At a Glance
Doornfontein to Wits: The Formation of a Communist
Yossel Slovo arrived in South Africa in 1935, a nine-year-old Lithuanian Jewish boy joining the stream of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had been making their way to Johannesburg since the late nineteenth century. The Jewish immigrant community of Johannesburg's inner suburbs — Doornfontein, Yeoville, Bez Valley — was politically alive in ways that the wider white South African community was not. It brought with it the political traditions of the Pale of Settlement: socialism, the Bund, Zionism in its various forms, and the experience of being a minority community in a hostile society that gave its members a particular sensitivity to what racial and ethnic categorisation did to human beings.
Growing up in Doornfontein in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Slovo absorbed these traditions and made his choice among them early. He joined the Young Communist League as a teenager — a choice that aligned him with the tradition that insisted on the universal application of the principles of equality and human dignity rather than their application only to the Jewish community. The Communist Party's non-racialism was, in the context of wartime South Africa, the most radical political position available: the position that all human beings, regardless of racial classification, were entitled to the same rights and the same dignity, and that a society organised on the principle of racial hierarchy was fundamentally unjust in ways that could not be reformed around the edges but had to be dismantled at the root.
At the University of the Witwatersrand, which he attended on the GI Bill after serving in the Second World War, he met Ruth First — the daughter of Julius First, a founding member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and already herself one of the most politically committed young women of her generation. Their partnership, which became one of the great intellectual and political collaborations of the South African left, began at Wits and continued until Ruth's murder in 1982. They brought different things to the partnership: Ruth's gifts were primarily journalistic and intellectual, her ability to investigate and expose and analyse unmatched in the movement; Joe's gifts were primarily political and organisational, his ability to think strategically and to build institutions and to maintain political relationships under pressure the foundation of his effectiveness. Together they were formidable.
MK: Building the Armed Wing
The decision to form uMkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 was one of the most consequential decisions the South African liberation movement ever made. The ANC and the SACP had concluded, following Sharpeville and the banning of the ANC, that nonviolent protest was no longer a viable strategy — that the state had demonstrated its willingness to use lethal force against peaceful demonstrators and its determination to ban the organisations through which peaceful opposition was conducted. The question was what form of armed action could serve the liberation struggle without triggering a repression that would destroy whatever organisational capacity remained.
The answer they arrived at was sabotage — targeted attacks on infrastructure and symbols of the apartheid state, designed to impose economic and political costs without killing people. MK's inaugural manifesto, issued on 16 December 1961, made the distinction between sabotage and terrorism explicit: the armed struggle was beginning, but it was beginning with the minimum of violence consistent with demonstrating that armed resistance was now part of the liberation movement's repertoire. Joe Slovo was one of the architects of this strategy and, as MK's chief of staff, one of the people most responsible for translating it into operational reality.
He directed MK's operations from exile for nearly three decades — through the years when MK was rebuilding after the destruction of its early networks, through the period of training in Angola and the Soviet Union and Cuba that produced the cadres who would carry the armed struggle into its intensified 1980s phase, through the military operations that ranged from the bombing of the Sasol oil-from-coal facility in 1980 to the car bomb outside the South African Air Force headquarters in Pretoria in 1983. He was a military commander who combined strategic vision with operational seriousness — someone who understood that the armed struggle's purpose was political rather than simply military, and that every operation needed to be assessed against its political as well as its tactical consequences.
Ruth First: The Unbearable Loss
Ruth First was assassinated in Maputo on 17 August 1982. She was at her desk in the Centre of African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University — the research centre she had built into one of the most important institutions of African studies in the southern hemisphere — when the parcel bomb sent by the apartheid government's Craig Williamson exploded. She died immediately. She was fifty-seven years old.
Joe Slovo was in Lusaka when Ruth was killed. The news reached him through the ANC's communication networks, and his response — the private response, the human response, rather than the political response he would have to make publicly — is not a matter of record in the way that his speeches and his strategy papers are. What is on record is what he did afterwards: he continued. He continued directing MK, continued the political work of the SACP, continued building the relationships and the strategies that would eventually produce the transition. He did not allow Ruth's murder to destroy him, and the refusal to be destroyed by what the apartheid state had done to him personally was itself a political act — a demonstration that the state could take the people he loved but could not take his commitment to the cause they had both served.
He wrote about Ruth, eventually — in the memoir that became Slovo: The Unfinished Autobiography, published posthumously. He wrote about her with a love and an honesty that refused the sentimentality of hagiography: a portrait of a complicated, brilliant, sometimes difficult person who was also the person he had loved for thirty years and whose absence was permanent. The portrait is one of the most moving passages in the literature of the South African liberation movement.
Has Socialism Failed? The Intellectual Reckoning
In 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing and the Eastern European states were abandoning communist governance, Joe Slovo published a pamphlet titled Has Socialism Failed? — one of the most honest pieces of political self-examination produced by any communist leader in the world at the moment of that political tradition's greatest crisis. He acknowledged that what had existed in the Soviet Union was not socialism in any meaningful sense — that the combination of one-party rule, the suppression of democratic rights, the cult of personality, and the systemic abuse of state power had produced a system that bore no resemblance to what Marx had envisioned or what the socialist movement had sought to build. He acknowledged that these failures were not accidental or the product of individual wickedness but structural — the product of the suppression of democratic accountability within the communist parties and states.
