JOHANNESBURG -- Joe Slovo, who was at once South Africa's most beloved and most demonized white anti-apartheid freedom fighter, has died at his home in Johannesburg after a four-year battle with bone marrow cancer. He was 68.


Slovo was the head of South Africa's Communist Party and the former chief of staff of the African National Congress's guerrilla army. He was a key strategist in the negotiations that led to the end of the apartheid system of white domination, and since last May he had served as housing minister of the country's first democratically elected government.


President Nelson Mandela, a close friend since the two attended law school together in Johannesburg in the 1940s, eulogized him Friday as a man who "dedicated his life to the struggle for justice, democracy and freedom in our country." Mandela had visited Slovo at his home Thursday night, hours before his death, and the president called on the family again early Friday morning. The ANC said Sunday that Slovo would be buried in the black township of Soweto after a state funeral next week. With his trademark red socks, his avuncular demeanor, his shock of white hair and his puckish sense of humor, Slovo seemed an unlikely figure to be branded Public Enemy No. 1 by the white minority government during the volatile years of the anti-apartheid struggle.


But he was. Slovo spent 27 of those years in exile, from 1963 to 1990, for much of that time directing a sabotage campaign against the white minority regime. Although it achieved only sporadic successes, taking out a handful of power stations and causing a big oil refinery fire, it gave Slovo a mythic status among detractors and supporters alike.


When Slovo returned in 1990 after the government decided to free all political prisoners and remove the ban on formerly outlawed political organizations, he came back a hero. Aside from Mandela, no liberation leader received a more tumultuous welcome.


Such was Slovo's reputation that even in 1990 the reform government of F.W. de Klerk was sufficiently wary that it tried to bar him from the ANC delegation that began constitutional talks with the government to plan the way from apartheid to democracy. Mandela would hear none of it.


Slovo was born a Lithuanian Jew but his family moved to South Africa to escape persecution. He joined the labor movement, and then in 1942 the South African Communist Party.


In 1949 he married Ruth First, herself a leading theorist of the struggle. She was killed in 1982 by a letter bomb, presumably sent by agents of the South African government. Her death, Slovo called her death a "wound that I will always live with."