27/08/2026
🚩In the month of August we celebrate Ruth First (1925–1982), a radical South African journalist, Marxist theorist, anti-apartheid strategist, and unwavering Pan-Africanist. Her political contributions reshaped how the world understood how imperialism operates across Africa.
Through various publications she exposed the brutal reality of forced labour on potato farms, migrant worker exploitation, and pass laws. She didn't just report news—she built the evidence base used to mobilise and organise mass popular resistance.
In exile, her intellectual focus expanded across Africa. Her seminal book, The Barrel of a Gun (1970), offered a groundbreaking critique of military coups in post-independence Africa. She argued that true African independence was impossible without economic decolonisation and breaking free from Western imperialist interests.
First was a fierce independent thinker within the liberation movement. While heading research at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, she studied the political economy of migrant labour to help newly independent African nations break free from South Africa’s regional economic dominance.
Her uncompromising pen and political commitment made her such a threat to the racist regime that agents of the apartheid state assassinated her with a letter bomb in Maputo on 17 August 1982.
Ruth First remains an enduring symbol of revolutionary integrity, radical intellect, and total commitment to a truly free and liberated Africa.
Long live Ruth First!
