*"The News" is a "construct"*

/News of Ruth First and Albert Luthuli/

In reality there are days when there is no news that conforms with the
expectation of "news".

The bourgeois newspapers do not report what the working class wants to
know. When there is no news of the kind that they want to print, they
make it up, and print nonsense. They refuse to report matters that are
favourable to their class enemy.

So, for example, the launch of Paperight, reported here last week, is
not in the newspapers.

This electronic medium -- e-mail and Internet -- is very precious for
the fact that anyone may be an agent of something that could be called
"news", if "news" means anything at all.

*_We announce_!*

Today, we can announce the publication by HSRC Press of a new book of
selected writings of the late Ruth First, former national secretary of
the Young Communist League ans communist party member, who was killed in
Maputo, Mozambique on 17 August 1982, by a bomb sent by the apartheid
assassin Craig Williamson.

The book is called "*Ruth First, Voices of Liberation*". It is edited by
Don Pinnock. It is 192 pages in total. It includes biography and
bibliography of Ruth First, many photographs, and 132 pages of her own
writing.

Like all HSRC Press publications, "Ruth First, Voices of Liberation". It
is available free from the HSRC web site in the form of downloadable PDF
files, whether as the entire 192-page book (5.3 MB), or in parts, in
smaller PDF files.

The main page of HSRC is at *http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/*. You will see
that "Ruth First, Voices of Liberation" is immediately followed by
"*Albert Luthuli, Voices of Liberation*", which I will not cover here,
but will look at very soon.

The page where you can download the Ruth First book, in whole or in
parts, is at:

*http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2292&cat=0&page=1&fe...
<http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2292&cat=0&page=1&fe...>*

The PDFs are protected from conversion. Hence I have not been able to
reproduce any of the text here.

_*Education, organisation and mobilisation*_

In this book, "Ruth First, Voices of Liberation", on page 12, there is
another account of the meeting, addressed by O R Tambo, which resulted
in the formation of the Congress of Democrats.

In those days the movement treated whites as a mass that, like any other
mass, needed leadership, education and organisation, and the movement
got a good result from that initiative.

Below is a picture of Ruth First addressing a meeting in Trafalgar
Square, London, organised by the British Anti-Apartheid Movement in 1960.

Ruth First, Trafalgar Square, 1960

*VC *