She was one of those who wrote the Freedom Charter, the historic 1955 document which laid the democratic principles of the South African liberation struggle. First compiled and edited the collection of Mandela’s speeches and trial addresses, which was published as “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” She edited Govan Mbeki’s book, “South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt”, and Oginga Odinga’s, “Not Yet Uhuru.”
The World Cup 2026 opened on Thursday, 11 June, with Mexico playing South Africa. It appeared the entire Africa turned out against our sister African country. In the 1990s, this would have been the reverse. That was when South Africa held a lot of promise for the human race, as it busted Apartheid and announced the death of that evil system.
Indeed, South Africa produced some of the best Africans in contemporary history: Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Solomon Mahlangu, Steve Biko and Chris Hani.
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Among the best in this legion was Heloise Ruth First, whose entire life and existence was to liberate the African continent from colonisation and backwardness. She was born into the struggle, with her father, Julius First, who migrated from Latvia when he was ten, and her mother, Matilda Leveta, who migrated to South Africa from Lithuania when she was four, both being two of the founders of the Anti-Apartheid Communist Party.
Ruth First lived in the struggle, attending the University of Witwatersrand with fellow activists like Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane. The latter was elected in 1962 as the founding president of the FRELIMO liberation movement in Mozambique and, like First, was killed in a bomb attack.
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Ironically, while Mondlane was killed in 1969 in Dar es Salaam, First was bombed in her office in the Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo in 1982.
Ruth First married the revolutionary, Joe Slovo, and raised a family in between planning political and military attacks against Apartheid, being in detention, and racing through life as if she knew she would not reach old age. She was blown up by a bomb specifically made for and personally delivered to her.
In 1968, the Civil War was raging in Nigeria when she arrived unannounced at the University of Ibadan. An obviously good navigator, she had found that Selina Molteno of the African Studies Department, whom she scarcely knew in the Anti-Apartheid office in London, was in that department. She knocked the door and simply asked, “Can I stay with you?” which to Molteno translated as: “I’ll be staying with you.”
At 43, Ruth First was already famous. She was the editor of newspapers in South Africa, which had been banned. She was a veteran of the Apartheid prisons. Being found in South Africa with a copy of her detention memoirs, 117 Days, published in London three years earlier, attracted a five-year imprisonment.
At that time, Ruth First was being hunted by Apartheid and neocolonial forces. Her husband, Joe Slovo, a founder of the ANC military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, and its chief of staff, was in exile with their three children in London. She had little money, yet embarked on travels across African countries like Ghana, Sudan, Egypt and Algeria, studying African independence and post-independence struggles.
She was one of those who wrote the Freedom Charter, the historic 1955 document which laid the democratic principles of the South African liberation struggle. First compiled and edited the collection of Mandela’s speeches and trial addresses, which was published as No Easy Walk to Freedom. She edited Govan Mbeki’s book, South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt, and Oginga Odinga’s, Not Yet Uhuru.
Robin Cohen, the husband of Molteno, later a famous intellectual but who at that time taught Political Science, was equally stunned when First appeared in Ibadan. But both gave her a fine welcome leading to her two-month stay.
At that time, Ruth First was being hunted by Apartheid and neocolonial forces. Her husband, Joe Slovo, a founder of the ANC military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, and its chief of staff, was in exile with their three children in London. She had little money, yet embarked on travels across African countries like Ghana, Sudan, Egypt and Algeria, studying African independence and post-independence struggles. This was from 1964 to 1968, during which period she showed up in Ibadan. She made her way into a meeting of Northern Nigerian political and military leaders, and by the time the Nigerian security services got on her tail, she was long gone.
One of the most memorable meetings she had was visiting the famous Susan Wenger, better known as Adunni Olorisa, the German-born Pan-Africanist who dedicated her life to developing the Ifá religion and helping to build the Osun–Osogbo Grove into a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The product of these African travels is her best known book, The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’état in Africa, published in 1970.
First was next heard of in 1975 at the Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania, where she took up a teaching appointment in economics, specialising, among other subjects, in the “political economy of underdevelopment and planning.”
At that time, the university was the vortex of African intellectualism. It had the best faculty of social studies on the continent and, perhaps, the best movement of intellectuals. It was enabled by the leadership of the African teacher-president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who had established the African socialist philosophy of Ujamaa, meaning “extended family” or “brotherhood.”
My plea is, South Africa, which produced Ruth First and many outstanding Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries, should not be abandoned in its current xenophobic state. Africa should rehabilitate and embrace it.
Dar es Salaam inevitably transformed into a volcano of ideas, with the molten exploding across the world as the greatest debates on imperialism. Some of it was captured in the 312-page book edited by the famous Ugandan political activist, Yash Tandon, a founder of the underground military movement, the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF), which took out the Idi Amin regime. The book was titled, Debate on Class, State and Imperialism. Among the gladiators in the ring was Walter Rodney, author of the famous, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, who, like First, was to be killed by a parcel bomb. There were fighting intellectuals like Issa G Shivji, whose 1973 book, Class Struggles in Tanzania triggered the eruption after it was critiqued by Dani Wadada Nabudere, author of The Political Economy of Imperialism. Nabudere’s book was like a bible for young radical students in the Nigeria of the early 1980s. There was Mahmood Mamdani, whose most famous book is, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. He is the father of the current Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. It was into this vortex that Ruth was thrown, and not one who suffered fools gladly, she dished out as many blows as she got.
She described one of the debates she attended as: “slaughter at a seminar.”
One of the casualties of the debate, she said, was “the calculated murder-in-public of liberal ideology” and that through it generally, “The radicals persevere with the analysis; the nationalists take refuge in statements about exceptions.”
Although an exile, a mother of three, journalist, researcher and author, the Apartheid regime identified First as an extremely dangerous militant combatant against its evil system. It tracked her around the world, till it blew her up.
Her husband, Joe Slovo, returned to a liberated South Africa in 1994 and became the minister of housing in the Mandela administration. He passed on the following year.
My plea is, South Africa, which produced Ruth First and many outstanding Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries, should not be abandoned in its current xenophobic state. Africa should rehabilitate and embrace it.
Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
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