JOE SLOVO, A WORKING CLASS HERO ~~ Africa Stream

http://youtube.com/post/UgkxOhiqMXns30LoKChgXHfpxhMR1UZieS6V?si=0XyxiYRlicma44Gw

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Many have described him as the 'most hated' White person by South Africa's apartheid regime Joe Slovo was a communist and commander of the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC). He was born Yossel Mashel Slovo on this day in 1926 in Lithuania to Jewish parents before moving to South Africa when he was eight. His political activism started in the 1940s when he served as a shop steward in the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), founded by supporters of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). In 1942, he joined the CPSA. Inspired by the Soviet Red Army's fight against the N*zis, he joined the South African military, serving in North Africa and Italy. Upon his return to South Africa, he joined the multiracial radical military veterans' group, the Springbok Legion. Slovo studied law alongside Mandela at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, graduating in 1950. However, soon after graduating, the regime listed him and his wife, Ruth First, as communists under the Suppression of Communism Act. This designation curtailed their ability to participate in politics or for the press to quote them. The law also banned the CPSA, which re-emerged in 1953 as the South African Communist Party (SACP.) Despite this, Slovo helped draft the Freedom Charter in 1955. In the late '50s and early '60s, the state detained him several times.  In 1961, he helped found the MK, the ANC's armed wing, jointly formed by the ANC and SACP. He went into exile two years later, spending the next 27 years in Angola, Britain, Mozambique and Zambia. From there, he planned and coordinated military strikes, which led the regime to declare him 'public enemy number 1.' South African state media outlets routinely called him a 'traitor.'  In 1982, apartheid operatives shipped a mail bomb that killed his wife, Ruth, in Mozambique. He and Ruth had three daughters. Despite all this, Slovo began in 1990 to participate in negotiations to end the apartheid state. After its fall, he began serving in 1994 as a Minister for Housing in Nelson Mandela's cabinet. Just a few months later, he succumbed to cancer on 6 January 1995.