[In the following excerpt, Chandramohan explores La Guma's portrayal of black South Africans.]

One of the aims that La Guma had in taking up creative writing was to fill the gap that he felt existed in the portrayal of the Coloured community in South African literature.¹ The gap arose as a result of the preoccupation of South African writers with the events of the expanding frontier of the Cape Colony which was dominated by the White-African military and cultural conflict. The preceding conflict, the Khoisan resistance to White inroads into their territories though heroic, Shula Marks demonstrated,² was less bloody and lasted for less time as compared with the White African conflict. Consequently, the interest in Khoisan ways of life was relatively less. Even the little interest that the Khoisan resistance aroused was dominated either by outright racial denigration, as in the observations of many travellers,³ or by a Rousseauite ‘Noble Savage’ formula as evidenced in the writings of Thomas Pringle.⁴ These stereotypes, February points out, were transposed to the portrayal of Coloureds⁵ who, similar to the defeated Khoisan, did not pose any military threat. Thus, the literary portrayal of the Coloureds was overshadowed by the interest in the White-African conflict. A realistic portrayal of the Coloureds of Cape Town remained a gap in South African literature in English, a gap that La Guma sought to fill.

Another reason for the neglect of the Coloureds was the preoccupation of South African writers with the ‘pure’ races of White and African. The idea of miscegenation as something sinful or at least abnormal, prevented writers from taking up the Coloureds seriously as normal human beings worthy of celebration in literature. The Coloureds were, Rabkin describes, ‘tribeless in a tribalised society’.⁶ Even liberal humanist writers such as Olive Schreiner did not escape the obsession with the ‘pure’ races. Nearly sixty years after the emancipation of slaves, in her Thoughts on South Africa Schreiner noted:

[…] the slave has been set free, the Half-caste has multiplied, and now forms a more or less distinct section of society. […] Nevertheless, socially his position remains much what it was. Without nationality, tradition, or racial ideals [..] robbed of racial self respect […]. The Englishman will swear to you on the word of an Englishman, and the Bantu on the word of the Bantu, but no Half-caste ever yet swore on the honour of a Half-caste. The world would break into crackling laughter did he do so: The honour of a Half-caste!’⁷

The antagonism to racial intermixture was even more explicit in the writings of Sarah Gertrude Millin. In her creative works the Coloureds emerge as ‘God's Step-children’ and the ‘pure’ Africans and ‘pure’ Whites are given a measure of nobility. In her novel Adam's Rest Millin uses the character Miriam to voice her views on various issues, particularly on the question of racial intermixture. Commenting on ‘half breeds’ to Janet, another character in the novel, Miriam says:

There must be something wrong at bottom. Look at their ancestry. It means a bad type of white man and a bad type of a black woman to begin with. You know yourself, Janet, decent Kaffir women have nothing to do with white men. So that's one thing. Besides it doesn't matter what it is. I can't work it out, but I have a feeling about colour as if it were a catching disease—perhaps it is—and I don't want to be near it.⁸

One of the problems that the Coloured writers encountered in such a situation of neglect and ascribed ontological sinfulness was gaining a place of honour and self-respect for the community and themselves. They were pitted against a literary tradition that portrayed Coloureds as willingly accepting the sinfulness, or at least the insignificance, of their existence. The Coloured writers, or any writer attempting a realistic portrayal of the Coloureds, had to swim against the current of negative stereotypes augmented by Millin through her novel God's Step-children.⁹ Calchas, a Khoi character in the novel, admits her ontological sinfulness to the Reverend Flood, an Englishman who intends to prove that all human beings are the children of God. The conversation between Reverend Flood and Calchas, which reveals a conflict of the attitudes that the Coloured writers had to choose between, proceeds as follows:

‘We are all God's children’, he said.

‘But is God Himself not white?’ asked Calchas.

And, as the Rev Andrew Flood hesitated for a reply, she made a suggestion:

‘Perhaps, we brown people are His stepchildren’.¹⁰

The Coloureds had, broadly speaking, two options to counter the negative image. One was to assert their group identity within the racial hierarchy of South Africa; and the other was to develop a trans-ethnic identity for all South Africans within which they could find an equal place. The choice in self-identity was influenced by the relative numerical dominance of the Coloureds in the different parts of South Africa. In a survey conducted by Edelstein,¹¹ when questioned on the the name they would like to be known by, a proportionally larger number of respondents in Johannesburg prefered the name ‘Coloureds’ in comparison to the number who prefered that name in Cape Town. The most prefered name of the Coloureds of Cape Town was ‘South African’. The findings of the Theron Commission¹² confirmed the trends noticed in Edelstein's survey. John Western too noticed this tendency among the Coloureds:

The sense of a specifically Coloured identity among those persons so classified was at its weakest in Cape Town, as opposed to other areas where Coloured persons constituted a minority group in their immediate environment.¹³

La Guma's preference for a trans-ethnic identity is a part of the general preference for such identity among the Coloureds of Cape Town.

The choice between ethnicity and trans-ethnicity that confronts the Coloureds is largely a consequence of their marginal position, a position of privilege within an overall context of disadvantage based on colour. They have been traditionally accorded by successive White-run governments certain privileges that were denied to the Africans and Indians. The urban Coloured community in Cape Town, for example, was not segregated by legislation until the passing of the Group Areas Act in 1950. Further, the Coloureds benefited most from the ‘Colour blind’ Constitution of 1853, as most of them lived in the Cape. While Africans were removed in 1936 from the common voters' list the Coloureds retained direct political representation till 1956. Similarly the Coloureds were not subjected to legal restrictions on their sexual partners till 1950 when the Immorality Amendment Act made it punishable for them to have sexual relations with Whites. Africans were denied the freedom of choosing their sexual partners after 1927 under the The Immorality Act, No. 5 of 1927 which prohibited sexual relations outside marriage between Africans and Whites. The Coloureds were admitted to various skilled jobs, and permitted to have trade unions, while the Africans were barred from doing so. Further, unlike the Indians, the Coloureds had residential rights in all the four provinces of South Africa. Through various legislative measures that gave ‘concessions’ to the Coloureds, while denying a similar status to Africans and Indians, the Coloureds acquired a position of marginality caught between the privileged Whites and under-privileged Africans.

