1925 - 1982

Investigative Journalist, Editor and Academic, Activist, Member of the South African Communist Party (SACP), Founder member of the Congress of Democrats, Editor of Fighting Talk, Johannesburg editor of New Age, 1956 Treason Trialist, Socialist academic

Ruth First was a renowned activist whose bold and insightful writings exposed the horrors of Apartheid and the evils of the racist regime.

Suspicion of her involvement at Rivonia, Johannesburg, where Nelson Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting against the Apartheid government, led to Firsts detention in solitary confinement in 1963. She wrote about this experience in a book entitled 117 Days. First left South Africa a year later on an exit permit with her children to join husband Joe Slovo already in exile in England.

In 1982 she was brutally murdered when she opened a parcel bomb, sent by the Apartheid regimes agents, in her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique. Thousands of mourners watched as six ANC pall-bearers carried her coffin, draped in an ANC flag, into Llanguene cemetery. She was buried next to 13 other ANC comrades who were killed during the Matola Raid in 1981, one of several cross-border raids conducted by white South African security forces in the region.

Did You Know?

At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in Pretoria in September 1998, Apartheid spy Craig Williamson claimed he ordered the murder of Ruth First out of frustration because the security forces were unable to assassinate her husband, Joe Slovo, despite many attempts. Williamson was controversially granted amnesty for her death by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.