Joe Slovo describes his relationship with Ruth First, in the second of our series of extracts from his unfinished autobiography
WHILE studying for my LLB, I was employed in the offices of Jack Levitan, an attorney. Early in 1948 he sent me to assist advocate Fred Zwarenstein in the defence of the Lefela brothers in Maseru, Basutoland. They were charged with sedition arising out of the activities of the Basuto Peasants’ Organisation – Lekgotla la Bafu (League of the Poor) – of which they were the leaders. With a peasant directness, the Lefela brothers dismissed Zwarenstein on suspicion that he was collaborating with the enemy; during one of the early adjournments he was seen to be having tea with the
Ruth First had been sent to cover the case for The Guardian, and it was there that our relationship began. I had known her from the very early 1940s. She was a key figure in the newly created Young Communist League and editor of its newspaper, Youth for a New South Africa. I was, at the time, part of a small clique, all of us workers, who considered ”university intellectuals” (including Ruth) to be inferior revolutionary material. They were articulate, talented with the pen, knew the literature – in short, they seemed to be too clever by half. They made us feel inadequate, and so (as has happened so often before and since to quite a number of activists) we tried to live with our complexes by attaching them to high sounding revolutionary
Ruth and I were elected to the Johannesburg District of the Party in, I think, 1946. We decided to start living together at the beginning of 1949, and eight months later we each took off half an hour from our respective offices to get married. Our three daughters, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn, were born between 1950 and 1954.
When Ruth was assassinated by a racist death squad on August 17 1982, we were 12 days away from our 33rd wedding anniversary. This is not the time or the place to detail the course of our life together and our relationship with our children. But, taken broadly, I would say (however smug and complacent it sounds) that we enjoyed a stimulating companionship and mutuality through most of our period together. It was certainly not without friction, competitiveness and phases during which our political disagreement reached threatening proportions. Nor was it free of other, more or less serious, involvements. But the basic fabric of our relationship stood up to all this and more, including many forced separations connected with our duties in the revolutionary
We were each aware of the important role we played in one another’s intellectual development. Even if it meant the most spirited confrontations (which often frightened those of our friends who were not yet aware of the chemistry of our relationship), she never allowed me to get away with the clichd catechisms which tempt all who become part of an apparatus; and I never allowed her to float comfortably in the sea of criticism against so-called orthodoxy which characterises the changing fashions of the critics on the left, particularly those with an academic background.
She was a woman of style and elegance, both in wit and vanity. She was a comrade whose intolerance of hypocrisy and humbug won her the respect even of those who were discomforted by the razor sharpness of her thrusts. She was a companion with a rich, albeit private, passion and one who had the extraordinary capacity to postpone the traumas of work conflict and fully relax with us or with friends in private and social situations. She summed up very well the flavour of an important aspect of our relationship in a letter written just after her release from detention in 1963 when I was already in London and she was about to come with the children: ”Oh for a good solid row in close proximity.”
Back in 1948, standing outside the Rand Daily Mail watching the election returns. The avowed supporters of Hitler had won with a minority of votes but with a majority of rural seats. We were all stunned. But most of us, like me, thought it would be a matter of five years.
For me the only good that this ill wind blew was that we no longer had to spend our Sunday evenings on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall, which the Party used as a weekly public platform. There was a time when one used to look forward to these Sunday evening outings.
Benny Sischy was among those who occasionally spoke at the City Hall steps. He has a place in my memory not so much because of the quality of his oratory, but because of his Jewish grandmother. Benny was a keen amateur actor who helped run a Party-inspired theatre group called the African National Theatre. They were always scratching around looking for stage props and, to the chagrin of his grandmother, Benny often disappeared with bits and pieces from his own home. On one memorable occasion the person who was to preside at the City Hall steps meetings was unable to come and a comrade was delegated to ask Benny to come as a replacement. His grandmother answered the phone:
”Is Benny there?”
”Is he ever here?”
”Please, Mrs Sischy, if he comes soon tell him we want him to take the chair at tonight’s City Hall steps meeting.”
”Look, lady,” burst out his long-suffering grandmother, ”not anodder shtick forniture is going out this flat.”