The marginal position occupied by the Coloureds has led to two contrasting attitudes over questions of ethnicity. The Federal Party, which represents one extreme ‘is convinced that parallel development is the only logical approach to problems besetting our [Coloured] people’.¹⁴ It argues that the community would benefit from consolidating the marginal position it occupies in the racial hierarchy of the country. Some others, such as La Guma, wanted a closer union with other racial groups to replace the existing racial hierarchy with a non-racial society. La Guma's political activities, journalism and creative writings reflected his concern for trans-ethnicity which he saw as the way forward for South Africa. In his article ‘Culture and Apartheid in South Africa’ La Guma argued:

The democratic revolution in South Africa implies […] a new community of people of all racial groups, African, White, Coloured, and Asian, being given the opportunity of creating a single, unified nation.¹⁵

In his creative works La Guma explored the problems of the Coloureds from a trans-ethnic perspective. He emphasised the common problems of racial disadvantage that the Coloureds share with other Black ethnic groups, and decried attempts at asserting Coloured racial ‘superiority’. His notion of trans-ethnicity was linked to a universality of opinion that he sought in his writings. In his interview with Robert Serumaga La Guma said:

As a writer I try to achieve a universality of opinion and ideas because I believe that writers are not confined to one set of particular compartments […] even if one has to write within a milieu, a particular environment, or portray a particular environment. I believe that universal ideas can still be expressed within that milieu, within that environment so that your writing does not become confined. Although your stage may be set in a particular environment, your ideas and your writing are not confined.¹⁶

In order to achieve the universality of opinion La Guma widened the scope of his artistic concerns beyond a narrow interpretation of Coloured ethnic interests. In his writings he dramatised the problems, or ‘troubles’ as some of his characters¹⁷ call them, of the Coloureds more in terms of poverty and less in terms of an ethnic group. Coloured ethnicity is under-played and seen merely as a background against which various cycles of man's inhumanity to man take place. La Guma uses different textual strategies to go beyond the specificities of the particular ethnic environment and projects a vision of a trans-ethnic society for all human beings. In this chapter the interlinkages between ethnicity and trans-ethnicity in La Guma's works are explored with a view to assessing whether or not the author succeeded in his twin objectives of putting the Coloureds on the literary map of South Africa and of projecting his universalist vision.

Most of La Guma's works about the Coloureds were written while he was inside South Africa. Between 1957, when he started publishing, and 1966, when he left South Africa, La Guma wrote several anecdotes of individual interest, and short stories that highlight the social consequences of racial legislation. The novels he wrote during this period, A Walk in the Night,¹⁸And A Threefold Cord,¹⁹ and The Stone Country,²⁰ provide an extended treatment of the life of the Coloured people. The focus in these writings is on the Coloured people and their relationship with other racial groups. The novel A Walk in the Night focuses primarily on the life of the Coloured community. The social relationships between the Coloureds and Africans are emphasised in And A Threefold Cord. La Guma's third novel The Stone Country is set in a prison. The prisoners are segregated on the basis of race and, consequently, George Adams, the Coloured protagonist of the novel, spends much of his time in the Coloured section of the prison. But the background to his arrest and imprisonment is trans-ethnic political activity, a theme pursued in La Guma's next novel, In the Fog of the Season's End,²¹ as well. The political dimensions of trans-ethnicity which The Stone Country and In the Fog of the Season's End deal with are examined in the following chapter.

La Guma's attempts to portray the community of poor people as the collective hero of his works overshadows his concern with the Coloured community as an ethnically specific group. Within the Coloured community he selects the economically deprived sections and observes how they are able to interact with the poor of the other racial groups and establish a viable community that can withstand the pressures of poverty and racial disadvantage. Instead of focusing on individual heroes, as Peter Abrahams and Rive do, La Guma concentrates on the social community of the poor united by ‘a threefold cord’. Collective action, instead of individual heroism, is suggested as the solution to the problems facing the social community in A Walk in the Night and And A Threefold Cord. Trans-ethnic humanism in La Guma's works revolves around the notion of the community of poor caring for each other in times of crisis.

La Guma's attempts to speak on behalf of the poor Coloureds represents an attempt to transcend his class origins. Within the Coloured community La Guma hails from a privileged social/economic position. His father, Jimmy La Guma, was a prominent trade union leader in Cape Town. Alex La Guma received the ‘handsome pocket money’ of ten cents per week,²² a luxury a vast majority of the Coloured parents could not give to their children. Another indication of the relatively privileged background of La Guma is that he attended Trafalgar High School. The prestige attached to the school among the Coloureds of Cape Town is recounted in Richard Rive's account of his personal experiences of growing up in District Six. Rive says:

Once I was older I joined an exclusive, upper class ‘Coloured’ athletics club. At first the members, all fair-skinned were worried about my dark complexion, but relented because not only was I a mere junior but I attended Trafalgar High School.²³

In order to acquaint himself with the lives of the poor of District Six, and to do political work amongst them La Guma underwent ‘slumming’ by taking up low-paid jobs in factories. Attempts at ‘slumming’ were not unusual among the Coloured writers of Cape Town in the 1950s. Richard Rive, for example, recollects in his autobiographical work Writing Black an occasion when James Matthews, a fellow writer, took him to a cinema hall to introduce him to the lower classes who frequented that cinema hall.²⁴ In his portrayal of the poor Coloureds La Guma tries to overcome the differences in socio-economic origins by adopting a sympathetic approach to their problems, without being overbearing or piously moralistic.

