Joe Slovo was the man who brokered the agreement which lead to majority rule. Jonathan Steele pays tribute to to a principled persuader
JOE SLOVO had the good fortune to see the promised land. After living in exile for many years, and after the South African Communist Party was unbanned, he helped majority rule come to fruition in the country’s first democratic election. Six months after that, he was praised as the most effective of the cabinet ministers.
For an idealist in any country, it was a rare consummation. Out of adversity and after a lifetime of struggle much of what he had fought for had been achieved. Not all, of course, as he made clear in his last report as general secretary. The end of political apartheid was a giant step, but “the wretched of the earth make up over 90 percent of humanity. They live either in capitalist or capitalist- oriented societies. For them, if socialism is not the answer there is no answer at all.”
Slovo arrived in South Africa in 1934 to join his father, who had left Lithuania to escape the pogroms.
The family was always poor and Slovo had to abandon secondary school to take a job. Living in a run-down boarding house, he was thrown in with the passionate arguments of other Jewish immigrants, mainly geared towards Europe and Zionism.
He joined the SACP at 16, deciding that Marxism and Zionism were incompatible, and preferring to concentrate on the injustices of the land where he was living. At 18 he served in Egypt as a radio operator during World War II and returned to study law at the University of Witwatersrand, where he got to know Nelson Mandela, who was a year ahead of him.
With others, they formed the ANC’s military wing, Umkonto weSizwe. Their friendship helped to create the rock-solid ANC/communist alliance which Western governments unsuccessfully tried to break, particularly in the 1980s when it became clear that the ANC would one day inherit political power.
Slovo was lucky to be on a mission to see the ANC’s deputy president, Oliver Tambo, in Tanzania when Mandela and many others in the military wing were imprisoned. He went into exile and until 1976 lived with his wife, Ruth First, and their three children in Camden Town, London.
Slovo was frequently in Africa on ANC business, helping to organise underground missions, as well as in the Soviet Union to arrange the financial and military help without which the movement might have foundered.
He had fierce arguments with his wife and friends over the Soviet model, but felt he had to stay loyal through thick and thin. As perestroika stumbled, he accused Gorbachev of “colluding in the chorus of vilification against Lenin” and of “responding to the attempted coup by hardline Stalinists with a Stalinist decree to dissolve the party, as if it were his personal property”.
In 1976, after the Soweto riots and the mass departure of hundreds of young black radicals, Slovo moved to Luanda in Angola to be closer to the ANC’s training camps. He helped to run “armed propaganda” actions, such as the bombing of the Sasol oil refinery, which kept up radical morale in the townships in the worst years of apartheid.
His greatest tragedy was the murder of his wife in 1982 by a parcel bomb, sent by South African agents to Mozambique where she was teaching at the university in Maputo. Her death coincided with one of the lowest points in the struggle, when the regime was intervening throughout Southern Africa, either covertly or by armed raids, or, as in Angola, by fullscale invasion.
Throughout the decades of gloom punctuated by a few spectacular successes, Slovo always kept his sense of proportion and humour. He sometimes said the ANC, and his own party for that matter, could not organise a fish-shop. On the day the SACP was unbanned, he straightened his tie at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and asked friends: “Do I look legal?”
Back in South Africa, he took a major role in the ANC’s negotiations with FW de Klerk. While his communist faith upset the regime at first, their racism gave them a perverse reassurance about his presence.
During the deadlock of 1992 it was Slovo who persuaded the ANC to make the historic compromise that opened the way to majority rule. He suggested the notion of a government of national unity which would oversee the transition to a new constitution, and give the National Party both a guaranteed place in government for five years after the first free election and an honourable chance of retreating from apartheid.
Slovo was well aware, from the dirty tricks of the “Third Force” in the South African police and army, that powerful figures in the white establishment could bring their destabilisation to South Africa itself, thus provoking civil war.
Before the 1994 election, Slovo frequently said that with its expected landslide victory the ANC would win office, but not power. His communism led him to the view that control over the economy held the key. This would remain in the old establishment’s hands unless it, too, was challenged.
By then Slovo knew he was on borrowed time, having been treated for cancer since 1992. Appointed by Mandela to be housing minister, Slovo set about his job with his typical skill as a principled persuader. He arranged a building programme, and negotiated with mortgage companies and local authorities to try to help the lowest-income groups first.
Criticising the notion that capitalism works and socialism has failed, Slovo once said: “Let us look at the capitalist roots of the racial miseries of our own country, South Africa. The real question is not whether a system works, but for whom it works.”
Slovo leaves his second wife, Helena Dolny, and the three children of his first marriage, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn.