OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Monday 7.00pm.
APARTHEID security police killed Ruth First because they were unable to catch SA Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, Gillian Slovo told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committee on Monday.
Gillian Slovo, along with her sisters Robyn and Shaun, is opposing the applications for amnesty by apartheid agents Craig Williamson and Jerry Raven, who have admitted arranging the letter bomb that killed First in Mozambique in 1982. Neither Williamson nor Raven can say who the letter-bomb parcel was addressed to.
Gillian Slovo told the committee she believed the letter had been addressed to First because if it had been addressed to her father, her mother would never have opened it. She said her mother, as a feminist, respected her husband’s privacy and neither of her parents would have opened each other’s post. Even if the letter had been addressed to them jointly, the one would not have opened the letter without the other being present.
She said she was convinced Williamson and the security police decided to send the letter bomb to First out of frustration at not being able to reach her father, who had proved an elusive opponent.
When asked by Allan Levine, who is appearing for Williamson, whether her mother had been a “revolutionary activist”, Gillian Slovo said First had used her “considerable intellect” to campaign against apartheid. She vehemently disputed claims by Williamson that First had been a legitimate target because of her involvement in African National Congress and SA Communist Party structures. She said Williamson and other security policemen had been responsible for creating myths around her parents, including the deliberately untrue story that Joe Slovo was a colonel in the KGB.
She said this had been aimed at creating fear amongst the white population of South Africa at the time. Williamson admitted in earlier testimony that he made up the story about Slovo and leaked it to the media in SA.