Most of the short stories of the Cape Town phase deal with the effects of ethnic categorisation operating both in legislation and in the social attitudes of some people in South Africa. La Guma highlights in each of his stories one or two specific examples where the characters' suffering is linked to the racially segregatory legislation of South Africa. Some of the characters in his fictional works internalise the value system of racial separation and suffer as a consequence. La Guma's work, in general, is aimed at explicating the social situation in which a narrow emphasis on ethnicity leads to pain, suffering and, in some cases, to death. The anger and frustration at the debilitating social conditions remain muted and unorganised, as in the case of Adonis in A Walk in the Night.

Most of the Coloured characters of La Guma's works are portrayed as victims of racial and economic disadvantage. Unable to face the problems arising from these two disadvantages several characters turn to crime. By articulating arguments of environmental determinism La Guma portrays these characters in a sympathetic light. He tries to rehabilitate the literary image of the ‘skolly’, the Coloured petty criminal, without either approving of his criminality or glorifying, or sensationalising his actions. La Guma shows that even in those people who turn to criminality there is an element of human sensitivity which attracts them, as in the case of the Coloured criminal in ‘Etude’, to the great cultural achievements of humankind. In the story a Coloured girl in a Cape Town slum, possibly in District Six, is shown playing Chopin's Nocturne and a petty criminal drops into her house to listen to her music. Even though he does not know the name of the tune, he enjoys it thoroughly before rushing off to keep his appointment with his ‘pals’ planning to rob a factory.

La Guma's sympathy towards the criminal in ‘Etude’, his first short story, introduces in a subtle way his preference for trans-ethnicity. By showing that even a Coloured criminal can enjoy Chopin's Nocturne, a high watermark in the European musical tradition, La Guma negates the theoretical basis of racial segregation and ethnic compartmentalisation. By focusing on the universality of human culture and artistic sensibility La Guma articulates his disagreement with the Nationalists' argument of separate races having separate cultures; and of one ‘racial’ culture being superior to another. This response of La Guma was typical of that of Black writers in the 1950s. Rabkin observes:

The black writer of the fifties defended his right of access to metropolitan cultural achievements, protesting against a policy which forbade (and forbids) black children taking part in a national Beethoven competition, on the grounds that this is not ‘their traditional culture’.²⁵

La Guma's disapproval of ethnic compartmentalisation of human culture finds an echo in the argument of the liberal historian De Kiewiet, who argued:

South Africa's racial policies are based on the perverse conviction that the sum of the differences between the Whites and the non-Whites will always be greater than the sum of their similarities. They [White supremacists] do not accept the historical truth that towns in all generations have been centres where culture slowly becomes the common property of all residents.²⁶

La Guma's works concentrate on the violation of this notion under the social and political conditions of South Africa. Many of his stories are woven around the human losses that attend social segregation both at a surface level where legislation condemns large sections of the populations to servitude based on their racial origin, and at a deeper level where sections of victims accept the values of such a status.

The theme of inter-racial love defying both the laws and the illiberal social conventions had been a popular literary theme in the 1950s and the 1960s, particularly in the background of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950. The rigorous implementation and the wide scope of these two Acts made the consequences of their violation more dramatic, or even melodramatic. While the Immorality Act of 1927 finds a rare mention in South African literature, the opposite is the case with the Acts of 1949 and 1950. The latter acts spurred on much creative writing, particularly in English, on the theme of inter-racial sexual relationships. Gerald Gordon's Let the Day Perish,²⁷ Peter Abrahams' The Path of Thunder,²⁸ Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope,²⁹ and Athol Fugard's The Blood Knot³⁰ were symptomatic of the literary concern with human tragedies that accompany inter-racial love in the social and legal environment favouring ‘purity’ of races.

La Guma's short stories ‘Slipper Satin’³¹ and ‘A Glass of Wine’³² portray the human suffering caused as a result of specific segregatory legislations. ‘Slipper Satin’ deals with the imprisonment of Myra for four months for violating the Immorality Act, and its social repercussions. In ‘A Glass of Wine’ the White boy ‘can't marry the girl, even though he may love her. It isn't allowed’.³³ The punishments inflicted by the legal system are compounded by those inflicted by certain sections of the society that accept the notions of racial separation/supremacy. In ‘Slipper Satin’ when Myra returns home after working out her jail sentence the women in the street torture her with their words and ‘act as a vicious vigilante force that destroys the chief character’.³⁴ They gossip:

‘That is she … that's she …

‘Got four months, mos', for immorality …’

‘Come home again, hey? We don't want damn whores on this street’.³⁵

The men in the street add to Myra's sufferings through their insinuating smiles implying that she was a loose woman. They thought ‘maybe there was a chance for one of them’.³⁶ When Myra reaches home her mother is unwilling to welcome her into the house. She rebukes Myra harshly:

You brought disgrace upon us … We all good and decent people, but you brought us shame. You couldn't go and pick a boy of your own kind, but you had to sleep with some white loafer […] And now you just come to bring bad luck into the house.³⁷

Myra is shown to be a victim of both the manifestly unjust law and the people who have internalised the values of the ‘Immorality’ laws.

In the short story ‘Out of Darkness’³⁸ La Guma highlights another form of internalisation of of the value system of racial separation/hierarchy as the cause of suffering undergone by Ou Kakkelak, the main character in the story. As a consequence of the differences in privileges between the Coloureds and the Whites there is a temptation among certain Coloureds whose racial features are close to that of Whites to slip over to the White group and disown their darker relatives and friends. This slipping across the racial barriers, commonly referred to as ‘passing for white’, is a cause of pain and suffering to the disowned relatives and friends. The tragedies that accompany ‘passing for white’ have been a popular subject with several Coloured writers, Richard Rive in particular.

