Peter Vale: A SECOND LOOK
The brave testimony of Dr Bridget O’Laughlin before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty committee provides a moment to pause and take a second look at the influential intellectual work of her friend and colleague, Ruth First, who was assassinated by an apartheid letter bomb in August, 1982. It also provides an opportunity to reinforce the veracity of the claims made by O’Laughlin that the device which took First’s life was tragically on target.
Until O’Laughlin’s public testimony, very little, outside of academic circles, was known of the significant contribution made to Southern African studies by First, who, by the time she settled in Mozambique in the late 1970s, was already established as an anti-apartheid activist and writer.
But First’s work during this, the final phase of her career, may well come to be judged the most productive and influential in the life of a woman born to middle-class privilege in a Johannesburg suburb and who took an initial degree at Wits University.
By relentlessly interrogating orthodox understandings of the region and its unfolding history, First and a cohort of young colleagues drew on the work of an earlier moment of Southern African Marxist scholarship which was located, among other places, in the writings of Martin Legassick and the late Harold Wolpe.
According to this view, the region was not a slow unfolding of endless nationalist movements, but rather a dynamic process rooted in political economy and dominated by rich, racist South Africa.
First’s lasting contribution was to draw these ideas directly into the policy arena of first Mozambique, then newly independent, and, primarily through her highly acclaimed study on Mozambican mine labour called Black Gold, into debates about the wider political and social affairs of Southern Africa.
This transformation of the theory and the practice of regional affairs was complemented by the Goan-born Aquina de Bracanza, First’s boss and the director of the Centre of African Studies (CAS) at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University.
A man of many talents, De Bracanza had been an activist during India’s independence and had participated in the 1968 revolt in Paris. The compelling events which seemed to be unfolding in Southern Africa in the 1970s seemed scripted for De Bracanza’s restless commitment to revolutionary causes. He was killed in the 1986 plane crash that took the life of Samora Machel.
It fell, however, to First to translate the immediate moment into policy action. This was to come directly from her early training as a journalist, which had nurtured an almost nervous predisposition with the output of those who worked with her.
Given its size and the perilous state of its funding, the CAS was probably the most productive research institute in the region’s history. Small wonder then that all subsequent efforts to understand and explain Southern Africa have been touched by the work of what we might now openly call the Mozambican School of Southern African Studies.
Its lasting influence is directly to be found in a successor generation whose lives have helped chart the direction of the new South Africa in remarkable ways: the University of Cape Town academic Judith Head, the Land Bank’s chief executive Helena Doley, Minister of Housing Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyale, the Development Bank of Southern Africa’s Alpheus Mangesi and the chair of Parliament’s portfolio committee on trade and industry, Rob Davies.
Albie Sachs, now a judge in the Constitutional Court, was First’s confidant and intellectually close to the Mozambican school, while Canadian-based political scientist Dan O’Meara, considered by some to be the most perceptive contemporary chronicler of South African politics, was also a graduate of the CAS.
In Mozambique, the circle is understandably wider and the work of the CAS continues under the leadership of Isobel Casamiro, the respected sociologist.
I have intentionally dwelt on the record of First’s Mozambican period and the legacy she bequeathed both to South Africa and the region because, along with O’Laughlin and many others, I believe the power of First’s ideas about the region and its future had become a real threat to the apartheid state. This, I hold, explains the letter bomb which she opened on that fateful August morning 17 years ago.
Within Southern Africa, First had become a force quite independent of her immediate political affiliation. A force for intellectual inquiry and inspirational academic leadership, to be sure, but infinitely more important, a force for the changing of the minds of Southern Africa’s people – especially those in her native South Africa.
Faced with this threat, and increasing international isolation, apartheid’s security establishment responded to her creative ideas about Southern Africa’s future with a policy which we now call regional destabilisation – Mozambique will feel its vicious effects deep into the new millennium.
Its purpose was to disrupt the sense of regional solidarity which the intellectual work offered by First (and her colleagues) sought both to demonstrate and foster. Rooted within the narrow confines of the Cold War doctrine of containment, apartheid’s approach to Southern Africa was, quite simply, no match for the sophisticated analysis which was offered by a clutch of Marxist scholars in neighbouring Mozambique.
As has been shown many times before the amnesty committee, violence was the only response to the power of an alternative voice. Can there be any conclusion other than First, who was way ahead of her times both intellectually and politically, was the quite obvious target of the assassin’s grim craft?
Until his recent appointment as acting vice- chancellor (Academic Affairs) at the University of the Western Cape, Peter Vale was professor of Southern African studies at the university