Ruth First was assassinated on 17 August 1982 by a letter bomb from the South African secret service of apartheid. She died at her workplace, the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA), working for the Eduardo Mondlane University, for Mozambique and for Africa. She loved Mozambique, where she had arrived in 1977 as if it were her homeland, to which – being in exile since 1964 – she would never return. She fought her whole life long as a woman, wife and militant against apartheid, for the liberation of her country and all of Africa.
A supremely elegant journalist, orator and writer, she had been in prison and in exile, had suffered ostracism and many losses. Yet she never lost her optimism, her drive to act, to contribute to the revolution with thought, research and teaching.
Furthermore and above all, in the moments of deepest crisis, and when the movement seemed to be losing ground, she never withdrew to the intellectuals' ‘Ivory Tower’ – a term which she found extremely indigestible – which imparts lessons in theory and ideology but which does not dirty its hands with analyses of the contradictions in the struggle for the conquest of freedom. Doing and organising research, writing – these for Ruth were inseparable from life itself. Passions move us to fight for a cause; empathy we feel for other people is fuelled by passion; Ruth's life was one with her political passion, which was for her a source of happiness, never of sacrifice.
She knew the risks she was taking – in her prison memoirs she wrote that she was sure they would be back – and they came back on 17 August 1982.
In her investigative journalism work, she went after the sources of facts, information and documents. The appeal and efficacy of her prose lies in the ability she had to identify essential connections, to go to the heart of issues. She was demanding in her choice of words. Language was important for her: it helped her to think, to develop the ability to argue her points correctly, to give shape and meaning to concepts.
For these reasons she never felt comfortable when she had to express herself in Portuguese. At the CEA she would meticulously check the translators' work; she spent long hours seeking out the wording which would be the most penetrating linguistically and conceptually, which would convey the message effectively and scientifically.
When Ruth was incarcerated for 117 days in 1963 (see First 1965/1982), the liberation movement in South Africa was under attack: many of the African National Congress's (ANC) leaders had been arrested or were in exile, and residual liberties of expression and organisation were drastically eliminated. The account of her prison days had an upsetting impact in Europe.1 It helped destroy the image of apartheid which still prevailed in journalism and historiography at the beginning of the 60s: that apartheid was nothing more than an archaic ancien regime's obsolete survival, which would have been done away with by gradual reforms.
Ruth ardently admired intelligence and beauty, but not when they were devoid of the ethic of commitment. No one has forgotten this formidable woman; all over the world there are foundations, scholarships, conferences – even streets, plazas and more which have been named after her. Her friends and comrades remember her with sincere affection, and even those who at times felt they were the subject of her cutting criticism miss the intelligence in her discussions. Nelson Mandela cites her with respect and real warmth, remembering her and her fighting spirit in his memoirs: ‘as you will readily concede few of her friends were not at one time or the other bruised by her sharp tongue,’ ‘But none will deny that she was a fully committed and highly capable person whose death was a severe setback to us all’ (Mandela 2010, 245).
Ruth believed firmly in the centrality of politics, in a national, regional and international dimension, and she actively followed the decolonisation process as well as the problems of consolidation and development facing the new African nation-states. Once out of prison, her exile in England was hard to bear; she wanted to return to live in Africa, where there was concrete work to be done, where research and teaching were meaningful. An invitation from Aquino de Bragança offered her the chance to go back (Gentili 2012), at first as director of a research project on the Mozambican miners in South Africa2 and then later to organise and direct the CEA's research including the design and launch of the Development Course. The invitation filled her with enthusiasm: in the Mozambique liberation, she – like all of us in the 70 s – saw the chance to work for institutions which were making radical changes toward eradicating the inheritances of the colonial state. As the research director, in close collaboration with Aquino de Bragança, she carried out her task with impeccable hard work and dedication, which stayed with her until her brutal end.
From 1977 to 1982 Ruth organised research and training with the participation of scholars from Mozambique, South Africa, other African countries and elsewhere, all of them with extensive experience in research and teaching in one or more African countries. Even if they came from diverse academic programmes and disciplines, all of them were politically involved, united by shared membership in the CEA programme wherein research and training needed to join together to investigate the priority problems for the country's development.
It could be said that such scholars were motivated by thinking along similar lines to Gramsci and Ruth and Aquino were the driving forces behind it.
