Yossel Mashel Slovo, commonly known as Joe Slovo, was a South African politician, and an opponent of the apartheid system.
27 Facts About Joe Slovo
1.
2.
Joe Slovo was imprisoned for six months in 1960, and emerged as a leader of uMkhonto we Sizwe the following year.
3.
Joe Slovo lived in exile from 1963 to 1990, conducting operations against the apartheid regime from the United Kingdom, Angola, Mozambique, and Zambia.
4.
Joe Slovo became known for proposing the "sunset clauses" covering the 5 years following a democratic election, including guarantees and concessions to all sides, and his fierce non-racialist stance.
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Joe Slovo was born on 23 May 1926 in Obeliai, Lithuania, to a Jewish family that emigrated to the Union of South Africa when he was eight.
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Joe Slovo's father worked as a truck driver in Johannesburg.
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Joe Slovo was educated at King Edward VII School and left school in 1941 and found work as a dispatch clerk.
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Joe Slovo joined the National Union of Distributive Workers and, as a shop steward, was involved in organising a strike.
9.
Joe Slovo served as a Signaler in combat operations for the South African forces in North Africa and Italy, and on his return to South Africa he joined the Springbok Legion, a multiracial radical ex-servicemen's organization.
10.
Joe Slovo was in the same class as Nelson Mandela and Harry Schwarz.
11.
In 1950, the SACP was banned and both First and Joe Slovo were listed as communists under the Suppression of Communism Act and could not be quoted or attend public gatherings in South Africa.
12.
Joe Slovo became active in the South African Congress of Democrats and was a delegate to the June 1955 Congress of the People organised by the ANC and Indian, Coloured and white organisations at Kliptown near Johannesburg, that drew up the Freedom Charter.
13.
Joe Slovo was arrested and detained for two months during the Treason Trial of 1956.
14.
Joe Slovo was later arrested for six months during the State of Emergency declared after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.
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Joe Slovo was a leading theoretician in both the SACP and the ANC.
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Joe Slovo insisted on having a "justified confidence in the future of socialism and its inherent moral superiority", and pointing to "the failures of capitalism", although he now rejected the one-party state model.
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In May 1990, after 27 years of exile, Joe Slovo returned to the country to participate in the early "talks about talks" between the government and the ANC.
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Joe Slovo was succeeded by Chris Hani, who was assassinated two years later by a white right-winger.
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Joe Slovo was a long-demonised figure in white South African society, widely misrepresented as a KGB colonel or Russian secret agent, and attracted a great deal of press after his return.
20.
However, Joe Slovo specifically rejected any compromise on full majority rule, and any agreement that "constitutionally prevented permanently" a new government "from effectively intervening to advance the process of redressing the racially accumulated imbalances in all spheres of life".
21.
Joe Slovo was a harsh critic of Israel, which he viewed as an apartheid state, and has been described among "people who want to see justice in struggles wherever they are fought".
22.
Joe Slovo's funeral was attended by the entire high command of the ANC, and by most of the highest officials in the country, including both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, and he was buried in Avalon Cemetery, Soweto, which was unheard of for a white South African.
23.
In 2004 Joe Slovo was voted 47th in the Top 100 Great South Africans.
24.
Harrow Road in Johannesburg and Field Street in Durban Central were renamed Joe Slovo Drive and Joe Slovo Street respectively.
25.
Joe Slovo was widely admired across southern Africa, leading Zimbabwean magazine, Southern African Political and Economic Monthly running a special issue on his death, and describing Joe Slovo in an obituary as a "liberation war hero" and "African patriot" completely immersed in the struggle for black freedom.
26.
Joe Slovo appears as a character in two films for which his daughter Shawn Slovo wrote the screenplay.
27.
Joe Slovo is played by Malcolm Purkey in the 2006 film Catch A Fire.