Gendered silences in Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's Struggle Auto/biographies

Two trajectories of two individuals in the fight against apartheid are juxtaposed; two narratives with a diachronic relationship put in train. In both Nelson Mandela's and Ruth First's cases, the expected and self-written arcs of the individuals are disrupted by (our noticing) a neglected or written-out aspect of their lives. In both cases, the new or eclipsed information is gendered in an awkwardly askew way. They both underline the unsettled nature of their times. For Mandela, a source points to his infidelities, dissimulation, and violence in his home, as a vector strangely paralleling his increasing radicalism. For Ruth First, a long-time Communist, the evidence suggests that in the immediate aftermath of the arrests in July 1963, she briefly became the determining political authority - a white woman in charge during the death throes of the internal sabotage and guerrilla movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), even though she never represented herself in writing as such. The silences of these two persons about these matters intersect in a zone from which we may, perhaps, glimpse the history of the mobilisation of the ANC freshly, in three dimensions as it were, even if only fleetingly.