Protest because we need all of your enthusiasm. Organise because we need all of your energy. Study because we need all of your intelligence. (Gramsci 1919, 1)
Everybody at the CEA was mobilised to help in the running of a UNESCO conference that preceded Ruth's death by a few days; 13 August 1982 was the last day of the international conference Ruth had organised to discuss problems and priorities for training in social sciences in southern Africa.3 South Africa's military and logistical support for the destabilisation of Mozambique was already contributing to the country's decline into a serious economic and political crisis. Throughout the 70 s members of the opposition to the South African government were eliminated with terrorist operations. Moreover, in the 80 s the South African regime would extend its tentacles – stretching over borders to eliminate exponents of the ANC – from countries in southern Africa including Botswana, Zambia, Lesotho and Swaziland, and reaching into European countries. In this context of repression and assassinations, it is not surprising in hindsight that the apartheid regime would respond to what it must have considered as the threat posed by Ruth's work, including the apparent international recognition for the social science training being carried out in Mozambique. Ruth was killed by a letter bomb when, after the conference, she found the time to open her mail, on 17 August 1982.
Ruth has been remembered as a militant endowed with extraordinary intelligence, culture, dialectic and communication skills. Through numerous conferences, articles, essays, books, defying ostracism and prison – fearless as Nelson Mandela has written – she contributed to an understanding of the true essence of the apartheid regime and its ramifications for the entire context of southern Africa.
Here we want to remember her for how much she contributed to the knowledge of the specificities of the struggles for emancipation in South Africa and in Africa as a whole. Her writings on the problems of the nation-states, on the nationalist and revolutionary movements of that era are still up to date because they offer a lesson on how to analyse today's politics and policies critically, on where the African states are 50 years after independence, on steps forward and lost ground, on the whys and the hows and in whose benefit changes taking place may be. However, above all our aim is to highlight the lessons we can draw from her innovative contribution to research organisation and training in Mozambique at the CEA directed by Aquino de Bragança (CEA 1982; de Brangança and O'Laughlin 1984; Letsekha 2012). We are talking about over 30 years ago when, throughout the whole world, despite the student revolts of ’68, research and teaching were still prevalently authoritarian and normative. And whereas in Africa the social sciences were rapidly changing approaches and methodologies – consider the innovation in the problems of historical research of the ‘schools’ of Ibadan, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, and the establishment of political economy's interdisciplinarity – in Mozambique they had yet to begin. The situation for higher education and research was destitute. The country absolutely and urgently needed to create cadres who had the skills to manage a modern state. Mozambique needed ‘capacity building’, as one would say in the jargon which is popular these days, and the Development Course was thought of as holistic education which was meant to lead to our students' greater trust in their own critical skills to be put at the service of the country's development.
I am convinced that Ruth's long march towards the elaboration of the Development Course in Maputo was inspired not only by her experience as a militant researcher in South Africa, in Africa and in the development courses she had taught previously in Manchester and Durham, but also the editing work she did of Govan Mbeki's study on the peasants in Transkei. The Peasant Revolt was published in 1964, but put together in between arrests, imprisonment, time spent underground that Ruth experienced in her last years in South Africa and the last years of freedom for Govan. The portrait Ruth paints of Govan restores for us her ideal of the political militant, organiser, intellectual who is both demanding in his examination of sources and determined in putting the people at the heart of his work: ‘he was organizer, propagandist, technician, policy-maker, man of action, intellectual.’ Above all, he sees Transkei through the eyes of a commoner, for the peasants of his home country are the people he loves.” Govan is above all a man of the people: ‘in the words and from the experiences of the peasant, for while Govan worked with blue books and statistics, the commoners of the Transkei were his chief source of information’ (First 1964, 13–14).
Regarding the Development Course, let's think again about the centrality of field research done with students and teachers working together, about the importance of listening to oral testimony, and continually putting data and ideology to debate with what we learned from reality as we discovered it in the field, from the populations who hosted us – subjects, not objects, of our research work.
