Joe Slovo: anti-Zionist universalist who fought for a just cause

MOIRA SCHNEIDER

Slovo was SACP general secretary and a founding member of the Congress of Democrats, and served as minister of housing in former president Nelson Mandela’s Cabinet until his death in 1995.

Born in Lithuania in 1926, Slovo immigrated with his parents to South Africa at the age of nine. He later contributed to the drafting of the Freedom Charter.

On a family visit some years ago to Abel, the north-eastern Lithuanian shtetl from which his family hailed, Howard Sackstein, who heads up Saicom and is the board chairperson of SA Jewish Report, came across a man who had turned his lounge in the “tiny little village” into a museum. On hearing that Sackstein was from South Africa, he asked: “Do you know Joe Slovo?”

“I knew that Joe came from the same shtetl as my family,” Sackstein relates, “and I asked him: ‘How do you know Joe Slovo?’”

It turned out that Slovo was employed by the Russians in the 1970s – when he had been in exile from South Africa – to go from town to town in Lithuania to try to convince the people, who all opposed the Russian occupation, that they should be supportive of Russia and be good communists. So, in all these little towns, they all knew Joe Slovo from South Africa!

“It was just fascinating that even in Lithuania, people still remembered the man,” says Sackstein.

Many of the Jews who came here were Bundists (a secular Jewish socialist movement), Sackstein adds, and when they arrived, they founded and joined the SACP. “This was a continuation of the anti-oppression attitude they had in Eastern Europe. Many of them thought this was a way to freedom.”

Sackstein, who met Slovo on a number of occasions, describes his introduction of the sunset clause after the collapse of the Codesa 2 (Congress for a Democratic South Africa) negotiations as the “key element” that paved the way for the transition to democracy.

This clause proposed a coalition government for the five years following the country’s first democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides and the phasing out of the Afrikaans public service. “That allowed the negotiations to continue and many credit Slovo with having saved the negotiations and having allowed the transition to happen.

“Although he was an ideologue, he was a very practical man,” Sackstein says.

“When you met him in the 1990s, he came across as anyone’s zeida! The last time I saw him was in Rocky Street in Yeoville; he was just a little old Jewish man, which belied the huge impact he had on the country.

“I think a lot of people were very fond of Slovo, even though he was head of the SACP and integrally involved in Umkhonto weSizwe, the ANC’s military wing [he was one of its earliest members, serving as its chief of staff] ­ because, at the same time, he was fighting for a just cause,” Sackstein says.

David Saks, associate director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, agrees that Slovo was a “great pragmatist, or maybe it was his legal training. I think he understood that a complete break from one power to the other was not possible. He knew you’d never get the white minority to agree to that and he knew that their fears and concerns had to be allayed.

“He was instrumental in negotiating that transition phase. Ideologically, he would’ve liked to have taken over and finally put into practice his communist ideals, but I think he did South Africa a great service during that time.”

Slovo’s relationship with the organised Jewish community was non-existent during the apartheid years; Saks describes it as one of “mutual antipathy”. 

“Slovo was not interested in Jewish causes – he was anti-Zionist, anti-religious, a universalist who saw no value in identifying as part of a small ethnic minority.”

Paradoxically, adds Saks, ethnically he was very Jewish. “His Jewishness comes through in his autobiography in a very entertaining way. He embraced wholeheartedly this communist vision of a classless, non-racial society and he regarded with disdain the mainstream Jewish community, who were only looking to their own interests, their own safety. In fact, he was quite hostile.”

From the Jewish vantage point, Slovo embraced the Soviet Union at the time that it was becoming the great enemy of the Jewish people. “He was anti everything the Jews cared about, so they weren’t interested in him either. Also, they were afraid to associate with the Jewish leftists because that got fingers pointed at the whole of South African Jewry by the nationalist government.”

After Slovo’s return from exile in the early 1990s, there was a different Jewish leadership in the board of deputies that embraced the changes quite sincerely, according to Saks. “Mervyn Smith was the chairperson at the time. He rwas a strong leader and a great believer in the new South Africa, and that Jews had to embrace it and be part of it.

“That’s when the board went around meeting with all the people that they’d previously kept away from.”

Slovo let bygones be bygones, he reflects, possibly in a further display of pragmatism. “There was a job to do in building South Africa, and the Jews were important. I don’t think it was a warm relationship, but something was established.”

When Slovo passed away in 1995, then chief rabbi Cyril Harris spoke at his memorial service in Soweto, an occurrence that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. “It was controversial in some quarters,” Saks confirms, referring to “diehards” in the community who felt that one should not associate with communists.

For the board, however, it was a matter of great pride and made the Jewish community look good. “Rabbi Harris was a wonderful orator and a charismatic personality, and I believe that was one of his great moments,” said Saks.