Attend the book launch:
Date: 16 July 2025
Time: 19:30
Venue: ATKV Boeke-oase, Centenary Complex, Bloemfontein Campus
A new edited collection, Research and Activism: Ruth First & Activist Research by Profs Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Internationalisation and Saleem Badat, Research Professor in the UFS Department of History, ensures that murdered South African freedom fighter, journalist and scholar, Heloise Ruth First’s ideas, work and legacy lives on.
“A major highway in Durban is named Ruth First, but who was she?” the authors ask. They respond that “First was a South African freedom fighter, journalist and public intellectual who worked against the racist system of apartheid during white minority rule.” She “was born on 4 May 1925 in Johannesburg to Jewish parents who migrated from Eastern Europe to South Africa in the early 1900s.”
They add that “her intrepid and penetrating journalistic research exposed her to the brutality of labour exploitation and control on the mines and the farms. It reinforced her understanding of South Africa in Marxist terms.” First was murdered by apartheid assassins in in her office at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo in 1982.
Profs Reddy and Badat worked on the book for three years with 15 other activist researchers, established and early career local and international scholars from various universities, including Durham, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Nelson Mandela University (NMU), University of the Western Cape (UWC), University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of Johannesburg (UJ).
In the Preface, the editors write that the book assembles contributions that describe, analyse, interrogate, celebrate, perform and open up a projective scholarship on First’s extraordinary body of knowledge. “The volume explores the making of First, her writing as a journalist, her role in movement-building as an activist and her practice in some of these domains to consider the material and intellectual weight of her life and work and its nuanced textures.”
Honouring her intellectual and practical activism
Profs Badat and Reddy indicate that “the text recuperates, recovers and perhaps rediscovers Ruth First, over four decades since her murder. By mobilising original contributions on the creative tension of her assigned identities, we seek to offer new thinking about First the person, the subject and indeed, as an object of knowledge, to expand and complicate our understanding of her various legacies (whether intellectual, journalism or activism)”.
Inspired by First’s work, the book considers how universities and scholars connect with institutions and social movements beyond the university. It shows that there is a difference between engaged research, critical research and activist research. Engaged research intentionally tries to connect knowledge produced by academics with institutions, movements and experts outside the university to collaboratively address issues and strengthen cooperation. Critical research, on the other hand, uses radical critical theory to critique oppression and injustice, to show the gap between what exists today and more egalitarian and just ways of living. However, it does not necessarily connect with political and social movements.
Ruth First’s research was not only engaged, but also critical in orientation and ‘activist’ in nature. As activist research it challenged oppression and inequality. It both critiqued the status quo and tried to change it. It seeks links with movements and is connected to political activism of different kinds, such as anticolonial, anti-imperialist, human rights and peace movements.
First’s activist research did not confine itself to the academic arena but engaged with larger, wider and more diverse publics. It used this experience to critique dominant and often limited thinking at universities and promoted other ways of producing knowledge and looking at the world. The knowledge and expertise developed was used to improve scholarship in various ways.
The text motivates that activist researchers do not confine themselves to the academic arena but engage with larger, wider and more diverse publics. They use this experience to question and problematise dominant and often limited thinking at universities and promote other ways of producing knowledge and viewing the world. The knowledge and expertise that activists develop can improve scholarship in various ways. For the editors, First must be honoured for her intellectual and practical activism. What matters, they say, is not just her knowledge archive, but also her example as both an outstanding interpreter of the world and an activist scholar committed to changing society in the interests of the downtrodden, marginalised and voiceless.
“First was a critical and independent thinker who refused to accept anything as settled and beyond questioning. But that intellect was committed to loyalty to the national liberation movement of which she was a loyal and invaluable cadre.”