In the preface to Govan Mbeki's work, Ruth goes back over the phases and the difficulties in putting together a study of the history of peasants' struggles in Transkei, and the lessons which the freedom movement could learn from them. The manual's initial project for ANC members, after Sharpeville and the outlawing of the movement, despite Govan's arrest for five months, took the shape of a book when Ruth was called to put together material scattered in various places along with numerous versions written on rolls of toilet paper as well. Despite being under strict surveillance by the police, Ruth organised and coordinated the collaboration of sympathetic friends who checked data, facts, materials and references in minute detail. The book was not yet finished when Govan and then Ruth were arrested; it would only be finished, in the version that then would be published, once Ruth was in exile in London, while Govan and his comrades – Mandela, Sisulu, Mhlaba, were sentenced to life imprisonment at the trial of Rivonia. This, among the many editing projects she took on,4 was for Ruth the one which involved her the most. It brought her even closer to the world of peasants and workers; it helped her to refine the analysis of apartheid's nature as a specific form of capitalist exploitation based on poorly paid, precarious work, which she had already developed in various articles in South African newspapers and journals5 that were regularly banned following the adoption of ever-more draconian laws denying freedom of expression. Direct contact with workers and their families during the struggles of the 50 s and early 60 s in South Africa and South West Africa (Namibia) were fundamental elements in Ruth's political education (First 1950, 1953, 1957a, 1957b, 1958, 1961a, 1961b, 1968, 1978).
Attention to history and the problems which faced rural populations in the context of colonial inheritances and of the politics of transition to socialism was a revealing part of CEA's research. To appreciate the richness of the work which was done in those years – in Zambezia, Gaza, Tete, in the port of Maputo – on the relationships between campo e cidade; among state farms, cooperatives and family farms, as well as the relationships between migrations and changes in the rural areas from which the migrants came, one should reread not only the research reports, which are at times too schematic, but one should also go back to read the field notes which contain interviews, reports on the historical context, analysis of oral sources, and sources from archives, documents and statistics.6
Ruth's extraordinary organisational skills shine through the work on Transkei as well. She succeeded in orchestrating the collaboration of a true collective of friends and experts despite the difficult conditions dictated by her being underground to avoid arrest. Each and every datum, fact, date and circumstance was checked in minute detail. Ruth would later bring to Maputo this collective work method characterised by extreme rigor and very high productivity. Paraphrasing what she wrote about Govan Mbeki, we can say the same about Ruth: ‘[Govan] had a sharp mind, intolerant of the foolish and the faint-hearted. But in between the meetings, and the drafting of circulars and resolutions, the stern disciplinarian becomes the gentle and considerate friend’ (First 1964, 14).
Ruth never pulled back from an argument or debate, which she interpreted as a process of growth, of learning, to improve analysis and to make more effective her contribution to the struggle. The most virulent discussions were those with her own comrades, and with her husband Joe Slovo in first place. Her positions often seemed heterodox to those who had a position of responsibility in the political apparatus, as had Joe. And Joe, when he was asked whether Ruth really was a member of the South African Communist Party, would answer with his typical dry wit that undoubtedly she was, but that were she not his wife she would have been at risk of expulsion many times. Ruth was not a dissident; she almost never put in writing her dissent. For those who retorted that she was often too polemical, she would respond that she belonged to the left and that therefore it was her duty to debate critically, and severely, the thoughts and actions of her comrades above all.7
Ruth always and in all ways defended her and our freedom of thought. Her way of interpreting research and teaching radically threw into question the foundations of social science as they were theorised and taught in South African universities. Not only that, it also put up for debate the dogmatism of official Marxism. She had a taste for knowledge of the world, peoples and contexts, reinforced by an inexhaustible, empathetic curiosity, which came out in persistent questions and an ability to come up with complex answers. The ability belonging to a true researcher, to question her own results, to ask herself each and every time once again: have I got this right? what am I missing? what have I not understood, and why?
Italian shoes
Since her youth, Ruth was in contact with and had made friendships among exponents of leftist European organisations and of African, Asian and South American liberation movements. Her curiosity drove her to watch with interest the ferment of change which culminated in the student revolts of 1968 and which agitated the European communist and socialist parties. Mostly in private, but also in a few of her writings, she reflected on – and wanted to have others reflect on – how much these struggles were changing the left's terms of debate for the definition of class struggles and alliances, for what the student movement stood for in its problematic relationship with traditional parties and unions of the working class, for the necessity to have an open position. Ruth criticised the dogmatism which was still prevalent among communist parties, the over-simplified arguments and the demonisation of those – individuals and movements – who were not totally faithful to the party line.
In Italy she had formed close friendships with exponents of the Italian communist and socialist parties as well as with many progressive Catholics. The Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was at that time the most numerous and certainly the most organised and influential in the West, experienced the tension between being an opposition mass party while also being a governing party at regional and local levels, in a country undergoing rapid economic and social expansion aligned with the West. Already by the latter half of the 50 s the party had entered a season of reformulating and reclaiming its independence in regard to the hegemony of the Soviet communist party. This took place in the political context of the 60 s, which was characterised by the Italian government policies making cautious overtures to the USSR.
