“Speak not ill of the dead” is a maxim which has long been honoured more in the breach. Those who would attribute lack of respect for the dead to modern fashion — the cowardice of the tabloids (the threat of libel action having been consigned to the worms), or the trend towards “obitchery” — might contemplate an editorial published by the Cape Times in 1929 to mark the passing of mining magnate Sir Joseph Robinson.
“The voice of his contemporaries is perforce silent about the evil which his long and unredeemed career compelled them, without known exception, to think of him,” it said. The editorial warned “those who in the future may acquire great wealth in this country, lest their memories should come within possible risk of rivalling the loathsomeness of the thing that is the memory of Sir Joseph Robinson”.
But if the principle is rarely honoured there must be many who will have been taken aback by the less than respectful remembrance of Joe Slovo offered up to the mass market by his daughter, Gillian Slovo — disclosing, among other things, the existence of a Slovo “love child”.
It is difficult to fathom her motivation in publicly washing what some might describe as her father’s dirty laundry. Revenge, for his lack of attention? A group therapy session, with an audience in the tens of thousands guaranteed by being plastered across the Sunday newspapers? Or, as a budding writer, did she simply regard her father’s life as part of her inheritance, open to being mined for financial advantage? Perhaps she merely sought to benefit society with an idealistic exercise in the sort of transparency guaranteed by the Constitution.
The explanation for her exercise in baring her father’s soul probably lies in a combination of such factors. The human psyche is glorious in its complexity — a point which needs be borne in mind in judging Joe Slovo, as well as his daughter.
On the face of it there is something cruelly dispassionate in a father refusing to acknowledge his child. At the same time it is possible to sympathise with the attempts of two adult men — including Judge Albie Sachs, who after all did knowingly accept the child as his own — to determine a course which they regarded as being logically the best for the boy and their respective families.
In Gillian Slovo’s account of her father’s determination not to abandon that course of action —“I’m not going to tell you anything,” he snapped “with venom” — there is something familiar to the life and times of the South African Communist Party leader. Reading the weekend papers, it was not difficult to imagine a ghost in red socks peering over one’s shoulder and murmuring with a resigned shrug: “So much for dialectical materialism…”