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Kids and Communists in South Africa

© Jessica Powers

She was a tiny thing, six years old, innocent and sweet, eating breakfast cereal in her pajamas as she explained to newspaper crews that "Mummy's gone to prison to look after the black people" (Frankel 66).

But Shawn Slovo's cute face brought little sympathy from the South African audience reading the newspapers in 1956. She was, after all, the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, two of South Africa's notorious Communists, hated and feared for their revolutionary ideals.

Shawn's "mummy" Ruth, in jail for her anti-apartheid activities, just like Shawn said, swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills in an attempt to kill herself. Her suicide attempt failed. Instead, she lived for another two decades until the South African police killed her with a letter-bomb that she opened from her home in exile.

Like other children of apartheid activists, Robyn, Gillian, and Shawn suffered terribly. They felt abandoned. They felt as though "the cause," South Africa, everybody else was more important than they were.

In her autobiography, Gillian Slovo describes a feeling of being utterly alone. If she had been an African child and her parents were activists, everybody in the community would have been proud of them, accepted her as their child, and would have taken care of her like she was their own. But as a white child in South Africa, with parents who were considered dangerous, she was entirely alone. Even within her family, the secrets were too deep, too dangerous, so nobody shared anything. This silence was damaging.

Yet children of African activists suffered just as much. Nelson Mandela comforted the Slovo girls after their father Joe (who had been head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed resistance against the South African state) died in the 1990's by describing how his own daughter pushed him away one day when he tried to give her a hug. "You are the father to all our people, but you have never had the time to be a father to me," she cried out (Slovo 214).

Mandela must have flinched. Joe Slovo and Ruth First would have flinched. Most of the anti-apartheid activists would have understood all too well the pain of being rejected by children who themselves felt rejected because of their parents' work.

Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, two other Communist activists in South Africa, have also agonized over the pain their activities caused to their children, most notably Patrick. The family fled South Africa after a judge acquited Rusty Bernstein in Rivonia Trial, the same trial that sent Nelson Mandela and others to prison "for life" (almost three decades, as it turned out).

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