Review 22.6
24 April - 10 May , 1997

Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country
By Gillian Slovo

They were the perfect young Jewish couple of whom many expected much. Both from Lithuanian families, he was a young law student, she a journalist.

He was known as Joe Slovo (actually born Yossel Mashel), having arrived at age 11 speaking only Yiddish. She was Ruth First, first generation South African, and her mother was thrilled: Joe was every Jewish mother's dream son-in-law - an engaging, clever, Jewish lawyer-to-be. The year was 1948, and the Nationalist Party had just been elected, vowing to stamp out both the black peril and the red menace. Ruth and Joe, both active members of the Communist Party, had dreams far beyond the moderate affluence of a suburban South Africa, with equality between not only the classes but also the races.

Ruth did not live to see it, blown to pieces by a South African letter bomb while in exile in Mozambique in 1983; Joe did - just. Seriously ill with cancer, he returned to become a minister in Nelson Mandela's first black-led government, but died shortly after.

The two, in their lifetimes, had become the most feared white opponents of the apartheid regime - Ruth the activist, Joe the Communist Party chief and head of the military arm of the ANC. It was a life of constant danger, secrecy, exile and imprisonment, but Ruth and Joe managed to combine a commitment to politics and revolution with family life, raising three daughters.

Just what is the legacy of a childhood lived among sly whispers, coded telephone calls and pervasive secrecy? It this that Gillian Slovo has addressed, seeking, painfully at times, to separate the private and public facets of her parents, Joe Slovo and Ruth First.

A writer by vocation, and an exceedingly talented one, she has turned her attention to that most intimate subject of all - her own life, seeking answers and reconciling conflicts.

They were an unusual couple, dedicated to the political cause rather than conventional comforts and the easy life; such a life was not the normal one for a white child in middle-class South Africa in the 1950s and beyond.

There were the absences, imprisonment, and general harassment; security police shadowed the family even on innocent social outings. The young Gillian, born in 1952, one of three sisters, is now in Australia promoting her book, Every Secret Thing, and the distant, haunted past is now just starting to fall into place for her.

"I think I was conscious and I wasn't conscious of the fact [that we were different]. I was conscious in the sense that I went to a school with white kids like me, and yet their lives were completely different from mine. They had no conception of what happened in my family and in my family home, and I guess, in a way, that I had no conception of what happened in theirs, so it was always very alien to me when I went to visit them."

"And yet, because I was a child who'd been brought up this way, I kind of accepted that that was the way childhood was, and it was only later on that I looked back and realised the stresses under which I had lived."

I asked Gillian Slovo whether she now looked back with a sense of regret that her childhood was so unlike those of other children. "Um, yes. I think in a way I didn't have a childhood where the children were central in the sense that my parents were preoccupied with something that was much bigger than us. And I think there were times when I did long that we would be the centre of their world and the centre of their lives."

To make a public assessment of one's own parents involves delving into memories, feelings long suppressed, and family recollections and associations that differ with the individuals involved. So determined was she to fully understand as much as she could about her mother's life that she tracked down a man with whom Ruth First had once had an affair; even more dramatically, she located and confronted the man responsible for her mother's murder. Perhaps it had helped Gillian Slovo that her elder sister, Shawn, had already portrayed the family to the outside world in her award-winning film, A World Apart." One shouldn't ask questions, one shouldn't seek for answers - and I think in the research period I really did wrestle with that, but at certain points in the writing I also had to do it. But I wasn't writing this book for myself; there is an audience outside that doesn't know as much about South Africa or about my parents as I did, and so I very much had to wrestle with 'would they understand what I was trying to say?' And how much should I tell? This was a tension right to the end, and I think that in the end I realised that I am actually a writer and not a censor. This story that I had discovered about my parents did not make me feel any the less proud of them, so there was no need for anyone else to feel bad about them."

It had always been difficult for Gillian Slovo to reconcile the very different pictures of her parents, demonstrated graphically at her mother's funeral in Mozambique when she suddenly realised the person everyone was talking about was quite different from the person she had known as her own mother.

"I didn't want to hear of that Ruth," she wrote. "I wanted them to talk of the mother I had known." She now can see the book as a coming to terms with the fact that "both were my mother, and both were my father in the sense that my parents were political animals and the things that were said about them and their heroism and struggle were true as were my own experiences of who they were to me."

Eventually, she met Craig Williamson, the man responsible for sending the letter bomb that killed her mother; he was, he said, merely following orders. How did it feel to be in an office surrounded by the stuff of everyday life, and talking matter of factly with the man who killed your own mother? "I think I dealt with it by not having a lot of feelings about it, and I guess that was a protective mechanism that went into play, but it was also deliberate. What I wanted to know was the truth. Now, I'm not sure I got the truth, or I certainly didn't get the whole truth, but I asked the questions and it wasn't me that prevented it from coming out."

Gillian Slovo lives in London with her partner and daughter, but says South Africa is still very much a part of her, the place where she grew up.

And is she politically active? "I think I am very politically conscious and I think, inevitably because of the parents I had, I see the world in a very political way and I interpret what I see in certain ways, but, no, I am not particularly politically active in Britain at the moment."