Building an alternative consensus for political action: Ruth First as journalist and activist

Ruth First's early work as a journalist and political activist in South Africa became an inspiration for later generations of journalists and political writers. Here Don Pinnock, himself a journalist by trade, recounts how he rediscovered her writing of the 1950s in a new phase of political questioning and revolutionary activity in the 1980s. He pinpoints her talent as a reporter of events and conditions of the times to create an alternative consensus about race and class in South Africa.