The 2026 World Cup kicked off on a Thursday with Mexico facing South Africa, and it felt like the whole continent had turned against our sister nation. In the 1990s, the mood would have been reversed. Back then, South Africa carried humanity’s hope, having shattered Apartheid and buried that evil system.
South Africa gave us some of Africa’s finest: Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Joe Slovo, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Solomon Mahlangu, Steve Biko, and Chris Hani.
Among them stood Heloise Ruth First, a woman whose entire existence was dedicated to freeing Africa from colonization and backwardness. She was born into the struggle. Her father, Julius First, migrated from Latvia at ten, and her mother, Matilda Leveta, came from Lithuania at four. Both were founders of the Anti-Apartheid Communist Party.
Ruth lived the struggle. At the University of Witwatersrand, she studied alongside Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane. Mondlane became the founding president of FRELIMO in Mozambique in 1962. Like Ruth, he died in a bomb attack. He was killed in 1969 in Dar es Salaam. She was bombed in her office at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo.
She married revolutionary Joe Slovo and raised a family while planning political and military strikes against Apartheid, enduring detention, and racing through life as if she knew she wouldn’t see old age. A bomb, specially made and personally delivered, ended her.
In 1968, Nigeria’s civil war raged when she showed up unannounced at the University of Ibadan. A sharp navigator, she found Selina Molteno of the African Studies Department, a woman she barely knew from the Anti-Apartheid office in London. She knocked and simply asked, “Can I stay with you?” To Molteno, it meant, “I’ll be staying with you.”
At 43, Ruth was already famous. She edited banned newspapers in South Africa. She was a veteran of Apartheid prisons. Being caught with a copy of her detention memoir, “117 Days,” published in London three years earlier, meant five years in prison.
She helped write the Freedom Charter, the historic 1955 document that laid out the democratic principles of the liberation struggle. She compiled and edited Mandela’s speeches and trial addresses in “No Easy Walk to Freedom.” She edited Govan Mbeki’s “South Africa: The Peasants’ Revolt” and Oginga Odinga’s “Not Yet Uhuru.”
Robin Cohen, Molteno’s husband and a future renowned intellectual then teaching Political Science, was equally stunned when Ruth appeared in Ibadan. But both welcomed her warmly during her two-month stay.
At that time, Apartheid and neo-colonial forces hunted her. Her husband Joe Slovo, a founder of the ANC’s military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe and its chief of staff, was in exile in London with their three children. She had little money but traveled across Ghana, Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria, studying African independence and post-independence struggles from 1964 to 1968. She even slipped into a meeting of Northern Nigerian political and military leaders, and by the time security services caught on, she was gone.
One of her most memorable meetings was with Susan Wenger, known as Adunni Olosa, the German-born Pan-Africanist who devoted her life to the Ifá religion and building the Osun-Oshogbo Grove into a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Her African travels produced her best-known book: “The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’état in Africa,” published in 1970.
Next, she turned up in 1975 at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania, teaching economics, specializing in the political economy of underdevelopment and planning.
The university was then a vortex of African intellectualism, with the continent’s best social studies faculty. It was enabled by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the teacher-president who established the African socialist philosophy of Ujamaa, meaning extended family or brotherhood.
Dar es Salaam became a volcano of ideas, with debates on imperialism exploding across the world. Some of it was captured in the 312-page book “Debate on Class, State and Imperialism,” edited by Ugandan political activist Yash Tandon, a founder of the Uganda National Liberation Front that took out Idi Amin. Among the gladiators was Walter Rodney, author of “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” who, like Ruth, was killed by a parcel bomb. There were fighters like Issa G. Shivji, whose 1973 book “Class Struggles in Tanzania” sparked an eruption after being critiqued by Dani Wadada Nabudere, author of “The Political Economy of Imperialism.” Nabudere’s book was a Bible for young radical students in 1980s Nigeria. There was Mahmood Mamdani, author of “Citizen and Subject,” and father of New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani. Into this vortex Ruth was thrown. She suffered no fools, dishing out as many blows as she got.
She described one debate as “slaughter at a seminar.” One casualty, she said, was “the calculated murder-in-public of liberal ideology.” Through it, she noted, “The radicals persevere with the analysis; the nationalists take refuge in statements about exceptions.”
Though an exile, mother of three, journalist, researcher, and author, the Apartheid regime saw Ruth as an extremely dangerous militant. It tracked her around the world until it blew her up.
Her husband Joe Slovo returned to a liberated South Africa in 1994 and became housing minister in Mandela’s administration. He died the following year.
My plea is this: South Africa, which produced Ruth First and so many outstanding Pan-Africanists and revolutionaries, should not be abandoned in its current xenophobic state. Africa must rehabilitate and embrace her.
