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“We must be free or die”

The above words appear in a different and narrower context in a sonnet by William Wordsworth. We dig them out of that obscurity not to give them a new connotation but to apply them to a wider, nay, international setting in which the life of Comrade Ruth – now no more – may be seen. In the course of the last forty years her life has been bound up with the struggles of the oppressed and exploited peoples of this country. Freedom does not come without a struggle. And because she struggled to be free she paid the highest price which those who hold back the masses of the people here at home and the world over exact from those who strive to restore man’s heritage, his birthright: freedom. Bearing in mind the South African situation, Comrade Ruth over the years consistently acted from a deep conviction of the ultimate ascendancy of the interests of the many who create wealth over those of the few who filch it. Now for a few snapshots of her in action in her crowded lifetime.

THE JOURNALIST AND WRITER

Her work milieu

Comrade Ruth spent all her years as a journalist with the newspapers that were published by The Guardian Newspapers, which was succeeded by Real Printing & Publishing Co. (Pty) Ltd, both of them registered as private companies. Under their wing were published the Guardian (banned in 1952), the Clarion and the People’s World (both of which were banned in quick succession after operating for a couple of months), Advance (banned in 1953), and New Age (banned at end of 1962). Spark, the last of this famous line, operated for a few months and folded in March 1963. It closed after all the editorial staff in the four offices – Cape Town, Durban, Joburg and Port Elizabeth – were served with banning orders that stipulated they were not to write for any newspapers or enter any premises where a newspaper was printed or published. Some of the editorial staff were served with house arrest orders.

Comrade Ruth served as the Joburg editor of all six of the Guardian line of newspapers (GLONS), which were in the forefront of the struggle to expose the fascist character of the National Party government. Each in its time – week after week – brought before the public of this country, and public opinion the world over, the sufferings of the oppressed and exploited peoples of this country and the masses of legislation and decrees (proclamations) churned out by the National Party government aimed at crushing all opposition among the oppressed. The GLONS went further and rallied the people to fight back.

We may pause at this moment to point out that while the National Party government – under the pretext of ridding the country of “foreign Communist ideologies” – was attacking freedom of speech and assembly as well as the freedom of the press, the bourgeois press and politicians looked on without raising a finger. The Guardian line of newspapers warned the white opposition parties and their press that true to the Nazi tactics of taking out opponents one at a time, the Nationalist government’s vicious attack on the Communist Party (CP), the Congresses, progressive trade unionists, and the GLONS would, in due course of time, be unleashed against all opponents of its policies.

After banning the CP, the government turned its guns relentlessly not only on the GLONS but on the personnel. Comrade Ruth’s name, like those of many others, was placed on the roll of listed Communists. When the government made a midnight swoop in 1956 on 156 political activists who were charged with treason, Comrade Ruth was one of them. The proprietor of Pioneer Printing Press which printed New Age was also charged with treason as was the manager of Real Printing & Publishing Co. In this way, the paper was itself charged with committing treasonable acts.

In addition to the battles in which the GLONS was locked with the government, there was always the problem of financing the papers. From month to month and year to year there always loomed the problem of meeting the expense bill. As would be expected, the GLONS did not get any advertisements. They survived on donations from those who were in sympathy with the cause for which these papers stood or from those who supported them directly. The editorial staff had to take off time from ferreting for news or from their desks to raise donations. But the main attack came from the government – sometimes harassment in the offices by the Special Branch who confiscated material including books of accounts, sometimes interference with the sellers. For twelve years (1951-63) the GLONS fought gallantly in the front line against the rise of fascism in this country. And Comrade Ruth was always in the thick of it.

Some highlights

And now for a glimpse of some of the great stories covered by this line of newspapers – stories of conditions which affected millions of people so adversely and vitally as a result of laws aimed at entrenching white supremacy or, put differently, the supremacy of the interests of the whites. During the 1946 African mineworkers’ strike it was the Guardian which went beyond the skimpy reports of the bourgeois press to show the brutality of the police in suppressing the strike: the shooting and killing of defenceless miners, the indiscriminate police attacks on miners in their compounds, flushing them out at the point of the bayonet and marching them to the shaft-head to disappear into the bowels of the gold-bearing earth. Gold – that scarce metal around which the currencies and economies of the capitalist world have revolved. The price which thousands of workers have paid to prop up capitalism and its vast machinery of exploitation is incalculable. Thousands have died a quick death from rock falls, thousands a slow painful death resulting from inhaling fine stone dust, hundreds of thousands have died miles and miles from the point of gold production where families of contract labour live in dire poverty. The mine wage structure is based on the notion that the determination of the wage should not take into account the miner’s dependants because they live on subsistence farming, and that in any case a high wage would be a disincentive as mine workers would take a long time in the reserves before offering themselves for labour on the mines again. In other words, a high wage would affect the supply of mine labour unfavourably.

The shootings in Joburg in 1950 received full coverage in the Guardian. By 1952 when the Defiance Campaign got under way, press photography had already established its role. Photographs of group after group of volunteers were a tremendous visual aid that made even illiterate people buy the paper because they could read the message of the struggle from the grim faces of the volunteers and what was then the Congress salute.

In the campaign to publicise the Congress of the People, the GLONS was alone in the field explaining tirelessly what the people should do to express their views and what a future South Africa should look like. In a way it was a referendum, the result of which is the Freedom Charter.

Then came the period of the great exposures which infuriated the government. Here was a photograph of Charles R. Swart (Mnyamana), the then Minister of Justice, towering above a group of giggling Nationalist parliamentarians as he fondled a cat-o’-nine-tails after he had piloted through parliament a Bill which prescribed flogging for offences associated with those living in conditions of poverty – in other words, the oppressed.

