Joe Slovo

Origins and early life

Joe Slovo was born in Obeliai, Lithuania, on 23 May 1926, to a Jewish family that emigrated to South Africa when he was a boy, and grew up in Johannesburg. He was raised in a religious family and became an atheist and a Communist, but never denied his Judaism, and late in life told the journal Jewish Affairs he was “not defensive at all about being a Jew” and “quite proud of it”. He joined the Communist Party in 1942, served as a signaller in North Africa and Italy in the war, then read law at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1946 to 1950, alongside Nelson Mandela.

Work and career

In 1949 he married Ruth First, herself a Jewish anti-apartheid activist, and in 1953 helped found the Congress of Democrats, which he represented on the committee that prepared the Freedom Charter of 1955. Charged in the Treason Trial in 1956, he saw the charges dropped in 1958, was detained in the emergency of 1960, and in 1961 became a leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. In exile from 1963, in Britain, Angola, Mozambique and Zambia, he was chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe; in 1982, in Maputo, Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid police.

In 1985 he became the first white member of the ANC national executive, and later served as general secretary of the South African Communist Party until ill health made him step down in 1991. Back in South Africa in 1990, he took part in the talks to end apartheid and in 1992 proposed the sunset clauses, five years of shared government with guarantees for civil servants, which broke a deadlock. Nelson Mandela made him Minister of Housing in the first democratic government and in December 1994 gave him the Isitwalandwe Seaparankoe, the highest award of the ANC.

He died of bone marrow cancer at his home in Johannesburg on 6 January 1995 and, after a state funeral, was buried in Soweto.