Remember Ruth First: journalist, academic and political activist assassinated by the apartheid state

Ruth First came into my consciousness as an an activist scholar and Marxist in 1977. She had collaborated with Govan Mbeki, Oginga Odinga (Kenyan freedom fighter – later banned) and Ronald Segal. She was assassinated by the apartheid state by the spy and murderer Craig Williamson on 17 August 1982 by a letter-bomb. First was the editor and a journalist on The Guardian who together with Gert Sibande exposed the cruel exploitation on the Bethal potato farms. In exile, First was known as an independent Marxist who often differed with the Stalinist positions of the South African Communist Party. In her book Power in Africa (also published as The Barrel of a Gun: he politics of coups d’etat in Africa), First analysed and condemned corrupt post-independence African leaders “who spoke of poverty but rioted in luxury”. She was one of the first scholars to analyse the role of US, British and French military powers in African coups without excusing the leaders.

Ruth First broke one of the most important taboos in revolutionary politics — the fact that an activist who is detained and placed in solitary confinement can break down. She recorded her detention in 1963 as a part of the crackdown that led to the Rivonia Trial in the book 117 Days. Her description of the relationship of a detainee to their bed is a classic account that is almost universal for people in solitary confinement.

For the first fifty-six days of my detention in solitary I changed from a mainly vertical to a mainly horizontal creature. A black iron bedstead became my world. It was too cold to sit, so I lay extended on the bed, trying to measure the hours, the days and the weeks, yet pretending to myself I was not. …

…the bed was my privacy, my retreat, and could be my secret life. On the bed I felt in control of the cell. I did not need to survey it. I could ignore it, and concentrate on making myself comfortable. I would sleep, as long as I liked, without fear of interruption. I would think, without diversion. I would wait to see what happened from the comfort of my bed.

Ruth First suffered, broke down and rebuilt her spirit and activism. On 17 August 1982 during a brief spell at the University of Western Cape, Jonathan de Vries led a protest against her murder by the apartheid state. Her daughters Gillian and Shawn, her late husband Joe Slovo experienced their greatest loss and the liebration movement lost a leader. Ruth First will always be remembered for her courage, tenacity, humour, rigorous activist intellect while her assassins Craig Williamson and his henchman Roger Raven will be remembered as cowardly murderers who took her life and the lives of many of her comrades.

Source: Writing Rights: Zackie Achmat