Rive's short story ‘Resurrection’,³⁹ like La Guma's ‘Out of Darkness’, powerfully portrays what ‘passing for white’ means in human terms. In the story a Coloured woman married to a Whiteman leaves behind three near-white children (who ‘pass’ for white) and a Coloured daughter, Mavis. During the funeral of Mavis' Ma the White friends and relatives of the father sing hymns in the ‘front room’ and Mavis and her Coloured friends are pushed to the kitchen. Mavis reflects on the tragedy of ‘pass whiteism’:

[her mother's] eyes […] had asked questioningly, “Mavis, why do they [the other children] treat me so? Please Mavis, why do they treat me so?”

And Mavis had known the answer and had felt the anger well up inside her, till her mouth felt hot and raw. And she had spat out at the Old Woman, ‘Because you're coloured! You're coloured, Ma, but you gave birth to white children. It is your fault Ma, all your fault … You gave birth to white children. White children, Ma. White Children.⁴⁰

‘Pass whiteism’ is a manifestation of ethnicity. ‘Passing’ does not challenge any law of racial segregation in a real sense. Those who ‘pass’ only duck the administrative machinery that implements these laws. Hence, La Guma's attack on ‘pass whiteism’ in his short story ‘Out of Darkness’ is also an attack on laws that uphold ethnicity. In the story Ou Kakkelak and his girlfriend Cora were in love with each other for a long time. They were going to be married. Then Cora fell a victim to the attractions of ‘passing’ for white. Recounting his tragedy to the narrator Ou Kakkelak tells:

Then she [Cora] began to find that she could pass for white. She could pass as white, and I was black. She began to go out to white places, bioscopes, cafes. Places where I couldn't take her. She met white people who thought that she was really white, and they invited her out to their homes. She went to parties and dances. She drifted away from me, but I kept on loving her.

[…] In the end she turned on me. She told me to go to hell. She slapped my face and called me a black nigger. A black nigger.⁴¹

Ou Kakkelak loses his head when his friend Joey criticises him for ‘going off over a damn play-white bitch’ and hits him. Joey dies as a consequence; Ou Kakkelak ends up in the prison and over a period of time becomes demented. The tragedy of Ou Kakkelak is the tragedy of internalised values of ethnicity. La Guma's denunciation of the such values is even more elaborate in ‘The Gladiators’.⁴²

‘The Gladiators’ describes a boxing match between Kenny, an ‘almost white’ Coloured and a tall African whom the narrator calls the Panther. Kenny is colour-conscious and considers himself to be superior to the African boxer. Capturing the racialist psyche of Kenny the narrator says:

[Kenny was …] Not exactly like teak, because he's lighter, just miss being white which was what make him so full of crap. He was sorry he wasn't white and glad he wasn't black […]. He got a nice face, too, except for the nose that's a little flat from being hit on it a lot, almost like a black boy's nose, but not exactly.⁴³

Racial prejudice makes Kenny blind to the strength of his opponent. Instead of playing the game in a professional way Kenny over-exerts himself in the first few rounds to floor ‘that black piece of crap’ easily. Panther is a superior player and he hits back after dodging Kenny in the first few rounds. Kenny gets a bloody nose and is knocked out.

La Guma uses the story to portray the ironies of Coloured ethnic ‘superiority’ and, allegorically, to discuss the ambiguities of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity as they affect racial politics in South Africa. The narrator, who is Kenny's coach, and their mutual friend Gog try to persuade Kenny to realise the myopic nature of his notions of the racial superiority of the Coloureds. When Kenny tells that he will ‘muck that black bastard’ the narrator reminds him, ‘Look Kenny, you don't have that. Christ, we all blerry black even if we off-white or like coffee. Be a blerry sport man’.⁴⁴ Again, when Kenny refuses to accept Panther as one of his ‘own’ kind the narrator reminds Kenny of the ironic position of the Coloured ‘supremacy’: ‘But we all get kicked in the arse the same’.⁴⁵ The irony becomes more poignant when Kenny is unable to relate his Coloured ‘supremacy’ to the similar notions that underpin the laws of ‘separate development’. Kenny queries the narrator and Gogs:

‘But what the hell I got to fight black boys and coloured all the time?’

‘You want to fight a white boy you got to go to England?’ Gogs is just so to him.

‘Or Lourenco Marques’ I reckon. You know you can't fight no white john here […]’.⁴⁶

The views of the narrator of the story and La Guma on the racial situation in South Africa overlap. Both the narrator and La Guma oppose the idea of segregation of seats on a racial basis in places of entertainment. The narrator in ‘The Gladiators’ points out that white boys were occupying the most-preferred seats ‘out front in the ring-sides’⁴⁷ and the rest of the audience who were not Whites were crowded behind them in the hall. This complaint of the narrator reflects La Guma's own childhood experience with racial segregation in places of entertainment. La Guma describes the event:

I was very young, about seven or eight years old, when my mother took me to the circus for the first time. Anyway, the circus was on, and for children it was very exciting. When we were in the big top watching the performance I discovered that I couldn't see anything that was going on in the ring. For some reason or another the performers were always looking the other way, performing in the other direction. I asked my mother why this was so and she told me we were sitting in the seats for black people and the main concentration of the circus was on the white audience, so we just had our chance with the entertainment being provided. That was […] my first experience with racial discrimination.⁴⁸

The narrator in ‘The Gladiators’ functions as a mouthpiece character in another respect as well. La Guma reflects on some of the contradictions of his political activities through the narrator of the story. After criticising the crowd for being bloodthirsty ‘to see two other black boys knock themselves to hell’,⁴⁹ the narrator in an introspective mood muses: ‘What you in this business then?’⁵⁰ The narrator's dilemma is that of being in a situation where he can not take part in the atmosphere of the place on account of having a different individual temperament. All the efforts to persuade Kenny to change his ideas of Coloured racial ‘superiority’ have had no effect. The only justification that the narrator could find is to stay there to see that not much harm is done to his irredeemably racially-conscious Kenny: ‘Maybe just to see my boy don't get buggered too much’.⁵¹

The dilemma of the narrator reflects the dilemma of the La Gumas about on the one hand being Marxists, and thereby professing allegiance to trans-ethnic politics, and on the other being leaders of ethnically-based Coloured People's Organisation (later of Coloured People's Congress). At a wider level the narrator's dilemma touches the ambiguities of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity that confront all politicians who profess trans-ethnic political ideologies in a society where ethnicity has been a strong factor in social stratification since the founding of the colony. The narrator's dilemma is the dilemma between what Durrant notices in South African literature, ‘an exaggerated concern for oneself as a member of a particular group’,⁵² and intellectual identification with certain ideals that transcend one's ethnic origins.

