In August 1982, a parcel bomb sent by South Africa’s Special Branch killed Ruth First at the Center for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. She was fifty-seven — a lifelong South African Communist Party member, journalist, and scholar who had already survived 117 days of solitary confinement. Christopher J. Lee’s Jacobin essay traces her life as an argument about who gets remembered from the liberation struggle, and why her Marxism still reads as urgent.

The arc of the piece:

  • Born Heloise Ruth First in Johannesburg in 1925 to Latvian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who joined the Communist Party of South Africa; raised political, she met Joe Slovo at the University of the Witwatersrand and married him in 1949
  • Journalist for the Johannesburg Guardian and New Age; among the 156 charged in the Treason Trial (1956–61) alongside Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, and Helen Joseph — Mandela called it “the largest and longest unbanned meeting of the Congress Alliance in years”
  • Detained in 1963 after a police raid and held 117 days under the ninety-day law, a stretch retold for a global audience in her memoir 117 Days (1965)
  • From exile in London: South West Africa (1963), The Barrel of a Gun (1970) on coups in postcolonial Africa — Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana — Libya: The Elusive Revolution (1974), a biography of Olive Schreiner (1980), and the posthumous The Mozambican Miner (1983)
  • The 1975 FRELIMO revolution drew her to independent Mozambique to watch a revolution unfold — and the same police unit that interrogated her in 1963 organized her assassination

Lee reads The Barrel of a Gun as the political complement to Walter Rodney: where How Europe Underdeveloped Africa traced economic underdevelopment, First argued colonialism also politically underdeveloped the continent, leaving weak institutions vulnerable to military takeover. Her writing dodged both nationalist parochialism and Marxist orthodoxy — it was born, like Fanon’s (a crucial influence on her), in the crucible of active struggle rather than party offices.

The apartheid state is gone; the questions that drove her are not. What is the nature of political power, what is the role of the state, what is the place of violence in liberation — and how do workers, women and men, get justice? A decolonial, anti-imperial history in exactly the register Hitesh likes, sitting naturally beside Mamdani’s work on power in Africa.