“Is Not the Truth the Truth?”1

“Is not the truth the truth?” 1 — The Political and the Personal in the Writings of Gillian Slovo and Jann Turner GEOFFREY V. DAVIS In Memoriam: Kristina Gebhardt, Aachen student, murdered in Cape Town, 2009. Anybody who is victimised because of his commitment to the struggle is a source of inspiration to us especially when he is a white person who belongs to a privileged group and decides to abandon those pleasures and identify himself with the struggle of the oppressed. —Nelson Mandela, speaking to Jann Turner in her film My Father, Rick Turner UST AFTER MIDNIGHT on 8 January 1978, Dr Richard Turner, a senior lecturer in Political Science at the University of Natal, heard a noise J outside his house; he went into his children’s bedroom to investigate and was shot through the window. Twenty minutes later he died in the arms of his thirteen-year-old daughter. He was thirty-six. On the afternoon of 17 August 1982, Ruth First returned from a shopping expedition to the place where she was then working, the Sociology Depart- ment of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique, to find an envelope ostensibly from the United Nations awaiting her. When she 2 opened it, it exploded, killing her instantly. She was fifty-eight. 1 This line from Henry IV, Part I, II.iv.224–25 is the epigraph to Gillian Slovo’s novel. 2 The horror of her death is described by Gillian Slovo in Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (London: Little, Brown, 1997): 8, 24. In Jann Turner’s novel 296 GEOFFREY V. D AVIS a Rick Turner had two daughters, one of whom – the elder in whose arms he died – is the novelist Jann Turner; Ruth First had three daughters, one of whom is the novelist Gillian Slovo. Both novelists thus went through the traumatic experience of losing a parent to assassination and in both cases the deaths were attributed to agents of the apartheid regime. As Ewald Mengel has put it, “Sometimes it seems as if the authors them- selves were sharing the nation’s trauma.”3 Ruth First married Joe Slovo, who later became the General Secretary of the South African Communist Party. For many years she led a turbulent, secretive and often dangerous life of political activism. She was a member of the Communist Party; she helped found the Congress of Democrats; and along with her husband she was briefly imprisoned as one of the 156 accused in the Treason Trial. As her six-year-old daughter Shawn put it at the time with the innocent insight of a child: “Mummy’s gone to prison to look after the black people.”4 In 1963, when the government clamped down on all op- position, First was detained without charge and held in solitary confinement under the Ninety-Day Detention Law, only to be re-arrested immediately upon release. (She has given an account of this ordeal in her book One Hun- dred and Seventeen Days.5). In 1964 she left South Africa on a one-way exit permit, never to return. The reason she was killed remains unknown. Joe Slovo evidently thought it was because of the kind of work she was doing in exile, which sought to lessen Mozambique’s economic dependence on South Africa. Her daughter Gillian suspected the reason was more encompassing: “My mother,” she wrote, “was a symbol of resistance to apartheid – bright, attractive, fiercely independent – she stood as a constant reminder that whites could choose to stand up and be counted.”6 Nelson Mandela thought that the death of this Heartland, Selina, who is killed in the same manner, seems to be modelled on First. See Heartland (London: Oriel, 1997): 91–92. 3 “Articulating the Inarticulate: An Interview with André Brink,” in Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, ed. Ewald Mengel, Michela Bor- zaga & Karin Orantes (Matatu 38; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 4. 4 Slovo, Every Secret Thing, 41. 5 Ruth First, One Hundred and Seventeen Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African Ninety-Day Detention Law (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965). 6 Slovo, Every Secret Thing, 17. .

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