The dilemma of the narrator in ‘The Gladiators’ has also been the dilemma of the Liberal colonialist Cecil Rhodes. As a White politician and as the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony under the ‘Colour-blind’ Constitution of 1853, Rhodes found a narrow path between trans-ethnicity advocated in the Constitution and the need to win White votes through appeals to ethnic interests. On the eve of the 1891 elections he made a vote-catching volte-face to placate Black voters by declaring that he was for ‘Equal Rights for Every Civilised Man South of Zambesi’.⁵³ The ‘civilisation’ that Rhodes implied, however, was not the civilisation of the Africans epitomised in the Zimbabwean ruins; nor was it the civilisation of the forefathers of the Coloureds who found means of surviving in the inhospitable terrains of Southern Africa for centuries; nor was it the civilisation of of those who can search their roots in Mohanjedaro and Harappa.⁵⁴ By ‘civilisation’ Rhodes meant the ways of life of Whites, an idea that buttressed the ‘Civilised Labour Policy’ of various governments in South Africa after 1924.⁵⁵ Rhodes, in spite of the Liberal protestations, as in the case of the narrator of ‘The Gladiators’, found that he was there in the boxing arena of politics only to see that his boys ‘don't get buggered too much’. In 1893 he rushed through legislative changes, La Guma points out, to deny Mr. A. M. Effendi, a Coloured candidate, an almost certain electoral victory through the cumulative voting system in use till then.⁵⁶

Inability to transcend ethnic divisions and translate trans-ethnic ideals into practise was not limited to the Liberal politicians. The Communist Party of South Africa, which, theoretically, should have stayed above the racial politics, faltered in its early years. In the 1920s the membership of the Party was largely White. In spite of the internationalist philosophy to which they professed allegiance, the members of the C.P.S.A. marched during the miners' strike in the Rand in 1922 under May Day banners with slogans such as ‘Workers of the World Fight and Unite for White South Africa’.⁵⁷ Local conditions were allowed to eclipse the professed trans-ethnic internationalism. Later the membership of the C.P.S.A. became more multi-racial and the slogan of 1922 did not resurface. However, the basic problem of operating on a trans-ethnic basis in an ethnically divided society persisted and even as late as 1961 the CPSA appealed to ethnic identities to increase its popularity. In a leaflet distributed during 1961 the CPSA claimed:

The Coloured people know the role the communists have played in fighting against apartheid and bad conditions. They remember the part played by pioneers like Jimmy La Guma, John Gomas and Ray Alexander in organising the poorest-paid Coloured workers.⁵⁸

Alex La Guma's response to the dilemma was to highlight the problems the Coloureds had in common with other racial groups, particularly in terms of the poverty and poor living conditions. In addition, he went beyond the problems connected with ethnicity and looked at social injustice and man's inhumanity to man from a perspective that decried crass selfishness and individualistic morality. In his short story ‘Late Edition’,⁵⁹ which acts as a bridge between his pre-exile and post-exile writings, La Guma shows Frikkie, a young boy selling newspapers, being cheated of his earnings for the day successively by the agent, a sweetmeat trader, and a couple of skollies. By the time he reaches his home the boy is in tears, afraid of the beatings he would receive at the hands of his mother for not bringing home any of his earnings. In this story La Guma points to the tragedy of the boy as an example of the different circles of exploitation that the poor Coloured boy has to face in a Cape Town slum.

In ‘Late Edition’ La Guma comes close to his objective of achieving the universal through highlighting the problems of a specific environment. Frikkie's story of the strong exploiting the weak is a universal theme common to the poor of slums all over the world. Even in terms of the locale the short story could have well been set in any of the urban slums with the poor, malnourished children who are forced to struggle for a living by doing odd jobs such as selling newspapers. Local colour becomes incidental to the actual story in ‘Late Edition’. Much of the description could fit into any story set in an urban slum:

In the gathering twilight he [Frikkie] limped down a cobbled lane, past tumbled heaps of rubbish, into the narrow grey street lined with old grey tenements and overflowing dustbins. There were people lounging in the doorways and other children playing among the dustbins. He limped past the damp, decaying buildings, ignored by those in the street, another anonymous child—one of the hundreds of nondescript smudges on the district.

Home was through a huge doorway and across a puddle hallway and into a courtyard, up a narrow, winding, rust-covered fire-escape, and into a room that always smelled of boiled cabbage or burnt cooking-oil. The lank-haired, young-old woman with the thickened body and smell of sweat, who was his mother, would be up there, waiting. Slowly, with fluttering heart, he climbed the rusty iron stairs.⁶⁰

‘Late Edition’ substantiates July's contention that similarities between District Six and Harlem do not ‘result from the fact that they are both Negro quarters, but that they are both city slums’.⁶¹ By stressing the problems that are not directly related to the racial disadvantage the Coloureds experience La Guma, in ‘Late Edition’, points out that poverty is as much a cause of their suffering as ethnicity is.

In the story ‘At the Portagees’⁶² La Guma points out another form of suffering connected with poverty and the cash nexus. The story is set in a cafe run by a ‘Portagee’⁶³ and deals with the narrator and his friend Banjo trying to befriend Hilda and Dolores, two girls sitting on the other corner of the cafe. Into this sketchy plot La Guma builds an incident that highlights the role of the cash nexus. Taking pity on a poor man who walked into the cafe the narrator gives him a six-penny coin to buy himself some food. The poor man then goes to a different table and orders fish. The Portagee does not want to deal with such a paltry transaction and shouts at him, ‘You can't get six-pence food here, you bladdy fool […] You better get out’.⁶⁴ He reaches out to take the man by the shoulder and throw him out physically. The poor man then walks out of the cafe. The same Portagee welcomes the narrator and the others with him on account of their capacity to spend more money at the cafe. It is not colour or ethnicity, but cash nexus that leads to the poor man's humiliation.

