The South African Communist Party (SACP) will hold a Commemoration service of the 20th Anniversary of Comrade Joe Slovo’s death and Celebrate his revolutionary life and times. This will include a thorough reflection on the first two decades of our 1994 democratic breakthrough, the conditions of the working class, the state of class struggle in South Africa and the world, and the role of the democratic revolutionary forces of change.
Details of the opening event are as follows.
Date: 6 January 2015
Time: 9:00am
Venue: Avalon Cemetery, Soweto, Gauteng Province
Keynote speaker: SACP General Secretary Comrade Blade Nzimande
Messages of support: Alliance partners ANC, COSATU and SANCO and the SACP youth wing Young Communist League of SA
The media is invited to attend and cover the event.
Comrade Joe Slovo: A brief biography
Joe Slovo was born on 23 May 1926 in Lithuania, where he left with parents for South Africa at the age of nine. He became active in the liberation struggle in South Africa. As part of the liberation movement, including the Communist Party, he fought against colonial and apartheid oppression, gender domination and class exploitation.
A founding member of the Congress of Democrats, a member and leader of the Communist Party, the people’s liberation army Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) and the African National Congress (ANC), Comrade Slovo became one of the targets of the apartheid regime. He was an accused in the 1956 Treason Trial; and his wife, a revolutionary cadre in her own right, Comrade Ruth First, was killed by a letter bomb.
Slovo held various leadership responsibilities in the struggle for liberation and social emancipation. SACP Central Committee and Politburo Member, General Secretary and National Chairperson; MK Chief of Staff and Member of the Revolutionary Council from 1969 until its dissolution in 1983; ANC National Executive and Working Committee Member; and the first Minister of Housing in South Africa’s first democratically elected government which was the Government of National Unity, Slovo died on 6 January 1995 at 69.
Issued by the SACP
Enquiries:
Alex Mashilo – Spokesperson
Mobile: 082 9200 308
Office: 011 339 3621
Twitter: @2SACP
Website: www.sacp.org.za