Ruth First

Abstract

Ruth First was killed on August 17 last by a letter-bomb sent to her at the Centre of African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. She was then the director of research at the Centre and had been in Mozambique for three years. No one seriously doubts that she was murdered by agents of the South African security police. They chose their victim well: for she was one of the most gifted and dedicated South African revolutionaries of our time, and she was, by virtue of her work and her writings, a source of growing influence and inspiration. Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925 and was the daughter of Jewish left-wing parents who had emigrated to South Africa from Lithuania. She joined the South African Communist Party while a student at Witwatersrand University and became the editor of a series of left-wing newspapers and magazines successively banned by the government. In 1956, she and her husband Joe Slovo were among the defendants in the mass treason trial which ended in the acquittal of all the accused. In the early sixties, she was banned from journalism and was arrested in 1963: the time spent in solitary confinement was the subject of her book 117 Days. She left South Africa on her release and settled in London with her husband and three daughters. It was soon after that I came to know her, and the following brief remarks are about her as the person I knew: others who are better qualified will in due course write about her work.