The constant presence of poverty, crime and imprisonment in the lives of the poor people among the Coloureds is highlighted in La Guma's ‘Blankets’.⁶⁵ The random violence and brutal settling of scores between the street toughs is shown outside the framework of ethnic divisions. The story deals with a street tough named Choker, who has been stabbed by an old enemy. Choker is waiting in a lean-to and is later taken to the hospital in an ambulance. La Guma weaves different aspects of Choker's life into the description of his half-conscious and half-delirious state after the stabbing. The narration shifts between the old, threadbare, stained blanket smelling of ‘sweat and having-been-slept-in-unwashed’ that some one throws on Choker while lying on the floor after being stabbed; the ‘thin, cotton blanket’ for which he jostles with his brother on the ‘narrow, cramped, sagging bedstead’; the ‘filthy and smelly’ vermin-laden blanket that the prison guard with ‘a doggish face’ flings at him; and the ‘thick and new and warm’ blankets of the ambulance van. Choker's story is told as a random happening and the narrator does not hint whether, and if so, how Choker's pain and suffering is linked to the ethnic situation in South Africa. The story, however, serves as an example of La Guma's articulation of environmental determinism, ‘the way in which social and familial circumstances combine to make up character’.⁶⁶

La Guma turns the focus away from South African ethnic problems and concentrates on issues of extra-marital relations and sexual jealousy in the earlier version of ‘Blankets’⁶⁷ where La Guma hints a possible link between Choker's affair with another man's woman, and being stabbed soon after leaving her house. The theme of sexual jealousy underpins ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’⁶⁸ and ‘Battle for Honour’⁶⁹ as well. This universal theme is discussed in the specific context of South Africa's Coloured community. The story ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’ is set in a prison for Coloureds, and it deals with the inmates awaiting trial, one of whom is the narrator. The prison bully, The Creature, wishes to exact revenge on the person who killed his brother Nails. Nails was fatally stabbed in a squabble over his ‘goose’ (girl). The injured Nails could not name his assailant, but just before his death managed to say that the assailant had ‘a dragon picked out on his chest’.⁷⁰ The Creature suspects one of the prisoners who has a dragon tattooed on his chest to be the person who murdered his brother, and tortures him. Later The Creature and his gang turn on Ahmed the Turk, another inmate who is friendly to the narrator, and challenge him to show his chest. La Guma leaves the story with an open-ended conclusion: ‘“Awright, all you baskets”, he [Turk] sneered, and unbuttoned his shirt’.⁷¹ Nail's fight over ‘goose’ ends up being a matter of honour for The Creature.

La Guma uses the same theme of extra-marital relations and fights over women in ‘Battle for Honour’. In the story, the narrator and Arthur work for a transport company, and on their way from South West Africa (Namibia) stop at a wayside pub for a drink. While they are having their drinks, Fancy, a boxer known to Arthur walks in and joins the duo. Fancy boasts about his affair with Mrs. Lily McDaniels in Port Elizabeth:

That one was really wake-up […]. They [the women] come and they go. This one walked out of her man for me […]. He was a no-good bogger, anyway. Never met him, hey, but she told me he was always on the bottle […]. So she strolled, and there was me, blerry, willing and able.⁷²

An old man standing near them, whom the narrator calls Shark, overhears this and, in spite of being weak and in no position to engage Fancy in a fight, charges at Fancy. In the ensuing fight Fancy easily beats him up. Later just before starting the lorry Arthur asks Shark why he got into a fight with Fancy. Shark replies that it was a matter of honour and that his name was John Adam McDaniels.

Even though La Guma focuses on aspects other than the racial problems in some of the stories the readers are reminded indirectly that racial disadvantage is a part of the experience that the characters undergo. In ‘Battle for Honour’, for example, Arthur and the narrator pass through the ‘Non-European entrance’ to the bar. The White barman attends to them only after serving the customers on the ‘European’ side of the bar. In ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’ La Guma establishes a connection between the brutality of The Creature and his henchmen, and the society outside. Describing the scene inside the prison the narrator says:

Around us were packed a human salad of accused petty-thieves, gangsters, murderers, rapists, burglars, thugs, drunks, brawlers, dope-peddlers: most of them by no means strangers to the cells, many of them still young, others already depraved, and several old and abandoned, sucking at the disintegrating, bitter cigarette-end of life.⁷³

La Guma's indictment of the brutality of The Creature and his henchmen is also, by extension, an indictment of the society that created them.

La Guma's short story ‘The Lemon Orchard’⁷⁴ deals with another facet of the life of the Coloureds, the way the ethnic attitudes of the Whites affect those who stand up for their rights. ‘The Lemon Orchard’ deals with a Coloured school teacher in a Cape village who takes the Principal of the school and the minister of the church before a magistrate for assault. The Whites in the village march him to a lemon orchard to shoot him dead by way of punishing him for insubordination to the Whites. The Coloured teacher suffers pain and, as suggested at the end of the story, death not on account of racially discriminatory legislation but on account of the attitudes of racial superiority among the White community. The Coloured teacher is abused as ‘verdomte hotnot’, ‘slim hotnot’, ‘one of those educated bushmen’ and ‘hotnot bastard’ and scolded for not showing respect to the White man. When the Coloured man refuses to answer the questions of one of the members of the party of Whites marching him to the lemon orchard, the leader says angrily, ‘Listen, hotnot […] when a baas speaks to you, you answer him. Do you hear?’.⁷⁵ When the Coloured teacher stubbornly persists with his silence the leader is even more furious:

[…] no hotnot will be cheeky to a white man while I live […] I will shoot whatever hotnot or kaffir I desire, and see me get into trouble over it. I demand respect from these donders. Let them answer when they are spoken to. […] We don't want any educated hottentots in our town.⁷⁶

The Coloured teacher maintains his silence to the very end of the story when the White villagers choose the site in the lemon orchard to punish him for insubordination.

