Joe Slovo

Joe Slovo (born Yossel Mashel Slovo; 23 May 1926 – 6 January 1995) was a South African politician, and an opponent of the apartheid system.

A Marxist-Leninist, he was a long-time leader and theorist in the South African Communist Party (SACP), a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC), and a commander of the ANC's military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

Slovo was born on 23 May 1926 in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family that emigrated to the Union of South Africa when he was eight.

His father worked as a truck driver in Johannesburg.

Although his family were religious, he became an atheist who retained respect for "the positive aspects of Jewish culture".

Slovo was educated at King Edward VII School and left school in 1941 and found work as a dispatch clerk.

He joined the National Union of Distributive Workers and, as a shop steward, was involved in organising a strike.

Slovo joined the South African Communist Party in 1942.

Inspired by the Red Army's battles against the Nazis on the Eastern Front of World War II, Slovo volunteered to fight in the war.

He served as a Signaler in combat operations for the South African forces in North Africa and Italy, and on his return to South Africa he joined the Springbok Legion, a multiracial radical ex-servicemen's organization.

Between 1946 and 1950 he completed a law degree at the University of the Witswatersrand and was a student activist.

He was in the same class as Nelson Mandela and Harry Schwarz.

In 1949 he married Ruth First, another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist and the daughter of SACP treasurer Julius First.

They had three daughters, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn.

In 1950, the SACP was banned and both First and Slovo were listed as communists under the Suppression of Communism Act and could not be quoted or attend public gatherings in South Africa.

A South African citizen from a Jewish-Lithuanian family, Slovo was a delegate to the multiracial Congress of the People of June 1955 which drew up the Freedom Charter.

He became active in the South African Congress of Democrats (an ally of the ANC as part of the Congress Alliance) and was a delegate to the June 1955 Congress of the People organised by the ANC and Indian, Coloured and white organisations at Kliptown near Johannesburg, that drew up the Freedom Charter.

He was arrested and detained for two months during the Treason Trial of 1956.

Charges against him were dropped in 1958.

He was imprisoned for six months in 1960, and emerged as a leader of uMkhonto we Sizwe the following year.

He was later arrested for six months during the State of Emergency declared after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.

In 1961, Slovo and Abongz Mbede emerged as two of the leaders of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, formed in alliance between the ANC and the SACP.

He lived in exile from 1963 to 1990, conducting operations against the apartheid régime from the United Kingdom, Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia.

In 1963 he went into exile and lived in Britain, Angola, Mozambique and Zambia.

In the 1970s he wrote the influential essay "South Africa: No Middle Road", which argued that the apartheid government would be unable to achieve stability, co-opt significant sections of the small but growing black middle class, or democratise: the only choice was between an insurrectionary overthrow of apartheid, centred on MK, or ever greater repression.

At the time the SACP's orthodox pro-Soviet and two-stage view of change in South Africa – "national democratic revolution" first, socialism later – was dominant in the ANC-led liberation movement.

Ruth First was assassinated in 1982 in Maputo, by order of Craig Williamson, a major in the South African Police.

In 1982, Slovo's wife, Ruth First was assassinated in Maputo, Mozambique, where the couple lived in exile.

In his capacity as chief of staff of MK he codetermined its activities, like the 1983 Church Street bombing.

In 1984, Slovo, an ANC and SACP member, was forced to leave Mozambique in terms of the Nkomati Accord between the Marxist People's Republic of Mozambique and apartheid South Africa.

In 1984, he was elected general secretary of the SACP in Lusaka, Zambia, and in 1985, he became the first white member of the ANC's national executive.

Slovo was a leading theoretician in both the SACP and the ANC.

Slovo's 1988 "The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution" defended the two-stage conception, insisting that "national democratic revolution" would "implement economic measures which go far beyond bourgeois-democracy" and so "erect a favourable framework for a socialist transformation but will not, in themselves, create, or necessarily lead to, socialism".

In 1989, he wrote "Has Socialism Failed?"

which acknowledged the weaknesses of the socialist movement and the excesses of Stalinism, while at the same time rejecting attempts by the left to distance themselves from socialism.

Slovo insisted on having a "justified confidence in the future of socialism and its inherent moral superiority", and pointing to "the failures of capitalism", although he now rejected the one-party state model.

In 1990, he returned to South Africa, and took part in the negotiations that ended apartheid.

He became known for proposing the "sunset clauses" covering the 5 years following a democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides, and his fierce non-racialist stance.

After the elections of 1994, he became Minister for Housing in Nelson Mandela's government.

He died of cancer in 1995.