The early writings of Alex La Guma: reflections on cultcha, identity and freedom in the 1950s and 1960

Abstract

Alex la Guma was a major twentieth-century South African novelist. His first novel, A Walk in the Night, in1966 brought him instant recognition as a pioneering writer on the African continent. Its ‘startling realism and accurate imagery’ drew high praise from his contemporaries. Wole Soyinka, later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o . The critic and writer, Lewis Nkosi, likewise, compared La Guma’s intense and sombre vision of the individual in society to that of Dostoevsky. La Guma was also an important political figure. As leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation and a communist, he was charged with reason, banned, house arrested and eventually forced into exile. At the time of his death in 1985 he was serving as chief representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean. Published on the centenary of Alex LaGuma’s birth on 20 February 1925, The Early Writings of Alex LaGuma contains a selection of his early work as a journalist and short story writer, before he became a published novelist and was forced into exile. It provides unique cameos of South African life and politics during turbulent time in the country’s history – the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years around Sharpeville–at the same time giving us insight into the making of a novelist. The ‘hidden’ world of Alex La Guma –material, social, emotional, political and intellectual – at a time when he was developing into a serious writer, is revealed. Many of the themes in his fiction are first encountered and developed in these early newspaper articles, providing useful material for literary scholars seeking to understand the progression of his work. A reviewer wrote that this book, like Alex La Guma’s novels, captures not only the misery of poverty and oppression in South Africa, but also the rich song of everyday life beneath the surface. It reads easily as fiction and adds significantly to our understanding of popular culture in Cape Town, as well as to the social and political history of the city. When asked what one of his novels was about, La Guma – born andbredinDistrict 6 – replied, ‘Ag, just about the folks back home’. La Guma peels off, as if with a scalpel, the glossy covers of the Cape’s tourist brochure ‘Liberalism’ to reveal the hard realities faced by the majority of its(non-)citizens: This is District Six talking. It is unmistakable – terse, racy, humorous, as convincing as truth.’ LaGuma’s insider accounts of contemporary politics also help with the recovery of important aspects of the history of the South African liberation movement. La Guma is described by Michael Weeder in these pages as ‘Cape Town’s Urban Griot’, someone who gives meaning to James Baldwin’s words that: “ … the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and … to make freedom real.” His words still resonate across the decades. They are an archive of a time past and a space whose spirit still survives though it was infamously bulldozed into dust under apartheid.