The Coloured teacher's resistance to subordination represents his act of defiance as an individual. It is the individual heroism of the character which is highlighted and hence the story, in terms of the thematic content, is closer to the works of Peter Abrahams than to the author's own novels which emphasise more the communal acts of resistance. In Abrahams' The Path of Thunder⁷⁷ Lanny Swartz, the Coloured man returning to his village after his studies in Cape Town, is reminded by the Whites of the village that an educated Coloured has no place in the village. Lanny remains undeterred, crosses the barriers of race and falls in love with Sarie Villier, a White girl. The novel ends with the death of Lanny in the hands of the White villagers for daring to cross the barriers of race. The heroism and idealism of Lanny and Sarie are presented as inspired acts of defiance, a quality they share with the Coloured teacher in ‘Lemon Orchard’.

La Guma's analysis of the social problems of the Coloureds as being predominantly trans-ethnic, even though the ethnic dimension is never absent, is done more elaborately in his novels A Walk in the Night and And A Threefold Cord. The extended scope afforded by the larger expanse of the genre, as compared with short stories, enables La Guma to explore within a single work several aspects of trans-ethnicity. The most significant of these aspects relates to the options open to the poor Coloureds to retain their human dignity in the face of hardships arising out of both ethnic and trans-ethnic causes. The social communities, or at least sections of them, in A Walk in the Night and And A Threefold Cord survive the adverse conditions through mutual help and sharing. Thus, thematically trans-ethnic attitudes are hinted as the way out of the present malaise. The narrative techniques La Guma uses to articulate his views include contextualising his works in terms of trans-ethnic tendentiousness, narratorial comments, and irony and satire within the text.

La Guma contextualises his first novel in terms of the trans-ethnic politics in which he was involved. He gave the title A Walk in the Night to symbolise his disagreement with what he saw as an apolitical or ethnically-political attitude in the Coloured community. In an interview with Abrahams La Guma said:

One of the reasons why I called the book A Walk in the Night was that in my mind the coloured community was still discovering themselves in relation to the general struggle against racism in South Africa. They were walking, enduring, and in this way they were experiencing this walking in the night until such time as they found themselves and were prepared to be citizens of a society to which they wanted to make a contribution. I tried to create a picture of a people struggling to see the light, to see the dawn, to see something new, other than their experiences in this confined community.⁷⁸

Similarly, La Guma has a political purpose in mind in writing And A Threefold Cord. In his article ‘Literature and Life’ La Guma said:

When I write that the poor people in South Africa are compelled to buy water itself from their exploiters [as it happens in And A Threefold Cord], then I also entertain the secret hope that when somebody reads what I have written he will be moved to do something about those robbers who have turned my country into a material and cultural wasteland for majority of the inhabitants.⁷⁹

The external context of the two novels is, thus, the political intent of La Guma to advocate a trans-ethnic society, or to use Drake's categorisation, a ‘creative type of pluralism as opposed to that arising from ethnic differences’.⁸⁰

The social setting of La Guma's novels A Walk in the Night and And A Threefold Cord is trans-ethnic. The viable community that he projects in the two novels is built around its poverty rather than colour and the racial classification of the South African government. In A Walk in the Night La Guma tries to recreate the social community that lived in District Six before the proclamations of residential areas for the different races in Cape Town under the Group Areas Act in 1957.⁸¹ The population of District Six in the 1950s consisted mainly of Coloureds and Malays. This racial composition was a product of the economic upward mobility of Whites, part of which is attributable to the ‘Civilised Labour’ policies reserving the highly paid jobs for the Whites.

In And A Threefold Cord La Guma tries to recreate the social life of another community that was predominantly, but not exclusively, of Coloureds. The novel is set in the Windermere squatter camp⁸² on the outskirts of Capetown in the late 1950s and the early 60s. Windermere was, Western describes, ‘a notoriously squalid shantytown […] where both Coloureds and Black Africans lived in tin pondoks […].⁸³ Poverty was the badge of Windermere and other Cape Flats shantytowns. The middle-class Coloureds of Heidelveld looked down upon the inhabitants of Windermere even after they had moved out of the area.⁸⁴ La Guma's first two novels, thus, deal with District Six and Windermere, localities of Cape Town whose social communities are made up predominantly by poor Coloureds.

La Guma's first novel, or ‘long story’,⁸⁵ to use a term he prefers, A Walk in the Night was written during the late 1950s. In the late 1950s La Guma was active as a journalist. He was a reporter on the staff of New Age and reported events in Cape Town. Apart from his reporting, he wrote articles for New Age and Fighting Talk and contributed ‘Up My Alley’, a regular column of commentary on miscellaneous issues. Thus he was performing two roles, that of the journalist and that of a creative writer. He was aware of the different demands of the two genres and made attempts to seek a transition from being a journalist to a creative writer. Commenting on this struggle to affect the transition La Guma said:

Reportage might bore the reader. Experience in journalism gives one the discipline to organise the material, but it might have bad effects when it comes to creative writing.⁸⁶

The link between journalism and creative writing has been a prominent feature of South African literature, particularly of Black South African literature. Couzens points out, ‘journalism and literature were, for a long period of South African Black [African] literary history, Siamese twins’.⁸⁷ The same could be said of the literary history of the Coloureds and the Indians. Popular journals were the only creative outlets available to Black writers and the ‘newspapers gave them both a public platform and a measure of social status in the aspirant urban middle-class’.⁸⁸ Many of the writers, including La Guma, were influenced by the link with journalism as regards their choice of genre, the content of their writings, and more importantly, the literary style. Links with journalism led to the predominance of the documentary style of narration. On account of their reliance on ‘external subjects’ for fictional creation, and photographic accuracy of observation many of the works of journalist-turned-writers could be categorised as ‘fables of fact’,⁸⁹ a category of fictional works that Hellmann popularised. La Guma's evolution as a creative writer shows the influence of his links with journalism, particularly in A Walk in the Night.