And having acknowledged all of this, he argued that the failures of the Soviet model did not invalidate the socialist project — that the aspiration toward a society organised on the principles of equality, collective ownership, and democratic governance rather than private accumulation and market competition remained the most serious political aspiration available, and that South Africa in particular, with its history of racial capitalism and its need for fundamental economic transformation, could not afford to abandon socialist politics simply because the Soviet experiment had failed.
The pamphlet was read widely within the South African left and internationally, and its combination of intellectual honesty and political seriousness made it one of the most significant contributions to the debate about socialism's future at the moment of its apparent defeat. It was characteristic of Slovo at his best: the willingness to face uncomfortable truths without allowing them to produce political paralysis, the insistence on thinking clearly even when clear thinking produced conclusions that many in the movement found unwelcome.
The Sunset Clauses: The Most Difficult Decision
The proposal that Joe Slovo made within the ANC and SACP leadership in 1992 — subsequently known as the sunset clauses — was the most politically controversial position of his career and arguably the single most important contribution any individual made to the success of the negotiated transition. The proposal was simple in outline and explosive in its implications: that the post-apartheid constitution should guarantee civil servants, police officers, and military personnel who had served the apartheid state a period of job security in the new dispensation, protection against summary dismissal, and a sunset period during which the new government would be bound to maintain the existing government structure rather than immediately replacing it with ANC loyalists.
The opposition within the ANC and SACP was fierce and understandable. The people being offered these guarantees were, in many cases, the same people who had tortured, imprisoned, and killed ANC members for decades. The Security Branch officers who had run the detention-without-trial system, the Military Intelligence operatives who had directed the hit squads, the apartheid civil servants who had implemented the racial laws — these were not neutral functionaries who had happened to work for a bad government; they were active participants in one of the most systematic programmes of racial oppression in the twentieth century. Guaranteeing their positions felt, to many in the movement, like a betrayal of everything the struggle had been for.
Slovo's argument was strategic rather than moral: not that these people deserved protection, but that without it the transition would fail. The apartheid state's functionaries had the capacity to sabotage the negotiation process, to destabilise a new government, to use their institutional knowledge and their control of the security apparatus to make democratic governance impossible. The choice was not between a just transition and a pragmatic one; it was between a pragmatic transition and no transition at all. The sunset clauses were the price of democracy, and democracy — even an imperfect democracy that left apartheid's functionaries in their positions for a transitional period — was worth paying that price.
The subsequent history of South Africa's transition largely vindicated his analysis. The relatively peaceful transfer of power — with the security forces remaining under command, the civil service functioning, the armed right-wing not rising — was in significant part the product of the reassurances that the sunset clauses provided. The man who had spent thirty years directing MK's operations against the apartheid state was also the man who made it possible for the apartheid state's functionaries to accept the end of apartheid without destroying the country in the process.
Minister of Housing: The Last Act
Joe Slovo was diagnosed with cancer before the 1994 election. He was fifty-seven years old — the age Ruth had been when she was killed — when he took office as Minister of Housing in Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity. He was already ill, already living with the knowledge that his time was limited, and he threw himself into the work of trying to deliver on the ANC's promise of housing for South Africa's millions of homeless and inadequately housed citizens with the energy of a man who understood that he did not have time to waste.
Housing was one of the most visible measures of the transition's success or failure. The apartheid system had produced massive housing backlogs — millions of people living in informal settlements, in overcrowded hostels, in inadequate structures that reflected decades of deliberate policy designed to prevent Black South Africans from achieving secure urban residence. Addressing this backlog required not only resources but institutional capacity, political will, and the kind of creative problem-solving that Slovo had spent his life applying to political problems. He approached the housing portfolio with the same combination of strategic vision and practical engagement that he had brought to everything else, launching programmes that would eventually deliver millions of houses even if the scale of the need outpaced the pace of delivery.
He died on 6 January 1995, eight months into the new democracy. He was sixty-eight years old. His funeral in Johannesburg drew tens of thousands of mourners — a crowd that included not only the ANC's political leadership but ordinary South Africans who had come to say goodbye to a man they felt had given his life to their liberation. Nelson Mandela gave the eulogy. It was one of the largest public gatherings the post-apartheid era had yet produced.
Legacy: The Whole Person
Joe Slovo's legacy is too large to reduce to any single element. He was the MK chief of staff who directed the armed struggle for three decades. He was the SACP chairman who wrote the most honest assessment of Soviet communism's failure produced by any communist leader at the moment of that failure. He was the architect of the sunset clauses who made the negotiated transition politically possible. He was the Minister of Housing who spent his dying months trying to deliver on the liberation movement's promises to the poor. He was the husband who absorbed the assassination of his wife without allowing it to destroy him. He was the man in the red socks — the detail that everyone who met him remembered, the small human signature that cut against the image of the dangerous communist the apartheid government had spent decades constructing.
What is perhaps most striking about Slovo's life, viewed from any angle, is its completeness as a political commitment. He was not a South African by birth. He was not African. He had no structural reason — no racial identification, no community of origin, no personal history of suffering under apartheid — to commit his life to the liberation of South Africa. He chose it. And the choice was not a youthful enthusiasm that faded into comfortable accommodation with the system; it was a choice renewed daily, through the years of exile, through the loss of Ruth, through the decades of being hunted by the most capable counter-intelligence apparatus in Africa, through the compromises of the transition period, through the physical diminishment of terminal cancer. He chose South Africa's liberation every day of his adult life, and the country knew it, and loved him for it.