I never heard Ruth label the Italian Communist Party of those years as revisionist, as was the tendency of the dogma faithful who had never put themselves to the test of being responsible for a mass party in the context of a country strictly aligned with the West during the most conflictual years of the Cold War.8 She found what was happening in the Italian left regarding the analysis and the ways of organising concrete solidarity with liberation movements extremely productive, since it had succeeded in involving a wide spectrum of political forces. She was interested in the dynamics of the alliances among diverse components of the ‘democratic’ spectrum and how the left had contributed to discarding or at least downgrading the conservative position on apartheid and Portuguese colonialism. Regarding the questions related to decolonisation and liberation movements, the PCI was allied with the Italian Socialist Party and the variegated galaxy of solidarity movements, mostly an expression of the Catholic world. At the time, many in Mozambique would have heard of Reggio Emilia's support for the struggle, or about the upset and protests in Portugal sparked by the Papal audience conceded to the liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau.
Ruth came to Italy frequently. She liked Italian shoes, as is repeated with somewhat friendly condescension in the numerous writings about her. But even more than elegance, of all that Italy had to offer, Ruth was attracted to the vivacity of political debate within and among the various components of the Italian left. She became a member of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and of the Lelio Basso Foundation, where she encountered the condemnation of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and the principal exponents of the critical left. Her Italian friends were mostly people solidly rooted in the PCI who, like Ruth, did not openly criticise the orthodox line of their party, but who participated in the intense internal debate which would then lead to the ‘turning point’, that is, to take on the challenge which social change and the emergence of a new international context posed.9
In the 70 s Ruth came to Italy more often, to participate in the sessions of the Peoples' Tribunal of the Lelio Basso Foundation, which from 1976 had continued down the path of the International Penal Tribunal (Russell Tribunal), which had investigated crimes against civilians in Vietnam. The Lelio Basso tribunal saw to various cases of violations of the United Nations Charter, including the denied decolonisation of Eritrea and East Timor. Its work involved eminent jurists and politicians, taking its moves from the Universal Rights Declaration of the people of Algeria.
I had crossed paths with Ruth in Dar es Salaam in 1976; I used her writing in courses I taught, I admired her from afar and then had the opportunity to talk with her at length for the first time on 24 June 1979 in Bologna, at the inauguration of the Tribunal on Eritrea. Ruth had studied the origins of the Eritrean liberation struggle; from the beginning she saw potential in it, while not denying weaknesses and divisions, but above all she criticised the political consequences which were coming to the fore due to the stubborn refusal to grant independence to that territory, and due to lost ground in the struggle for emancipation caused by militarisation in the regional context through the Soviet support for Ethiopia. Her position of declared support for the Eritrean liberation struggle deviated from the main line of the ANC, which was aligned with the Ethiopian regime, militarily supported by Moscow.
On the wall behind her desk at CEA she had hung up a poster representing an Eritrean woman warrior which she had brought with her from Bologna. In September 1982 when I left Maputo I looked for that poster. I was told that it had been removed, stained with Ruth's blood, and no one was able to tell me where it had ended up.
Africa needs a pitiless look at herself. (First 1970, 11)
As a journalist, Ruth had high standards for data collection, interviews, document gathering and reviews of previous literature. She was just as demanding in her use not of dogma but of Marxist theory as a tool for critical analysis. Her articles and later her books written in exile and the works she edited had a formidable impact in London and abroad. London at the time was the international intellectual centre where the daily agenda included heated debates among journalists, academics and political activists on the prospects of the ‘winds of change’ which at that time pointed toward the emancipation of Africa as a whole, but somehow seemed to exclude southern Africa.10 In London she would participate in the debate on the new South African and African historiography, but without the ideological and dogmatic rigidity of many of its interpreters.
Ruth had been a part of the editing commission for the Freedom Charter, and even while considering antiracism a non-negotiable principle, she recognised the reasons for internal debate in the ANC regarding the controversial question which gave rise to heated disputes for all of the 1960s – whether to admit white, coloured and Indian members – a decision which was made as late as 1968 at the ANC Convention in Morogoro, Tanzania.
