''For Joe Slovo Informal Settlement in Cape Town, see: Joe Slovo (Cape Town).''

Joe Slovo (May 23, 1926 – January 6, 1995) was a South African politician, long-time leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and leading member of the African National Congress.

Life

Slovo joined the SACP 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, afterwards joining the Springbok Legion, a multiracial radical ex-servicemen's organization, upon his return.

Between 1946 and 1950 he completed a law degree at Wits University 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. First was assassinated in 1982 by order of Craig Williamson, a major in the Apartheid security police.

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. 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 the 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 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. In 1963 he went into exile and lived in Britain, Angola, Mozambique and Zambia. In his capacity as chief of staff of MK he codetermined its activities, like the 1983 Church street bombing. Slovo was elected general secretary of the SACP in 1984.

He returned to South Africa in 1990 to participate in the early "talks about talks" between the government and the ANC. Ailing, he stood down as SACP general secretary in 1991 and was succeeded by Chris Hani who was soon murdered. Slovo was given the titular position of chairperson of the SACP.

Slovo was a leading theoretician in both the SACP and the ANC. In the 1970s he wrote the influential essay ''No Middle Road'' which stated that the apartheid government would be unable either to achieve stability or to co-opt significant sections of the small but growing black middle class - in other words the only choice was between the overthrow of apartheid or ever greater repression. At the time the SACP's orthodox pro-Soviet and ''stage-ist'' view of change in South Africa was dominant in the ANC-led liberation movement.

Being Jewish and a Communist, Slovo was a demonised figure on the far right of Afrikaner society.

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 died in 1995 of cancer. In 2004 he was voted 47th in the Top 100 Great South Africans.

It was he who in 1992 proposed the breakthrough in the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa with the "sunset clause" for a coalition government for the five years following a democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides.

After the elections of 1994 he became Minister for housing in Nelson Mandela's government, until his death in 1995. His funeral was attended by the entire high command of the ANC, and by most of the highest officials in the country, including both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

Anti-Zionism

Remembering his brief visit to a Jewish kibbutz in Palestine during his trip back to South Africa from Europe after the Second World War, Slovo, in an unfinished autobiography published following his death, wrote:

"Within a few years the wars of consolidation and expansion began. Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press. It is ironic, too, that the Jew-haters in South Africathose who worked and prayed for a Hitler victoryhave been linked in close embrace with the rulers of Israel in a new axis based on racism."

Acclaim

Civic and similar tributes

Cinema and music

References

External links

Category:1926 births Category:1995 deaths Category:People from Obeliai Category:Lithuanian Jews Category:South African Jews Category:White South African people Category:Members of the South African Communist Party Category:Members of the African National Congress Category:Anti-apartheid activists Category:Cancer deaths in South Africa Category:Jewish politicians Category:Jewish anti-Zionism Category:Jewish atheists Category:Lithuanian emigrants to South Africa Category:Marxist writers Category:Slovo family Category:South African activists Category:South African military personnel of World War II Category:South African revolutionaries Category:University of the Witwatersrand alumni Category:People acquitted of treason Category:South African atheists

Her novels were at first predominantly of the crime and thriller genres, including a series featuring the detective Kate Baeier but she has since written more literary fiction. Her 2000 work, ''Red Dust'', a courtroom drama that explores the meanings and effects of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was made into a film released in 2004 directed by Tom Hooper and starring Hilary Swank, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jamie Bartlett. Her 2004 work ''Ice Road'' was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel incorporates real events (the death of Sergey Kirov) with a fictionalised rendering of life during the Siege of Leningrad.

Her 1997 memoir, ''Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country'', is an account of her childhood in South Africa and her relationship with her parents Joe Slovo and Ruth First — both famous South Africans and major figures in the anti-apartheid struggle who lived perilous lives of exile, armed resistance, and occasional imprisonment, which ended with her mother's murder in 1982. A family memoir in the form of a feature film, ''A World Apart'', was written by her sister Shawn Slovo and starred Barbara Hershey. With Victoria Brittain, she compiled the play Guantanamo- Honor Bound to Defend Freedom that was put on in theatres all over the world.

Gillian Slovo has lived in London since 1964 and has one daughter, Cassie.

Bibliography

Novels

Plays

Biography

External links

Category:1952 births Category:Slovo family Category:Living people Category:South African dramatists and playwrights Category:Women dramatists and playwrights Category:South African memoirists Category:South African writers Category:South African women writers Category:South African Jews Category:White South African people