Our Sister: Ruth First – by Owei Lakemfa

The 2026 FIFA World Cup began on Thursday, June 11, with Mexico facing South Africa. The event seemed to draw the entire African continent against its sister nation. In the 1990s, the reverse would have been true, as South Africa had recently ended apartheid and declared the death of that oppressive system.

South Africa produced some of the most influential African figures of recent history: Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Solomon Mahlangu, Steve Biko and Chris Hani.

Among them was Heloise Ruth First, whose life was devoted to freeing Africa from colonial rule and backwardness. She was born into the struggle; her father, Julius First, had migrated from Latvia at age ten, and her mother, Matilda Leveta, had come from Lithuania at age four. Both were founders of the Anti‑Apartheid Communist Party.

First studied at the University of Witwatersrand alongside activists such as Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane. Mondlane was elected in 1962 as the founding president of Mozambique’s FRELIMO movement and was later killed in a bomb attack. Ironically, First was bombed in her office at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo.

She married revolutionary Joe Slovo and raised a family while planning political and military actions against apartheid. She endured detention and lived as if she might not reach old age, until a bomb specifically delivered to her ended her life.

In 1968, while the Nigerian Civil War raged, First arrived unannounced at the University of Ibadan. She found Selina Molteno of the African Studies Department, whom she had barely known from the Anti‑Apartheid office in London, and asked, “Can I stay with you?” Molteno interpreted this as a request to stay, and she did.

By age 43, First was already famous. She edited banned South African newspapers and was a veteran of apartheid prisons. Possessing a copy of her detention memoirs, “117 Days,” published in London three years earlier, led to a five‑year sentence.

She contributed to the Freedom Charter, the 1955 document that set the democratic principles of the South African liberation struggle. First compiled and edited Mandela’s speeches and trial addresses, published as “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” She also edited Govan Mbeki’s “South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt” and Oginga Odinga’s “Not Yet Uhuru.”

Robin Cohen, Molteno’s husband and a noted intellectual teaching political science at the time, was surprised to see First in Ibadan but welcomed her during her two‑month stay.

At that time, First was hunted by apartheid and neo‑colonial forces. Her husband, Joe Slovo, a founder of the ANC military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe and its chief of staff, was in exile with their three children in London. With limited funds, she traveled across African countries—Ghana, Sudan, Egypt and Algeria—studying independence and post‑independence struggles from 1964 to 1968 before arriving in Ibadan. She entered a meeting of Northern Nigerian political and military leaders, and by the time Nigerian security services pursued her, she had already left.

One memorable encounter was with Susan Wenger, better known as Adunni Olosa, the German‑born Pan‑Africanist who devoted her life to developing the Ifá religion and helping to build the Osun–Oshogbo Grove into a UNESCO World Heritage site.

These travels produced her best‑known book, “The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’état in Africa,” published in 1970.

In 1975, First was heard again at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where she taught economics, focusing on the political economy of underdevelopment and planning. At the time, the university was a hub of African intellectualism, led by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, who had established the African socialist philosophy of Ujamaa, meaning “extended family” or “brotherhood.”

Dar es Salaam became a cauldron of ideas, with debates on imperialism captured in a 312‑page book edited by Ugandan activist Yash Tandon, founder of the Uganda National Liberation Front. The book, “Debate on Class, State and Imperialism,” featured intellectuals such as Walter Rodney, who, like First, was later killed by a parcel bomb. Other scholars included Issa G. Shivji, whose 1973 book “Class Struggles in Tanzania” sparked controversy, and Mahmood Mamdani, author of “Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.”

First described one debate she attended as “slaughter at a seminar.” She said a casualty of the debate was “the calculated murder‑in‑public of liberal ideology,” noting that radicals continued their analysis while nationalists retreated to statements about exceptions.

Although an exile, mother of three, journalist, researcher and author, the apartheid regime deemed First an extremely dangerous militant. It tracked her worldwide until it blew her up.

Her husband, Joe Slovo, returned to a liberated South Africa in 1994 and served as minister of housing in the Mandela administration. He died the following year.

My plea is that South Africa, which produced Ruth First and many outstanding Pan‑Africanists and revolutionaries, should not be abandoned in its current xenophobic state. Africa should rehabilitate and embrace her.

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