Ruth was never considered a white rebel anti-conformist; her work revealed fundamental empathy which allowed her to give voice to the black majority, which suffered the most extreme violence under the apartheid regime. Ruth did not consider apartheid to be an exclusively South African question, but a system which had its origins in conquest, in the political domination of segregation and later in a hierarchy of access to basic rights which represented the essence of the entire region's subordination to the supremacy of a network of capitalist interests. She criticised the scarce knowledge which was to be found in the rest of Africa of the white power structure in South Africa, of conflict strategies and their deep history, and of how numerous the human lives were which were given in tribute. And in Mozambique she did not hide her annoyance with the South African exiles who showed neither interest in nor understanding of the history and the actual internal, regional and international conditions that the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) had to face and overcome in order to move forward with its project for socialist transformation.
Her concrete experience as a militant scholar was not confined to South Africa at a time when the majority of intellectual and militant South Africans did not consider looking beyond that horizon to be important. She went to investigate how and why the great hopes of independence had lost their force, why constitutionalism proved to be an empty box which was quickly filled by authoritarian regimes, why the imperatives of the Cold War were dominating the agenda, and why and how this was nothing other than the manifestation of contradictions rooted in the ways that the continent was being incorporated in the world system.
Ruth was not among those who considered African independence an empty cosmetic exercise. She was not one of those so-called afro-pessimists, to use today's term. She did not think, as did many theoreticians of dependence, that African countries' emancipation was nothing more than a manifestation of an imperialist plot. She believed that constitutional independence was a fundamental change, but she wondered why in too many cases it had been considered the conclusion of the process of emancipation, and not the beginning. From this position came her analysis not only of colonial inheritances, but also of the ways with which decolonisation had been negotiated; of compromises which had been accepted; of dependence on foreign investments and markets. With a wealth of data, Ruth's works condemned the blatantly neocolonial politics of intervention and their ability to penetrate, going deep to investigate the origin and the dynamics of class formation, alliances in the nationalist movements and the relationship with the popular base.
In 1970 Ruth published The Barrel of a Gun, on the military intervention in the politics of key African countries at the time: Ghana, the ‘homeland’ of all African independence, the cradle of pan-Africanism; Nigeria, Africa's giant; Sudan, the state linking Arab and sub-Saharan Africa; Togo, the site of the first coup d’état just a few years following independence, with the assassination of the popular nationalist leader Sylvanus Olimpio; Ethiopia, dominated at the time by the Amharic monarchy; and Egypt and Algeria, North African countries whose revolutions had influenced the emancipation of the whole continent. Military interventions just a few years after the countries had achieved independence were becoming endemic. Ruth wondered about the structural and systemic problems in the recently independent African countries; why was it that in Ghana and Tanzania what had been a strong commitment to social change had changed rapidly and too easily into a defence of primarily authoritarian governmental methods; what the elements were that could give meaning to and explain the failure of Kwame Nkrumah's ‘political kingdom’. The Barrel of a Gun (First 1970) is, and remains so after nearly half a century, the best, most detailed and complex – while also being the most readable – treatise on military intervention in politics in Africa.
The decade of world recession, from 1970 to 1980, brought with it a deterioration of the political and economic situation in all of the African countries, the socialist and the so-called liberal-capitalist ones alike. In 1978, the champions of continuity with colonial capitalism, like Kenya and Côte d'Ivoire, were bankrupt just like the champions of ‘moderate’ socialism, like Senegal. State monopolies on scarce resources, distributed mainly through clients' networks, increased the instability; conflicts among factions were complicated then by new models and international tools for direct or indirect involvement in economics and politics. At the beginning of the 80 s a second oil crisis, drought, rising interest rates, world recession with its fall in raw material and mining prices all meant drastic reductions in African exports. With Reagan and Thatcher in power an era of less state and more market began, with austerity measures and structural adjustment which reduced domestic market growth and import capacity.
In 1975, when the world and African crises were already in place, the conclusion of the liberation struggles in southern Africa represented a fundamental break with the neocolonial configuration of African independences opening the possibility to relaunch a revolutionary emancipatory project. ‘Socialism is easier to proclaim than it is to attain,’ Ruth wrote to her friend Gavin Williams regarding Tanzania's single-party politics. She realistically knew the obstacles on the road to total true liberation, having lived through, interacted with and fought in her homeland and in exile against prefabricated formulae and positions in which theory was interpreted as indisputable doctrine; having experienced in both research and teaching how much nationalist, socialist and Marxist rhetoric could hide the pursuit of class interests.