Under Hendrik Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs, the implementation of pass laws was intensified. A special police section – the Ghost Squad – was set up. Its function was to keep a tight check on passes and to arrest pass law offenders. Almost from nowhere the Ghost Squad sprang on Africans on busy streets, at odd places and times. Droves of African males were caught in this dragnet. The Native Commissioner’s Courts, especially in Joburg, could not cope with the flood of arrests. One of the concomitant results of this drive was that a large number of such pass offenders were pressed into labour on the farms without going through the legal court procedures – such as there are. The GLONS hunted for the Ghost Squad, as they in turn, unaware they were being tracked down, hunted for and swiftly bundled their victims into closed vans. In the meanwhile people on the crowded pavements went about their business without so much as throwing a second glance at an African man who was stopped and led to the edge of the pavement, ostensibly by friends. To white South Africans all seemed normal.

The GLONS caught the Ghost Squad in action and splashed their photographs. Thus exposed, the Ghost Squad was stripped of its ghost mask. From week to week the story, accompanied by photographs, told of the disappearance without trace of men who had left the township in the mornings to go to work. The people were awakened to the brutal reality of the new type of pass: the Dom Pass. To check the Dom Pass, police had to thumb through its many pages and one was lucky not to be caught out in one or another of the various sections.

Quietly the editorial staff of GLONS was trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of law-abiding men who failed to return home after work. A number were traced to the potato farms of the eastern Transvaal in the Bethal area. Photographs of some of the lost men dressed in grain sacks were splashed. One story told of how the men were whisked away, how they lived on the potato farms, how those who died at the hands of the foremen were buried in furrows and covered under the soil as the tractor ploughed through into the furrow where the corpse lay. The unfolding of the ghastly truth was so shocking that the government did not make any attempts to deny it. Instead they explained it away by saying: those are Jewish-owned farms.

The anger of the people found immediate expression in the as yet most successful nationwide economics boycott: the potato boycott.

During periods when there was considerable unemployment in the townships, the government employed convict labour especially on the railways (at the loco). It also hired out convict labour at a fee which was far less than the average wage of unskilled labour – itself far below subsistence level. When the GLONS reported on this practice, cabinet ministers dismissed it as Communist propaganda. The GLONS took photographs of convict labour working at premises of private concerns, such as wool-packing houses. Challenged by captions such as “The Camera Does Not Tell Lies”, the government fell back on its last line of defence. It passed legislation making it a criminal offence to take and publish photos of prisoners or prisons without the permission of the minister.

In covering the march of 20 000 women to the Union Buildings to protest against the extension of pass laws to women, the GLONS captured this historic event by filming it so that it could be shown on the screen.

It is to be hoped that at some time the role that the GLONS played in advancing the cause of the struggle for liberation in this country will be shown more fully, and that a collection of some of Comrade Ruth’s main articles will be compiled.

EDITOR OF FIGHTING TALK

As editor of Fighting Talk, Comrade Ruth’s ability as an organiser blossomed. In addition to the exacting work in GLONS, she called on her inner springs of energy to marshal a wide range of writers for the monthly Fighting Talk. It required one with the push she had to have ensured the regular publication of the high standard of F. T. She drew contributors from both within the Movement and from outside its ranks. One would have imagined that her fork already carried more than it could. No! In addition to finding diverse contributors who required some prodding to observe the deadlines and the general editing work involved, she had to keep an eye on the financial side and distribution of the magazine.

A POLITICAL ACTIVIST

The role which Comrade Ruth played in building and guiding the CP, especially after it was forced to operate illegally, can only be mentioned in passing here. She had one of the sharpest brains and played a vital role in solving some of the most knotty problems. At the highest decision-making levels she participated in shaping policies that will vitally influence the future course of events in this country. The CP does not operate in a vacuum. It works amongst the masses of the oppressed and exploited, and to that end she applied herself as devotedly in advancing the cause of national liberation as in advancing that of the working class. As the expression goes, yimazi ephala neenkabi (a mare that holds her own in the race with steeds).

Always nurturing, she worked hard to set up an illegal printing press for the Movement, and when an illegal radio was commissioned, she played an important part in the preparation of the script for broadcast. She lined up material for an illegal publication which was intended for translation into the main African languages: Why You Should Be A Communist. Under trying conditions she kept a steady nerve. When the post-Rivonia “Mfecane/Difaqane” gathered momentum and she had herself spent about four months in detention, she left the country to continue the struggle from outside the borders. This gave her an opportunity to develop yet another dimension in her varied contribution to the struggle. She engaged in research work, on the basis of which she wrote books on problems affecting the African continent.

AT HOME

Those who knew her as the tough politician she was or as the journalist who used her pen so effectively to destroy the myth of the race superiority of the whites, might have found it difficult to think of her as a woman who had a home to run and a mother who had children to rear. She invited friends to her home and as a host she was always warm. Her idea of what a new South Africa should look like was reflected in the relaxed atmosphere one experienced in her home.

WEEP NO MORE

Comrade Ruth is no more, but to those who would shed tears we say: Weep no more. She lived a full and fruitful life. Her life holds lessons for us, the living: to hold back nothing of ourselves to ensure ultimate victory for the cause of the struggle against fascism. Comrade Ruth dedicated her life to this noble cause, and in thinking of her, let our resolve to bring about the liberation of the masses of the oppressed and exploited peoples of this land – whatever the price – be strengthened. She has shown us: “We must be free or die.”

Forward to Freedom.

Amandla! Matla!

[Ruth First died on 17 August 1982]