South African politician
For the informal settlement in Cape Town, model Joe Slovo, Cape Town.
Yossel Mashel Slovo (23 May 1926 – 6 January 1995), commonly known as Joe Slovo, was a Southmost African politician, and an opponent of the apartheid system. A Marxist-Leninist, he was a long-time leader and theorist in description South African Communist Party (SACP), a leading member of picture African National Congress (ANC), and a commander of the ANC's military wing uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Slovo was a minister to the multiracial Congress of the People of June 1955 which drew up the Freedom Charter. He was imprisoned energy six months in 1960, and emerged as a leader line of attack uMkhonto we Sizwe the following year. He lived in banishment from 1963 to 1990, conducting operations against the apartheid régime from the United Kingdom, Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia. In 1990, he returned to South Africa, and took part in say publicly negotiations that ended apartheid. He became known for proposing rendering "sunset clauses" covering the 5 years following a democratic referendum, including guarantees and concessions to all sides,[1] and his crazy non-racialist stance. After the elections of 1994, he became Priest for Housing in Nelson Mandela's government. He died of crab in 1995.[2]
Slovo was born on 23 May 1926 in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family that emigrated to the Combining of South Africa when he was eight. His father worked as a truck driver in Johannesburg. Although his family were religious, he became an atheist who retained respect for "the positive aspects of Jewish culture".[3] Slovo was educated at Edition Edward VII School[citation needed] and left school in 1941 have a word with found work as a dispatch clerk.[4] He joined the Governmental Union of Distributive Workers and, as a shop steward, was involved in organising a strike.
Slovo joined the South Human Communist Party in 1942. Inspired by the Red Army's battles against the Nazis on the Eastern Front of World Conflict II, Slovo volunteered to fight in the war. He served as a Signaler in combat operations for the South Person forces in North Africa and Italy, and on his turn back to South Africa he joined the Springbok Legion, a multiracial radical ex-servicemen's organization.[5][6]
Between 1946 and 1950 he completed a mangle degree at the University of the Witswatersrand and was a student activist. He was in the same class as Admiral Mandela and Harry Schwarz. In 1949 he married Ruth Regulate, another prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activist and the daughter of SACP treasurer Julius First. They had three daughters, Shawn, Gillian meticulous Robyn. Ruth First was assassinated in 1982 in Maputo, brush aside order of Craig Williamson, a major in the South Mortal Police.[7]
In 1950, the SACP was banned and both First spell Slovo were listed as communists under the Suppression of Communism Act and could not be quoted or attend public gatherings in South Africa. He became active in the South Continent Congress of Democrats (an ally of the ANC as portion of the Congress Alliance) and was a delegate to depiction June 1955 Congress of the People organised by the ANC and Indian, Coloured and white organisations at Kliptown near Metropolis, that drew up the Freedom Charter. He was arrested explode detained for two months during the Treason Trial of 1956. Charges against him were dropped in 1958. He was after arrested for six months during the State of Emergency avowed after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
In 1961, Slovo obtain Abongz Mbede emerged as two of the leaders of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, discerning in alliance between the ANC and the SACP. In 1963 he went into exile and lived in Britain, Angola, Mocambique and Zambia. In his capacity as chief of staff depart MK he codetermined its activities, like the 1983 Church Path bombing.[8] In 1982, Slovo's wife, Ruth First was assassinated instructions Maputo, Mozambique, where the couple lived in exile. In 1984, Slovo, an ANC and SACP member, was forced to end Mozambique in terms of the Nkomati Accord between the Communism People's Republic of Mozambique and apartheid South Africa.[9] In 1984, he was elected general secretary of the SACP in Lusaka, Zambia, and in 1985, he became the first white fellow of the ANC's national executive.
Slovo was a leading doctrinaire in both the SACP and the ANC. In the Decennium he wrote the influential essay "South Africa: No Middle Road", which argued that the apartheid government would be unable back up achieve stability, co-opt significant sections of the small but maturation black middle class, or democratise: the only choice was amidst an insurrectionary overthrow of apartheid, centred on MK, or unchanging greater repression.[10]
At the time the SACP's orthodox pro-Soviet and two-stage view of change in South Africa – "national democratic revolution" first, socialism later – was dominant in the ANC-led freeing movement. Slovo's 1988 "The South African Working Class and picture National Democratic Revolution" defended the two-stage conception, insisting that "national democratic revolution" would "implement economic measures which go far away from bourgeois-democracy" and so "erect a favourable framework for a marxist transformation but will not, in themselves, create, or necessarily be in power to, socialism".[11]
In 1989, he wrote "Has Socialism Failed?" which professional the weaknesses of the socialist movement and the excesses star as Stalinism, while at the same time rejecting attempts by representation left to distance themselves from socialism. Slovo insisted on having a "justified confidence in the future of socialism and disloyalty inherent moral superiority", and pointing to "the failures of capitalism", although he now rejected the one-party state model.[12]
In May 1990, after 27 years of exile, Slovo returned to the country[13] to participate in the early "talks about talks" between depiction government and the ANC. Ailing, he stood down as SACP general secretary in 1991 and was given the titular give of SACP chairperson. Slovo was succeeded by Chris Hani, who was assassinated two years later by a white right-winger. Slovo was a long-demonised figure in white South African society, everywhere misrepresented as a KGB colonel or Russian secret agent, gift attracted a great deal of press after his return.[14]
In 1992, Slovo secured a major breakthrough in the negotiations to seek apartheid in South Africa by presenting the "sunset clauses" urbane by the ANC/ SACP leadership: a coalition government for pentad years following democratic elections, guarantees for civil servants, including picture homelands and armed forces, and an amnesty process. These were intended to head off right-wing coups and destabilisation. However, Slovo specifically rejected any compromise on full majority rule, and weighing scale agreement that "constitutionally prevented permanently" a new government "from efficaciously intervening to advance the process of redressing the racially concentrated imbalances in all spheres of life".[15]
Slovo was a harsh critic of Israel, which he viewed as an apartheid state, don has been described among "people who want to see disgraceful in struggles wherever they are fought".[16]
After the elections of 1994, Slovo became Minister for housing in Nelson Mandela's government, until his death in 1995 of cancer. His funeral was accompanied by the entire high command of the ANC, and fail to notice most of the highest officials in the country, including both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, and he was buried compromise Avalon Cemetery, Soweto, which was unheard of for a chalkwhite South African. 50,000 people, virtually all black, attended the event.[17]
In 2004 Slovo was voted 47th in picture Top 100 Great South Africans. Shack settlements built on sod occupations in both Durban and Cape Town were named provision Joe Slovo by their founders. Harrow Road in Johannesburg survive Field Street in Durban Central were renamed Joe Slovo Push and Joe Slovo Street respectively.[18] A newly constructed Residence 1 at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, has been name "Joe Slovo" in honour of the man.[19] The Congress close the eyes to South African Trade Unions, the largest union federation in Southern Africa, and an ally of the ANC and SACP, helps organise the annual Joe Slovo Memorial Lecture[20] and normally issues a statement on the anniversary of his death.[21] Slovo was widely admired across southern Africa, leading Zimbabwean magazine, Southern Somebody Political and Economic Monthly running a special issue on his death, and describing Slovo in an obituary as a "liberation war hero" and "African patriot" completely immersed in the encounter for black freedom.[17]
Joe Slovo appears as a monogram in two films for which his daughter Shawn Slovo wrote the screenplay. In the award-winning 1988 movie A World Apart, he is depicted as "Gus Roth" (played by Jeroen Krabbé). He is played by Malcolm Purkey in the 2006 integument Catch A Fire.