Perhaps the most successful and laudable international political campaign since the Second World War was the one launched by the free world to end apartheid in South Africa. A combination of economic boycotts, physical isolation, and moral disdain eventually smashed the racist state into a thousand pieces, like some hammer of civilization coming down on a multi-coloured plate of glass.
Those responsible for the death of apartheid included people of almost all political and religious leanings, but it was largely the Christian churches and the capitalist and democratic nations that made the triumph possible: moderate representatives of moderate institutions acting firmly so that moderation would succeed in South Africa. The result was that one of the most noble politicians of the era, Nelson Mandela, is now leading his country into what promises to be a golden age. Thank God it was not communism and extremism that were responsible for the downfall of the Pretoria regime-we can all imagine the consequences of such an event. And thank God that black Christians rather than white Marxists govern the country now.
All the same, it is fascinating to read the memoirs of a South African communist whose family played a small but famous part in the anti-apartheid battle. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country is Gillian Slovo's account of the most active and significant Marxist clan in South Africa. The author's grandfather, Julius, was a leading figure in the original South African Communist Party, while her father, Joe, spent many years in command of the ANC's military wing. Joe Slovo's wife Ruth, a Marxist-Leninist thinker, was killed in 1982 by a letter bomb sent by the South African security services.
In the 1950s the Slovo family began their fight against apartheid. They were relatively wealthy and privileged and entertained their dinner-party guests by mocking the antics of the Afrikaner government. That they hardly knew any Afrikaners seemed to be beside the point, as was the fact that their contempt for so many of these men and women bordered on the racist. Opposition to the regime magnified into full-scale warfare in the 1960s, and both of Gillian's parents spent time in prison. Ruth Slovo attempted suicide, which says something about her moral strength as well as about her attitude towards human life.
But there is more. The book reveals a pathetic, dysfunctional tale of lies and betrayal. Slovo's grandmother, an unrepentant Stalinist, was unfaithful to her husband and became pregnant by another Stalinist while in the Soviet Union; an abortion was arranged.
Joe and Ruth did not love each other, perhaps did not even like each other very much. She had a long affair in the 1960s; he fathered a son with the wife of a close friend in the anti-apartheid movement. The boy's existence was hidden for almost a quarter of a century. Wives, husbands, best friends, sons, daughters, all lied to and stabbed in the back.
But as well as the wound from behind, there was the thrust to the front. I mean the aching contradiction that appeared to escape these thinkers. While the racism of the South African government stank like a political cesspit, it had the odour of roses compared to the genocidal regime of Moscow. From Lenin in 1919 and 1920 to the murderer Stalin, through to the bitter 1960s, the Soviet empire killed tens, possibly hundreds of millions of people in its rabid efforts to create a monolithic state. Where were the protests, the resistance, the opposition from the Slovos and their kind against this barbarism? Or, at the very least, where were the letters of resignation? The history of international communism forces us to accept that these questions are rhetorical.
Like the ignorant adherents of some stale religion, the Slovos were willing to overlook the human bondage, the blood sacrifices, and the hypocrisy of their faith in the distant hope that the weird god of their creed would one day give them salvation. Suddenly the religion is proved wrong, but by then it is too late for the lazy to look at any alternatives.
Gillian Slovo presents a picture that we read, see, and hear time and time again in the autobiographies of revolutionaries, particularly those committed to Marxism. The struggle becomes not a means to a better life but an end in itself, creating not a new Jerusalem but an old Moscow. People are at best used as tools, at worst abused as fools. In the guise of the Marxian acceptance of the individual as subservient to the mass, personal lusts and hatreds dominate. I am firmly convinced that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have a profound love and respect for human life. I do not believe for a moment that the Slovo family had very much love for anybody at all. Poor Gillian Slovo seems to be coming to that conclusion somewhat late in life.
