Every secret thing
Subtitle: my family, my country
By: Gillian Slovo.
Edition: 1st U.S. ed.
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
Subjects: Slovo, Gillian, 1952- -- Homes and haunts -- South Africa; Slovo, Gillian, 1952- -- Childhood and youth; Slovo, Gillian, 1952- -- Family; First, Ruth, 1925-1982; Slovo, Joe; Novelists, English -- 20th century -- Family relationships; Novelists, English -- Homes and haunts -- South Africa; Anti-apartheid movements -- South Africa -- Biography; Civil rights workers -- South Africa -- Biography; Political activists -- South Africa -- Biography; Journalists -- South Africa -- Biography; Communists -- South Africa -- Biography; Parent and child -- South Africa; Family -- South Africa; South Africa -- Intellectual life -- 20th century
Description: Gillian Slovo's life has been extraordinary. She is the daughter of South Africa's most prominent white anti-apartheid leaders: Ruth First, the journalist and political activist assassinated in exile in 1982, and Joe Slovo, South African Communist Party head and eventual Minister of Housing in the government headed by his old friend Nelson Mandela.

Slovo grew up in a household fraught with secrets, where a police tail was commonplace on every family outing, and where letters were written in code and phones were tapped. In telling her story, she recounts her childhood agony at always coming second to "the cause" and gives us an illuminating portrait of the mysteries and turmoil at the heart of every family's history. For her own safety, she was sent to England at the age of twelve, leaving behind a troubling family past.

With the end of apartheid, Slovo returned to South Africa to reclaim her childhood - and to confront her mother's murderer. Delving into her past, she uncovered the parents she never knew. What she learned - about their public roles and their private lives, including their affairs - shocked and angered her but ultimately gave her the strength to make peace with the past.

In a voice that makes the extraordinary sweep of history fresh and intimate, she brings sharply into focus all the brutality of the apartheid system. At the same time, she provides splendid glimpses of the leaders who, like her parents, fought against it.