”, Pen and Sword, 2018.
Jacques Pauw, “Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins”, Jonathan Ball, 1997.
Ruth First, “Selected Writings”, International Union of Left Publishers, September 2022.

Castro Khwela
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