/ 9 December 1994

Fragile but Slovo’s reaping the fruits of a lifelong fight

fight

He may be vulnerable and fragile, but Joe Slovo’s political and personal battles are not over yet, reports Phillip van Niekerk

A FEW weeks ago Joe Slovo’s battle with cancer took on a very public dimension. A dramatic weight loss and sudden gaunt appearance, brought on by an unfavourable response to new medication, unleash-ed frenetic speculation about whether the old communist, the most senior white person in the ANC, had fought his last political and personal battle.

In an interview in his Pretoria office last week, it was hard to tell which was the more fragile, Slovo’s health or his humour, as he faced the inevitable questions about his health.

“I am in a stable condition,” he snapped. “I’m doing my work, as you see. You chaps go on and on about it. Like all of us, when we can’t do our jobs, we’ll say so.”

His sharp response was softened by a flash of old Slovo wit. “Life is a terminal illness,” he added. “We’ll all go.”

Despite his advanced illness, Slovo is enjoying life as a cabinet minister, savouring the most “challenging, most productive period” of his life. He puffs contentedly on a cigarillo, but won’t allow himself to be photographed smoking it.

Talk about Slovo’s health has overshadowed his achievements as housing minister in President Nelson Mandela’s government of national unity. Into his domain falls one of the most visible inheritances of apartheid: nine million homeless people packed mostly into squalid squatter camps ringing the cities.

Housing is the yardstick against which Mandela’s government will be judged to have succeeded or failed in its primary task of delivering a better life to black South Africans.

But before the building can even start, a political impasse has to be broken. Law and order has collapsed in many townships, and the boycott of bond repayments, rent and service payments — begun as resistance to the old order — has only grown under the new government, and along with it the banks’ retaliatory red-lining of black areas.

“The banks fear to tread because of the complete breakdown of civil law enforcement,” said Slovo. “They have got something like 18 000 properties for which they’ve received judgment for eviction, and are unable to implement.”

To end the stand-off, Slovo has put together the most pragmatic of compacts: coaxing the banks back into the township market by deploying state funds to underwrite mortgages, while cajoling black residents into resuming monthly payments with the carrot of community upliftment and the stick of eviction threats.

“We have spent this period charting the path ahead, ensuring that all the relevant stakeholders are with us. From early next year the fruits of this will start to show themselves.

“This question: `what have you delivered?’ was ridiculously asked after three months. The question is: `are the resources there? Do you have strategy in place? Has progress been made?’ I am sure that is the case.”

If employing private investment and individual ownership is an odd policy for an avowed communist, Slovo’s plans to house the millions who can’t afford mortgages are even more unorthodox: the state will provide sites with the basics of electricity, water and sewage and a slab. Apart from backup in the form of know-how and access to cheap materials, responsibility for putting a roof over the heads of South Africa’s millions will depend on “mobilising the sweat equity of the people themselves”.

“You cannot build an economy or a society purely on the basis of entitlement,” said Slovo, who for many years admired Eastern Bloc societies where the state was meant to provide from cradle to grave.

“People have to make a contribution. They have to have a sense of ownership which they don’t get from being given blocks of rented accommodation which they don’t own, don’t have a stake in and haven’t helped to design.”

Slovo still considers himself a communist. “It’s not on the agenda now, it’s not the issue now, but I believe with what we are doing in every sphere — the reconstruction and development programme and so forth — we are creating a foundation in which there will be all kinds of possibilities including a movement away from the domination of the economy by the criteria of profit.”

He is, however, contrite about his lifelong support for the Soviet Union and that model of socialism. Gone is the old defensiveness. In a remarkably frank moment during the interview, he said: “I was wrong and I am ashamed of some of the traps I was led into.”

He explained: “If you’ve ever been part of an official delegation you learn less about a country than sitting in the British museum. You don’t meet the people, you don’t actually see the conditions. People said there were gulags, millions of people incarcerated there. We were assured there was no such thing. We didn’t have opportunities to actually check.”

Slovo still points out that the Eastern Bloc was not all “tyranny and evil and murder and mayhem.

“You’re talking about a world that pioneered the modern eight-hour day, women’s equality and free education. Every segment of the welfare capitalist world originated in the socialist world and the battle between the two had an impact on the more tolerable conditions in the capitalist world.”

He admitted that his own doubts began in the mid-1960s but he chose to remain silent because he had seen the alternative close at hand. His wife, the fiercely independent author and academic Ruth First, was, he said, sidelined by the movement. He said he had differences with her on this issue.

“The choice that you face is whether you can continue to contribute to the struggle or not. At that stage, independence was just not tolerated. It was part of the sickness we tried to get away from eventually.

“For me, the question was: do I now take a lecturer’s job in London? In retrospect I would have made a big mistake if I’d allowed my doubts, which were growing and growing, to lead to a withdrawal.”

It is in that context that Slovo’s contribution makes sense. He is a pragmatist, prepared to compromise to achieve a larger goal: in this case, national liberation.

While pointing out that “we are still living in an apartheid state”, Slovo admits to feeling “smug” about the way things have gone.

A brief few years ago he was the bte noire of the white establishment, a target for assassination. His wife was blown up in Maputo by a parcel bomb sent by the South African security forces. Today he is one of the most respected cabinet ministers in South Africa, working from the offices of the very politicians who made him out to be the epitome of all evil.

He savours the twists of fortune that have taken him from membership of a “relatively powerless grouping” in the 1940s, through the defiance campaign, exile and armed struggle, the negotiating process, the attainment of power, to the beginnings of reconstruction. At every point Slovo was a key player.

“The last year or two have been the happiest in my life. There have been miraculous achievements in this period. It’s working. We’re going to have major and minor hiccups, but I’m optimistic. I think that in general we are going to achieve our targets.

“I could happily lie down and die now because what more does a person want out of life than the life I have had?”

But beneath the self-confidence, Slovo betrayed a vulnerability, as the subject he least likes to talk about resurfaced on its own. “I have cancer. What can I tell you? I also have feelings.”

Phillip van Niekerk is the Southern Africa correspondent of the Observer