The City Hall steps increasingly became a physical battleground between defenders of the platform and the thugs who were given free rein by the token police contingent in the vicinity. After a while the meetings no longer served a political purpose; no one listened to the speeches and we were all on alert for the moment when we would be forced to defend the platform.
It was sad to see this historic forum of free speech close down. But at least one could now wake up on Sunday morning without experiencing the nervous cramps brought on by the expectation that the day would end with yet another street fight.
It was part of the Nationalist election platform that they would ban and destroy the Communist Party, and, true to their word, they promulgated the Unlawful Organisations Act by the middle of 1950.
When the axe fell on our Party, I was in the final year of my legal studies. The study of law appealed to me both as an exercise in deductive logic and as an instrument for the assertion of social and political rights.
At the beginning of 1951 I was admitted to the Bar. I was not qualified for admission to the side bar. I was an alien, and by some legislative quirk an attorney (solicitor) had to be a British subject, whereas an advocate was merely required to express loyalty to the Queen.
My 12 years of legal practice proved to be useful and enjoyable. Life at the Bar, compared to the constraints of the worker-boss relationship, was relaxed. The advocates constituted a community, all housed in one building and sharing administrative staff. Teas and midday meals were taken together in a common room. The conversation rarely touched subjects other than Bar and courtroom gossip. To reinforce the illusion that the law is above politics, leading and well-known communists, such as Bram Fischer and I, shared tables and exchanged formal pleasantries with leading Nationalist politicians such as John Vorster, who spent a short spell at the Bar before going on to become Minister of Justice and then Prime Minister.
But this fraternal legal spirit did not even pretend to cover black colleagues. The Group Areas Act prohibited the entry into the common room of Indian and African advocates who were not legally permitted to occupy premises in the only building which housed all the advocates. Even the black elite (such as the three black advocates who had reached the Bar, out of a total of 120 or so advocates) were not equal in the eyes of the law. Imagine then how empty the hallowed legal maxim was when it came to black workers and peasants!
I appeared on behalf of Duma Nokwe, the first African to be admitted to the Transvaal Division of the Supreme Court. One of the big issues was whether he would be permitted to use the change rooms at Pretoria Supreme Court to take off his normal collar and put on his robes, the advocate’s fly collar and bib. In the end a special room was set aside to enable Duma to perform this 15-second operation without ”sullying” the all-white change
The Afrikaner equivalent of the Jewish mother’s proud boast ”mine son, the doctor” was certainly ”my boy, the advocate”. Even if one was a communist advocate, one was still an advocate, and it gave one a special advantage when dealing with authority, including the police.
The Bar itself was basically a posh trade union. To prevent undercutting, minimum fees were obligatory. Collective sanctions were imposed against any attorneys who failed to meet an advocate’s bill within three months and seven days. The annually elected Bar Council was the custodian of Bar ethics.
Even hardline fascists like Vorster were tainted with some kind of sentimental slush about the advocate’s oath. When Vorster was already Minister of Justice, a deputation from the Bar Council, led by the then chairman, George Coleman, flew to Cape Town in order to discuss a ban which had prohibited me from leaving the municipal area of Johannesburg and which was interfering with a large slice of my rural practice.
On its return the deputation informed me that Vorster had made an eminently reasonable proposal. He had said to Coleman: ”Tell Slovo that if he gives me his word of honour from one advocate to another that he will stop all his subversive activities, I will immediately lift all his restrictions.” It was indeed a shrewd offer. Coleman emphasised that all I was required to do was repeat my advocate’s oath of fidelity to the laws of the land. I refused this offer and explained that Vorster and I had a completely different understanding of the meaning of ”subversive”, and that he would undoubtedly exploit such an undertaking to the detriment of the cause in which I believed.
I recall an amusing sequel to this episode when another colleague, Charlie Rosenthal, met Vorster over a drink after a rugby test match in Bloemfontein. He asked Vorster why he continued persecuting Slovo, ”who is just a nice guy and not really a communist”. Vorster said to Charlie that he had made me a most reasonable offer and that the answer which reached him from Coleman was ”just tell Vorster he can go and get fucked”, language which I did not use, but which nevertheless reflected my thoughts rather accurately.
Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography is published by Ravan Press Next week: Grappling with Stalinism