For Ruth, theory and analysis were areas open to debate. Research under her direction at CEA started from Frelimo's priorities, and in any case – as Harold Wolpe (1985) noted – she did not avoid criticism, even intense criticism, of those policies whether in the planning or in the implementation phases.
What were the concrete facts of the socialist transformation in Mozambique? Analysis which was consistently critical in form needed to put itself up for comparison with the real problems of that transformation. Which changes were necessary to break the dependence on migrant mining labour and at the same time defend the miners' interests through the process of transition? How did companies and cooperative farms need to organise in order to support transformation in family agriculture? To do it required studying the historical dynamics of family agriculture in the various regions and places, not imposing models derived from hard, pure theorisation which in no way included the processes of social differentiation. Work and productivity reorganisation needed to put workers and farmers in decision-making positions. What contradictions come up in this process? What are the dynamics and class alliances?
Students in the Development Course came from various places and levels of academic preparation. The course was very intensive, including lectures (which were attended by the staff as well), group seminars, exercises, document preparation, research done with data available in Maputo, research proposal and guide writing, division of labour to resolve logistics problems before and during the month of field research, and editing research reports. Students were not only students; they were chosen among those who already had responsibility in the Frelimo party, in the ministry departments, in the port, in the state administration, in cooperatives, in teaching. The idea was to give them training to learn to do research so that they could then apply what they had learned to concrete problems they would have to face in their respective workplaces. Students in this context of union among theory, teaching, research and application of results did not need to be passive recipients – not ‘cheap labour’ – but did need to integrate social investigation in the work at hand. At the same time, the concrete experience gained in their respective workplaces meant the course was enriched, providing its base for analytical training.
I remember how in organising research in Zambezia we worked with students to gather all the statistical and normative documentation regarding the organs of administration, administrative organisation, and the Frelimo party's structures and functioning at the local level. Then in the field we checked the data in great detail, comparing it with the way local institutions worked in fact: identifying the problems they faced while putting to work political decisions made by the central government, the economic means and skills they had available, the distribution of these in their territory, that is to say what the processes of inclusion and/or exclusion were.
The Development Course was always a work in progress, continually rethought and restructured, to improve it, and for us teaching staff it was a continuous stream of learning. Each step of the way found us debating – without exception – applying the lessons learned, motivating the students to participate proactively. This was not to be taken for granted; the majority came from normative schools in which no form of discussion was foreseen, and even less so any challenge to authority.
Ruth could not stand – and she showed it – know-it-alls full of rhetorical hot air, nor the flights of fancy of those who proposed beautiful ideas which were totally unachievable. She would not make room for proponents of generically formulated research, or even worse those who would have used the Centro as a service to promote their own academic careers. She required from everyone total dedication to the work at hand and she pushed everyone – teachers and students – to acknowledge their own limits and to fight to overcome them. This frankness of hers often provoked ill feeling. Perhaps this was because she came across as a very self-confident person, which was in fact far from the truth.
As the true leader she was, she took on personally the majority of the criticism made of the Development Course and the Centro's research, whether it came from students or from political figures, colleagues or intellectual tourists. Ruth suffered from the criticism more than anyone else, but only the people closest to her realised it. The Centro was a work collective whose coherence had to be worked for day after day; we were stimulated by arguments but fundamentally united. Responsibility, in good times and bad, was shared by all of us. In no case, as far as I remember, did Ruth or Aquino leave us alone to face criticism.
Knowledge for Ruth meant clarity of thought, and so she respected those who knew how to defend their own point of view. Her way of arguing had inescapable rules; she used words with precision because she was clear on what she had to say.
A few days before that fatal 17 August 1982, she summarised her experience as a work of continual reflection, of experiments from which to learn and improve, of confrontation and debate. As always, Ruth had more questions than answers, and every answer opened up a new path of reflection to work on:
It is exciting working in Mozambique … because the work is exciting: It is not without struggle, there are all kinds of problems. There is a debate in the University about how you teach, about how the University relates to the politics of the country as a whole, about institutional forms, about methods of teaching, about what you teach … you have no choice if you want to be a social scientist in struggle, you have no choice but to work through those institutions which are creating change. That does not mean an unproblematic relationship, that does not mean it is a service role, that does not mean it is thought control or blind acquiescence. That means, given a certain realm and a certain terrain, the struggle goes on that terrain, and the questions are how to work, how to research, how to teach. They are continuously questions which you have to confront, they take different forms on different occasions and contradictions are at play.11
At the heart of thinking on research and training are questions which look at the nature of independent African nations, of each nation in particular, and how and how much the realm of choice in the transition to socialism is limited. Research and training needed to contribute concretely to critical construction of main analytical categories, keeping in mind the tension and ambiguity among ideological declarations and propositions, and facts, while still aiming for strategic priorities of a besieged country and government.
