The Ruth First legacy

A MAJOR highway in Durban is named Ruth First, but who was she.

- PROFESSOR SALEEM BADAT

First was a South African freedom fighter, journalist and scholar who worked against the racist system of apartheid during white minority rule. She was murdered by apartheid assassins in her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo in 1982.

A new book, Research and Activism: Ruth First & Activist Research, by Vasu Reddy and I ensures that her ideas, work and legacy live on. The book can be downloaded for free.

Heloise Ruth First was born on May 4, 1925, in Johannesburg to Jewish parents who migrated from Eastern Europe to South Africa in the early 1900s.

Her parents were founder members of the South African Communist Party.

Involved in the Young Communist League and the Federation of Progressive Students, at age 21, First joined The Guardian (later New Age) and served as its Johannesburg editor for 17 years.

Her brave and penetrating journalistic research exposed her to the brutality of labour exploitation, and control on the mines and the farms.

First wrote that “silence in the face of injustice is complicity”.