The investigative journalist who exposed apartheid, the communist revolutionary who endured 117 days of solitary confinement
“In prison you see only the moves of the enemy. Prison is the hardest place to fight a battle.” — 117 Days (1965)
White anti-apartheid activist and journalist who worked within the SACP and ANC. As editor-in-chief of the progressive Guardian, she exposed racial segregation and served on the Freedom Charter drafting committee. A Treason Trial defendant, she became the first white woman detained under the Ninety-Day Law; her solitary confinement produced the memoir 117 Days. In exile she became a scholar of African liberation movements and was assassinated in Maputo by an apartheid police parcel bomb.
Career Timeline
- 1946BA Social Science, University of the Witwatersrand; co-founded Federation of Progressive Students
- 1946–1950sEditor-in-chief of The Guardian; after its banning, relaunched as Clarion, New Age, and others
- 1949Married Joe Slovo
- 1953Helped found the Congress of Democrats (COD), the Congress Alliance's white wing
- 1955Freedom Charter drafting committee member; banned from attending the Congress of the People at Kliptown
- 1955Editor of the radical political journal Fighting Talk
- 1956–1961Treason Trial defendant alongside 155 others; all acquitted
- 1963First white woman detained under the Ninety-Day Law; 117 days solitary confinement; later wrote 117 Days
- 1964Exiled to London; active in the British Anti-Apartheid Movement
- 1964–1970sEdited biographies of Mandela, Mbeki, and Odinga; researched African liberation movements
- 1970Published The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d'état
- 1972–1978Research Fellow at Manchester; lecturer in development studies at Durham
- 1978–1982Research director, Centre of African Studies, Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo
- 1982.08.17Assassinated by a South African Police parcel bomb; presidents and ambassadors from 34 countries attended her funeral
The Barrel of a Gun: The Political Economy of African Coups
The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d'État (1970) is Ruth First's Marxist political-economic analysis of the structural causes behind the wave of military coups that swept post-colonial Africa. After enduring the Treason Trial and exile in London, First traveled across Africa in the late 1960s (Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan) conducting interviews and field research. Through detailed case studies of Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana, she argued that coups were not simply "politics by the barrel of a gun" but symptoms of deeper structural contradictions in post-colonial state formation: bureaucratic fragility, political class corruption, and neo-colonial dependency. Declaring "I count myself an African, and there is no cause I hold dearer," First leveled unsparing criticism at independent Africa's leadership, not to confirm European prejudice, but to contribute to the continent's ultimate liberation. The book established First as a scholar of international standing, transforming her from journalist into a serious analyst of African politics, and remains essential reading in the field.