Heloise Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar. She was assassinated in Mozambique, where she was working in exile, by a parcel bomb built by South African police. Family and education Ruth First's Jewish parents, Julius First and Matilda Levetan, emigrated to South Africa from Latvia in 1906 and became founding members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the forerunner of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Ruth First was born in 1925 and brought up in Johannesburg. Like her parents, she joined the Communist Party, which was allied with the African National Congress in its struggle to overthrow the South African government. As a teenager, First attended Jeppe High School for Girls and then became the first person in her family to attend university. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1946. While she was at university, she found that "on a South African campus, the student issues that matter are national issues". She was involved in the founding of the Federation of Progressive Students, also known as the Progressive Students League, and got to know, among other fellow students, Nelson Mandela, future President of South Africa, and Eduardo Mondlane, the first leader of the Mozambique freedom movement FRELIMO. After graduating, First worked as a research assistant for the Social Welfare Division of the Johannesburg City Council. In 1946, her position in the Communist Party was boosted significantly after a series of mine strikes during which leading members of the Party were arrested. First then became the editor-in-chief of the radical newspaper The Guardian, which was subsequently banned by the state. Through investigative journalism, First exposed the racial segregation policies known as apartheid, targeting black South Africans following the rise of the National Party in 1948. In 1949 she married Joe Slovo, a South African anti-apartheid activist and Communist, with whom she had three daughters, Shawn, Gillian and Robyn. Together, Slovo and First became a leading force in the 1950s protest era in which the government outlawed any movements that opposed their policies. In addition to her work with The Guardian and its successors, the South African Congress of Democrats (COD), a white-only wing of the Congress Alliance, was founded in 1953 with support from First. In 1955, she assumed the position of editor of a radical political journal called Fighting Talk.