Ruth First at 100: Behind the legend

The atmosphere in Ruth First’s office on the afternoon of August 17 1982 was relaxed, First’s former colleague Bridget O’Laughlin told the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Also present in the room at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo were Pallo Jordan (then the head of research for the ANC) and Prof Aquino Bragança, First’s boss.

First and Bragança were teasing each other about who had received the most important mail when the package First was opening exploded in her hands. “I thought,” recalls O’Laughlin, “I'm going to die, and then I realised, no, you know you’re alive.”

O’Laughlin, who was pregnant at the time, was struck by the complete silence that followed the blast and the haze in the subtropical air. “I saw Pallo first and he started, he was bent over … he’d flopped over but he started moving his head back and forth, so I knew that he was alive. Ruth was sprawled, she was face downward. I didn’t try to go past Pallo to touch her or anything.”

While those who arrived later were confronted by gruesome scenes, O’Laughlin “didn’t see all of this horror, [Ruth] was wearing this red blazer that she’d worn all during that social science conference, that made her feel good … and these Italian shoes she was always so proud of, but she wasn’t moving at all, she was totally still.”

Leading evidence at the hearing, George Bizos alleged that apartheid spy Craig Williamson sent the letter bomb to First as a way of getting to her husband, Joe Slovo, the commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Williamson denied this claim, arguing that he was not sure which Slovo the package was addressed to. But he did acknowledge “a sneaking admiration for the grey fox [Slovo] ... I had the greatest respect for how he evaded all efforts to kill him.”

Despite being an enemy of the apartheid state in her own right, First was not nearly as careful, says O’Laughlin. “[Joe] was always conscious of his security and was aware that he was a possible target for South African forces, but Ruth lived a normal life. We went to the cinema and to the beach together.” 

First is often remembered for how she died, but it is the way in which she lived that should be celebrated. Her parents, Julius and Tilly, had come to South Africa, separately, to escape the persecution of Jewish people in tsarist Russia. By the time First was born, in Joburg on May 4 1925, her folks were proud communists and antiracists. Julius and Tilly made a point of educating their children in politics, taking them to meetings at the town hall and involving them in discussions with their adult friends — all of whom were heavily involved in politics. As Tilly explained: “We made them conscious. We wanted them to have an understanding of what was going on.”

First’s junior school classmate, Myrtle Berman — who herself went on to become an important anti-apartheid activist — also owed her political education to Tilly: “One day after school I went home with Ruth. I got there about three o’clock and emerged at six o’clock with my head reeling, having had a three-hour lecture from Tilly on the history of socialism, the Russian Revolution, the origins of religion … I remember wandering home and telling my mother, who nearly had a fit at this seditious stuff.”

Studying social sciences at Wits University, First found her groove, moving in the same circles as Nelson Mandela, Bram Fischer, Slovo — and Ismael Meer, a leading figure in the Transvaal Indian Congress and First’s first serious boyfriend. First made an impression on Mandela too: “Wits opened a new world to me,” he wrote. “I discovered for the first time people of my own age firmly aligned with the liberation struggle, who were prepared, despite their relative privilege, to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the oppressed.”

After graduating, First got a job as a researcher at the Joburg city council, but this didn’t last long. As she wrote, she had no interest in “checking the figures for the number of play supervisors for (white) children in (white) parks”. When then prime minister Jan Smuts responded to the African miners’ strike of 1946 with draconian force, First quit her dull council job and became an unpaid but full-time strike organiser. Smuts quashed the strike, but he also, wrote First, “inaugurated a new period of militancy and a great surge forward of African political organisation. The days of petitions and pleadings were well and truly over.”

As an activist-journalist at a string of left-leaning papers (every time the government closed one down, it would re-emerge under a new name), First played a major role in fuelling this “great surge forward”. One of her earliest scoops was, Ronnie Kasrils wrote, her “exposé of what came to be referred to as the Farm Labour Scandal … [which] brought to the surface the cruel system run by the police and magistrates, consigning luckless pass law offenders to work as virtual slave labourers on white farms such as the Bethel potato farms”. Her continued work on this story, alongside other activists of all races, led to a nationwide potato boycott and some pretty meaningful government concessions.

The only way to truly appreciate the power of First’s journalism is to read it. The opening paragraphs of this 1956 story headlined “The New Slavery” are particularly poignant: “The young African in the hospital bed at Coronation Hospital could not talk easily, which wasn’t surprising. He had tried to slit his throat with a razor blade, and had been found, moments later, by sheer chance, as he lay bleeding on the floor of the room in Sophiatown. His pass was not in order. He’d tried again and again at the pass office to have it ‘fixed’, but without success. How could a man live in the town without a proper pass?

“A 30-year-old Orlando man decided he could not. Convicted for a pass offence, he served a long prison term on a Bethel farm, and when he came back ‘a changed man’, desperate because his past still left him on the wrong side of the law, he hanged himself by an overall belt from a nail behind the kitchen door of his mother's house.

“Horror stories? Horrible, but true … Every year more and more Africans go to prison under the pass laws. On every working day last year more than 1,000 Africans were sentenced in the courts under the pass laws. These are the figures for convictions, not arrests. Thousands more caught in the pass law dragnet do not appear in court.”

As her biographer, Don Pinnock, puts it: “She had clearly worked out the relationship between factual reporting and mass mobilisation.” In addition to her many articles, First also wrote countless pamphlets for the liberation movement and played a major role in writing the Freedom Charter (though a banning order prevented her and Slovo from being at Kliptown on June 26 1955 when it was adopted).

First was one of the finest investigative journalists this nation has produced — so fine, in fact, that she was banned from wielding a pen in 1961. First said the ban plunged her into a “state of civil death”, but it did not stop her from writing altogether. She forged ahead, travelling to Windhoek to interview people for her first book — a critically acclaimed history of South West Africa (now Namibia). The apartheid government was not amused when the book was published in London in 1963.

Things went from bad to worse on July 11 1963 when police raided Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia and arrested most of the leaders of MK and confiscated their sabotage plans. First was lucky not to be at the farm on the day of the raid — she was a regular at Liliesleaf and knew “almost everything” about MK’s plans. Three weeks later, she was arrested under the “90 days without charge” law.

She was held in solitary confinement and questioned repeatedly by security police, who — despite her stoic resistance — tricked her into believing she’d given away vital information about MK. She was released after 90 days but rearrested on the pavement outside the prison, while trying to call her mother from a tickey box. Her rearrest, coupled with the mistaken belief that she’d betrayed her comrades, led her to attempt suicide by overdose. “Somehow,” she wrote, “the act of taking the pills shocked away any further intention of doing so.”

When she was eventually released after 117 days in solitary, she left South Africa with her three young daughters and joined Slovo in exile, first in London and then in Maputo. Abroad, First continued to fight discrimination and injustice through her books (she published seven in total), her involvement with the Anti-Apartheid Movement and her work at the university in Maputo.

As Mandela said on the 10th anniversary of her assassination: “Ruth spent her life in the service of the people of Southern Africa. She went to prison for her beliefs. She was murdered because of her acute political acumen combined with her resolute refusal to abandon her principles. Her life, and her death, remains a beacon to all who love liberty.”