Joe Slovo, Top S. African Communist, Dies at 68

Joe Slovo, the firebrand Communist Party chief and defiant guerrilla commander who later became a guiding force for moderation and multiracial democracy in South Africa, died today after a long battle with bone-marrow cancer. He was 68.

During the harsh apartheid years, probably no white man was as widely revered in black townships, or as fiercely hated by white authorities. No other white was as prominent in the black liberation movement that ultimately won power in South Africa.

“Politics was my lifeblood,” Slovo once explained. “From the moment I committed myself, politics was more important than anything else.”

But Slovo paid a high price for his zeal. He was forced to spend 27 years in often harrowing exile. His first wife was harassed, imprisoned and finally killed in 1982 by a mail bomb sent by a government death squad. Although he remarried, his family life was a shambles.

By the ruling white racists of the era, Slovo was dubbed “Public Enemy No. 1.” He was feared as a terrorist, denounced for his loyalty to the Soviet Union and despised for his supposed betrayal of his race.

For the oppressed black majority, however, Slovo was second in popularity only to now-President Nelson Mandela and a handful of other black leaders.

“The nation mourns the passing of a great South African patriot,” Mandela said in a statement today.

Slovo was the first white elected to a leadership post in the African National Congress and was chief of staff of the ANC’s armed wing, Spear of the Nation. Scores of black settlements, streets and schools were named in his honor.

The lifelong revolutionary also became one of the most critical moderating figures in the often agonizing transition from apartheid to democracy.

Mandela said it was Slovo who persuaded the ANC to suspend its armed struggle in 1990 after then-President Frederik W. de Klerk released political prisoners and lifted a ban on the ANC and Communist Party.

Similarly, Slovo played a key role in the tense on-again, off-again negotiations that led to the first non-racial elections in April.

He broke a major deadlock by proposing a power-sharing scheme that enabled the defeated white rulers of the National Party to join the ANC in a five-year unity government. The compromise formed the blueprint for the new government and helped prevent a right-wing coup against majority rule.

After the election, Slovo was considered one of Mandela’s most effective Cabinet ministers. Given the housing portfolio, he moved quickly to produce a credible plan to deliver on Mandela’s campaign promise to build 1 million low-cost homes for the poor.

As before, Slovo cut deals with his former enemies: capitalist bankers. He signed an agreement in which mortgage lenders pledged $500 million in new housing loans to blacks, in exchange for government guarantees against payment boycotts and violence.

*

Slovo always appeared more elfin than evil. With tousled white hair, apple cheeks, bemused smile and ubiquitous red socks, he was sometimes called the “teddy-bear terrorist.”

“I have the advantage of starting off with such a bad reputation that if people only see me smiling, they think maybe I’m not so bad,” he once said.

Slovo was born May 23, 1926, to impoverished Lithuanian Jews. They emigrated to South Africa when he was 9.

The family settled in a rough Johannesburg suburb, where his father took odd jobs and was “in and out” of debtors’ prison, Slovo once said. His mother died when he was 13, and he grew up in a series of dingy boarding houses where leftist politics was served with dinner.

Forced to quit school to help support the family, Slovo worked as a clerk for a drug company and then in trade unions. From there, it was a short step for the young activist to join the Communist Party at 17.

Slovo served with South African forces in Egypt and Italy during World War II, but saw no combat. Back home, he won top honors at the University of the Witwatersrand law school, where he met Mandela.

“He was terribly anti-Communist,” Slovo said later. “We spent long hours outside the law library having the most terrible rows.”

Slovo’s Marxist ideology quickly caused other problems. The Communist Party was outlawed in 1950, two years after the National Party created apartheid to separate the races. Soon after, he was banned from all political activity.

In 1956, Slovo was charged with 155 other defendants in an infamous treason trial, although charges against him were later dropped.

Years later, he admitted that he subsequently had tried to firebomb the military court with a homemade explosive. But he said he fled when a white officer accosted him moments before the timer went off. He nervously defused the bomb outside.

Slovo escaped South Africa in May, 1963, just ahead of a police crackdown that led to arrest and life sentences for Mandela and other members of the ANC high command. He did six months’ military training in the Soviet Union.

Slovo quickly became a key anti-apartheid figure abroad. He was chief of staff of the ANC’s guerrilla army until 1987, and directed a mostly ineffective campaign of sabotage and bombings. Pretoria officials called him the ANC’s chief terrorist and a puppet of Moscow.

Slovo returned to South Africa in May, 1990.

At an ANC convention in Bloemfontein in December, Mandela hugged his old friend and gave an emotional tribute after Slovo was given the party’s highest award.

Slovo stood slowly. His left arm, broken in a fall, hung in a sling. His once stocky frame was withered by cancer, his face gaunt.

“What I did, I did without any regret ever,” Slovo said in a hoarse whisper. “I decided long ago in my life that I had only one target, and that was to remove the racist regime and to return power to the people.”