When I first learned about Joe Slovo in 1980s apartheid South Africa, I assumed he must be Black. At the time, most white people did not openly support the liberation struggle, so my assumption felt natural. My ignorance was not without context.

My working-class parents rarely spoke about liberation movements. By the 1980s they were devout Christians, largely disconnected from what was simply called “the struggle.” Their energies were consumed by survival and by raising seven children. Politics beyond that horizon barely registered. As a result, I had to seek out information about Slovo (1926–1995), and about the broader liberation struggle, largely on my own.

That search took place within a suffocating regime of censorship, especially around images, voices, and visual representations of jailed or exiled leaders. Photographs of ANC leaders who were imprisoned or in hiding could not be published in newspapers or shown on television until the late 1980s.

The first time a South African newspaper published an image of Nelson Mandela was in 1986, when The Weekly Mail placed him on its front page. The photograph had been taken before his imprisonment, when he was 45 years old. By then Mandela was already in his seventies. As we would later learn, more recent photographs did exist, taken on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison by government photographers, but they circulated only among security operatives.

There was also the infamous 1985 case involving Tony Heard, editor of the Cape Times, a left-leaning liberal newspaper, who interviewed Oliver Tambo, by then the ANC’s leader in exile, in London and published a direct quote from him alongside a photograph of the two chatting. This was deemed illegal. The government issued repeated threats, and Heard faced up to three years in prison simply for publishing the interview.

Compounding this silence was the education system. Our school’s “History” syllabi made little or no reference to the liberation movement. If resistance appeared at all, it usually took the form of heroic white Afrikaner leaders fighting British colonialism. Yet the 1980s were also the period of the “mass democratic struggle,” with high schools playing a central role. We encountered sympathetic accounts of exiled and banned movements like the ANC, SACP, and PAC through what was called “alternative education”: sessions organized by boycott leaders, or independent publications such as Grassroots, South, and Upbeat. Crucially, education student teachers from the University of the Western Cape also came to do their “practicals” as teachers at coloured schools like mine, quietly broadening our understanding of the struggle and its leadership.

It was in this context that my first real encounter with Joe Slovo occurred. Someone at school passed around faded photographs of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Joe Slovo. When a classmate pointed to the white man in the images and identified him as Slovo, I was genuinely shocked. I had been shouting his name at rallies and singing songs that included it. Songs about Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu—and yes, a certain Joe Slovo—were everywhere.

Joe Slovo was unusual. Whites were present in the “democratic” movement, but they were few in number.

By 1984, the United Democratic Front, which actively sought to recruit whites into the mass struggle, began to dominate internal resistance politics. But the UDF was only a year old, and while a small number of committed whites were involved, the movement was still consolidating. Organizations such as the End Conscription Campaign—which mobilized young white conscripts who refused to serve in the apartheid army—would come later. Slovo, however, stood apart. He was singled out for particular vitriol in the white media and by the state not only because he was the public face of the Communist Party (apartheid ideology was overtly Christian), but even more because he led the ANC’s armed wing.

By the late 1980s, images of Joe Slovo began appearing more frequently in the mainstream South African media. This shift made sense. By then, the apartheid government was unofficially negotiating with the ANC, and the press had grown bolder. Tony Heard was eventually fired by the Cape Times’s owners (likely for other reasons), while the alternative press openly published ANC and SACP statements and images. Still, the first time I saw Slovo’s face clearly, it was a revelation.

So who was Slovo, and why did he matter so much to the resistance, and to people like me?

Born Yossel Mashel Slovo, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, he entered liberation politics in the 1950s, when opposition to apartheid—still a relatively new policy—was organized explicitly along racial lines. Slovo came to the ANC through the Communist Party of South Africa, which, while it had some black members, was primarily white. After the CPSA was banned in 1950, white communists formed the Congress of Democrats, which worked alongside the ANC, the Indian Congress, and the Coloured People’s Congress. During this period, Slovo was arrested, charged, and briefly jailed for treason.

When the ANC turned to armed struggle and began strategic bombings of government installations, Slovo emerged as one of the leaders of Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation). In 1963, he went into exile and eventually became general secretary of the Communist Party—by then renamed the SACP—during its long years abroad. During this time, his first wife, Ruth First, was assassinated in 1982 in Maputo, Mozambique, by a letter bomb sent by apartheid death squads. As head of the SACP, Slovo was also a major contributor to ANC strategic thinking, most notably the theory of a “two-stage revolution,” in which political power would precede economic transformation.

After the ANC was unbanned, Slovo played a central role in negotiations. He deserves credit—or blame, depending on your view—for some of the ANC’s most consequential compromises, particularly the so-called “sunset clauses.” These provisions, proposed by Slovo, allowed the new democratic government to retain senior apartheid-era civil servants, military officers, and bureaucrats to ensure a smooth transition. Though deemed necessary at the time, it soon became clear that sections of the white army and police leadership were actively undermining the new democracy—spreading false rumors of a left-wing coup and fomenting third-force violence and proxy wars.

After 1994, Slovo briefly served as South Africa’s first minister of housing. His record was mixed, and by then he was dying of cancer.

His words, however, remain strikingly relevant:

“It’s not difficult in South Africa for the ordinary person to see the link between capitalism and racist exploitation, and when one sees the link one immediately thinks in terms of a socialist alternative.”

“Sometimes, if you wear suits for too long, it changes your ideology.”

“Since race discrimination is the mechanism of this exploitation and functional to it… the struggle to destroy ‘white supremacy’ is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.”

“National liberation in its true sense must therefore imply the expropriation of the owners of the means of production… There can be no halfway house.”

So does his example.

Joe Slovo died on January 6, 1995. Eight days later, he was buried in Avalon Cemetery in Soweto, South Africa’s largest Black township. His funeral was accorded official status, and President Nelson Mandela declared a national day of mourning. More than 50,000 people attended.

With very few exceptions, they were Black South Africans.

For a white man born into privilege bestowed by his skin color, vilified by his own community, exiled for decades, and hunted by the apartheid state, there could be no clearer final statement of where he belonged—or of the depth of his commitment—than to be laid to rest among the Black majority whose freedom he had made his life’s work.