TRANSCRIPT: A MACABRE PLACE
The ANC had an office in Maputo. The first representative was Lennox Lagu, one of the first ANC/ MK activists. Very, very lovely guy. And then later on he was replaced by a certain Jacob Zuma, whom I got to know quite well in those years. And there were a number of people working in the office. Thousands of South Africans streaming out of South Africa, would go into Swaziland, other countries and many would fly into Mozambique and then go on – some to MK, some for education. A few would remain, but it was a staging post rather than a place where there were ANC camps. So relatively few people were visible, were seen. And there was a smallish South African community, ANC kind of community.
A number of us were working at the university, not a huge number. The Centre for African Studies at the University of Eduardo Mondlane did extraordinary research. In many ways I would say it’s the most exciting, advanced, intellectually adventurous research place in the world that I’ve known of because it had highly charged intellectuals from many, many countries, but in a situation where ideas mattered. And a strong interaction. The two leading figures were Ruth First and Aquino de Bragança. Aquino was the head. He was from Goa, who had become involved with Frelimo in Mozambique, and very much in touch with the Sorbonne and the French left-wing intelligentsia. And his idea of a marvellous discussion would be to get a number of thinkers in one room and get them talking.
Chief of research operations was Ruth First. And she wanted hard information, facts, knowledge but not knowledge for its own sake, not just data. You had to pose a problematic, a theme, an idea, what are you investigating. And the team doing the research, the empirical research, have to ask certain questions and spread out into the countryside and do that. And I went on one of those missions. It was quite, quite extraordinary. Alpheus Manghezi from South Africa, very active and he was Shangaan-Tsonga speaking. So, he served as an interpreter and did extraordinary research on Mozambican mineworkers. Rob Davies had done a PhD at Sussex University in Economics; there was a guy from Belgium; somebody from Stanford University, she had a brilliant intellect outlook; and people from England. In this intensive laboratory together with a number of young Mozambicans as well.
And they provided some information to Frelimo. Frelimo was very ideological. You could solve all problems by knowing the line properly and developing it and adapting it to changing circumstances. But this was asking different questions. Sometimes the sharp critical questions of the French intellectuals. But often the on the ground, what’s really happening amongst ordinary people that Ruth was insisting be conceptualised, theorised and fed in. She was very highly respected by the Mozambican leadership. As Joe was very respected and loved. Joe never stayed there. Ruth stayed there in Mozambique.
We’d had a shocking event the year before. It was in January 1981 and Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated as president of America. A week later the Matola Raid – Matola Massacre, we called it – took place. South African commandoes came in and they killed a number of MK people in a house there. I believe some of the attackers were also injured or killed. And it was a shocking form of kind of aggression.
South Africa was putting heavy pressure on Mozambique. And their line then was Samora is a captive of the communists of Moscow. But now there was a much tougher policy, and we had no doubt the CIA had given the go ahead. Because it was just a week after Reagan took office. It was very shocking. But it was at a distance for most of us.
But we would go to the cemetery December the 16<sup>th</sup> every year. We would clean the graves. We would sing freedom songs, and we would look at that space – quite a lot of space there. Who’s going to be next? Who’s going to be next?
And then 1982, Ruth First is blown up. And the bell rings and a knock on the door and I open – a bleak face. And Ruth has been severely injured by a letter bomb at the university. I can’t believe it. Does she have any chance? There’s no chance at all. I read somewhere if you want to say goodbye to someone who’s died, it’s good to see the body. And I thought, I must go and see the body, and... I see Ruth’s legs lying there, nicely dressed as she always was. The body… And there’s no face. There’s no face.
It was like terrible. We could understand Joe: in the frontline; military commander. But Ruth, this wonderful intellect, the lecturer, people loved Ruth. Many were scared of Ruth. She had a sharp tongue. She didn’t even realise how sharp her tongue was, just blasted away like that. And there was a pall – a heaviness. Abdullah Ibrahim was visiting Maputo at the time. And should we cancel the concerts? And we said, ‘No, the music must go on.’ And we had a concert and we’re all feeling bleak and heavy. And the electricity is sabotaged. We have one candle and Abdullah is playing. Love, death, revolution – it’s all – and music - you know, in that hall.
I got glandular fever that year. It was the emotional impact that was so destructive. And the sense of our vulnerability – that somehow a line had been crossed by the regime in Ruth’s business. The parcel was sent to her. She’d opened a parcel. She’d been at a UN sponsored workshop at the University of Eduardo Mondlane, Centre for African Studies. And she’d been talking about… it was about the peasantry in Mozambique. She said the peasantry aren’t an abstraction. They’re real people with real lives and real contradictions. And they’re better off and worse off. And there’s some near water and some on dry land, and some are men, and some are women, and some are poor, and some are desperately poor. And some speak Portuguese and others don’t speak Portuguese. And we’ve got to know these contradictions. And we heard her voice because it was recorded. And it was so reminiscent of Ruth, and her voice and her style of speaking. And now she’s dead. And we had a ceremony at the university. Certainly, the hardest talk I’ve ever given. Not just because it was in Portuguese, it was speaking about Ruth.
At her graveside, it was so painful to see her mother crying for the fallen daughter, Joe crying, this tough competitive guy crying. And we just sang beautiful, beautiful songs. It was a most beautiful send off. And it was Alpheus Manghezi, I remember, Indres Naidoo, myself carrying the coffin. But we felt overwhelmed with grief. It was like a devastating moment. And we’d been preparing a formal obituary to be read out. And preparing the obituary speech, I remember Harold Wolpe was there. And one of the phrases I used, ‘She was cut down in her finest flower.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘she hated these clichés.’ And that was a very good corrective for me. And I decided to speak about the contradictions in Ruth’s life, just the way she spoke about the contradictions amongst the peasantry. And the contradiction of being a white person in a black movement. But she didn’t deny that she was white. She used all the benefits, the privileges that whiteness gave her to get knowledge and information and ideas that could feed into the struggle for general liberation. And being a middle-class woman in a worker’s movement, the same thing applied. That’s how she resolved that contradiction. But a third contradiction was being a woman in a man’s movement. And she never fully resolved that. Although she took men on at the level of theory, and she was combative and brilliant and she had books published – she always felt inadequate, incomplete. And that must have been, it could only be explained by the gender relationships that somehow made her feel a little bit undermined.
The cemetery was a macabre place of unity, of solidarity, of affirmation. Affirming and disconcerting at the same time. And a reminder of death. And a reminder of how violent apartheid was. And once Ruth was there, it was clear nobody was safe because now it wasn’t simply going for ANC combatants in the underground, in the resistance. It was anybody working to encourage Mozambique to be independent of South Africa, to support the freedom struggle in South Africa.