In her years at CEA, through her work as researcher, organiser and teacher, Ruth proved that she was a true social scientist. The basis for her explanation of modernity was Marxist. Her scientific method was always experimental, open to the need for modifications to the theory and aware that the scientific method is logically unable to sustain complete, definitive proof. She taught and practised an experimental, empirical method which did not pretend to have all the truth, nor that the knowledge which one attained was entirely true. She protected and defended her and our freedom to investigate because she knew that all doctrines need to be amended sooner or later, and that the necessary modifications require investigative freedom and freedom of debate.
Ruth was, therefore, at the opposite end of the spectrum from dogmatic doctrinarians who think of Marxism as a religious faith, an eternal truth of absolute certainty. Harold Wolpe, her dear friend since youth, remembered the extent to which Ruth was critical of research arguments which came purely from the logic of scientific work and from research concepts which used materials elusively, to conform to pre-defined policies.
Documenting the struggles of poor and oppressed people may give encouragement to social movements and undercut the arrogance of analysts and policy-makers, but it will be their actions that change the world, not the stories we tell about them. (O'Laughlin 2010, 30)
We lived in the era in which one believed in progress, in the century of struggles and revolutions for the conquest of freedom. I want to remember this today, in a world which watches the crumbling away of fundamental achievements of the cultural, political and philosophical experience of the ideologies – Enlightenment, Idealism and Marxism – on which modernity was built and had developed also to assert and support the struggle for Africa's emancipation. Today the post-modern ‘paradigm’ seems to prevail where reality is thought to be socially constructed and subject to infinite manipulation; solidarity is more important than objectivity; you cannot talk about faith in progress; there are no ‘facts’ but only ‘interpretations’. From the cancellation of facts to the prevalence of interpretations comes a design which I do not hesitate to call populist, in which limits and rules do not matter. It is a mechanism through which the subject people have always been excluded.
Ruth certainly would not have lived these last 30 years in defeat. She would have continued believing in progress and in research well done, authoritative because rigorous, like a field of battle or contest, to understand better the substance of problems and reveal contradictions in political action meant to solve them, keeping track of priorities and interdependencies among local, national and international institutions.
I find no words more convincing than those of a former CEA student of those years, Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, who remembers her for us this way:
It would be inadequate to talk about Ruth without mentioning an absolutely vital aspect of her methodology – her absolute belief in the necessity of bringing research and teaching together. For her, research was learning, and led directly to teaching. Teaching was questioning, and thus research. The coming together of both research and teaching permitted the maximisation of criticism and social struggle. Thus the union of research and teaching was not only an academic methodology, but it was a methodology of political struggle. I think Ruth would be very much at ease here, at this conference. She would be here to learn, to question, to teach. She would be here as that sophisticated weapon, as Samora would have said, we need today to understand the questions we want to ask, the process of thinking those questions, and the path we have to tread to work out solutions. She would be here to tell us not to be afraid if we do not have answers, but yes, we should be worried if we are not asking relevant questions. With her here we would be better off because we would all be compelled to face our preconceived ideas, to be aware of what we are saying, how we think and the possible effects of this on the answers to the questions which worry us. (Nuno Castel-Branco 2012)
When I arrived in Mozambique the first time in 1978 I was coming from Tanzania where I had taught at the University of Dar es Salaam. They were the early, but already difficult, years of hard-won independence. Travelling for an entire month from Maputo to Ruvuma, by airplane, public bus and boleia, I spent hours talking with the other travellers and families who hosted me. Wherever you were you could breathe liberty, because no one knows as well as those whose liberty has been denied how much the chance to move around, to choose, to decide – how much this matters in what we mean by ‘human life’. Ruth often said that the years in Mozambique were the best ones of her life. We, the veterans, know we experienced at the Centro de Estudos Africanos years never to be repeated, years in which research and teaching saw us grow as scholars, but above all as human beings.