The story in A Walk in the Night deals with a slow but steady moral deterioration of Michael Adonis, a Coloured worker in a sheet metal factory. He is dismissed from his job for talking back to Ou Scofield, a white foreman who refuses to let him take a few minutes off his work for urinating. Further, the foreman insults Adonis by calling him ‘a cheeky black bastard’ (p. 4). Adonis has nowhere to appeal to against the arbitrary dismissal. He is thrown into ‘the whirlpool world of poverty, petty crime and violence’ (p. 4) of District Six, a Coloured urban slum resembling the District Six of the late 1950s. Pushed into the anonymous and alienating urban crowd, without a job, or the hope of getting one in the immediate future, Adonis' thoughts were ‘concentrated upon the pustule of rage and humiliation that was continuing to ripen within him’ (p. 1). Even while having food in a restaurant on his way home he kept thinking over and over about Ou Scofield: ‘That sonavabitch, that bloody white sonavabitch, I'll get him’ (p. 5).

When Adonis comes out of the restaurant two Afrikaner policemen stop him on the road and search him for dagga (marijuana) in an insulting way. With insult added to injury ‘deep down him the feeling of rage, frustration and violence swelled like a boil, knotted with pain’ (p. 12). Adonis then goes to a pub on his way home and meets a few of his friends. The conversation rambles on to the topic of treatment of Negroes in the U.S.A. and about an incident about a street hanging of a negro by some Whites. The topic of the ill-treatment by Whites makes Adonis even more bitter about the Whites of South Africa. Adonis ‘thought about the foreman, Scofield, and the police, and the little knot of rage reformed inside him again like the quickening of the embryo in the womb’ (p. 16).

La Guma extends the metaphor of embryo to depict the anger brewing in Adonis' mind. Adonis' anger against Whites remains unmitigated while climbing the stairs of his tenement and he ‘was nursing the foetus of hatred inside the belly’ (p. 23). Doughty, an old Irish one-time actor living in the tenement invites him for a drink. While Doughty is pouring a drink for him Adonis feels the ‘anger […] curled into a sour knot of smouldering violence inside him’ (p. 26). While talking about his career in acting stage plays Doughty recites Shakespeare's Hamlet and unintentionally includes Adonis among ‘the ghosts doomed to walk the night’. Adonis' ‘pustule of rage’ that had grown into a ‘foetus of hatred’ by now bursts out. Doughty becomes the focal point of Adonis' anger against Whites. Adonis hits Doughty on his head without any murderous intention and the old man falls dead.⁹⁰

The racial situation in South Africa complicates matters for Adonis. The realisation that the dead man was a White makes Adonis nervous: ‘Din't mean it. Better get out. The law don't like white people being finished off’ (p. 29). Adonis does not want to explain the events either to the people in the tenement or to the police. The fear of the consequences of killing a Whiteman overtakes him. The insult he suffered at the hands of the White foreman and the White police earlier in the day makes him hesitant in approaching the police. Lying on his bed after slipping out of Doughty's room Adonis thought:

Maybe I ought to go and tell them (the police). Bedonerd. You know what the law will do to you. They don't have any shit from us brown people. They'll hang you, as true as God. Christ, we all got hanged long ago. What's the law for? To kick us poor brown bastards around. You think they're going to listen to your story; Jesus, and he was a whiteman, too. Well, what's he want to come and live among us brown people for? To hell with him. Well, I didn't mos mean to finish him. Awright, man, he's dead and you're alive. Stay alive. Ja, stay alive and get kicked under the arse until you're finished, too. Like they did with your job. To hell with them. The whole effing lot of them.

(pp. 43-44)

Adonis' alienation from the social system is shown to be caused by ethnic and trans-ethnic factors. His ethnic experience of discrimination, the collective memory of enforced subordination, and the social distance from the Whites determine the reaction of Adonis towards Doughty. In spite of of Doughty's attempts to be accepted as a part of the community of the tenement, he remains an outsider. The larger social divisions between the Whites and the Coloureds (or ‘brown people’ as Adonis identifies his community) dominate over the individual attempts to cut across such barriers, hence the reaction of Adonis ‘What's he [Doughty] want to come and live here among us brown people?’ (p. 44).

The anger against the social system blurs Adonis's reaction to Doughty as a person whom he liked prior to the chain of events that made him bitter about Whites. Adonis, along with other tenement dwellers, liked Doughty and endearingly called him ‘uncle’. As in Shakespeare's Hamlet, a literary work that leaves visible imprint on A Walk in the Night and later works, a bitter personal experience leads to an embittered (over)reaction. When Prince Hamlet witnesses the ‘frailty’ of women in the form of his mother marrying Claudius without weeping sufficiently for the dead husband he gets bitter about all women. Overcome by the anger against women as a whole he rejects Ophelia in spite of of loving her earlier. Hamlet tells Ophelia' ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (Act III, Scene i) and Adonis tells Doughty, ‘Aw, go to buggery’ (p. 26).

Adonis' reaction, however, is not just an outburst of ethnic anger. He qualifies his reaction against the police by emphasising that it is the ‘poor brown’ rather than just ‘brown’ people who get the raw deal from the police. Adonis, thus, sees himself as a member of another social group which is based on poverty rather than ethnicity. It is the precarious existence that poverty forces on the tenement dwellers that unites them and gives the sense of a community. But this trans-ethnic alternative is overshadowed by Adonis' sense of ethnicity, and he refuses Doughty's offer of a comradery based on poverty. When Doughty argues that his Whiteness is of no help Adonis refuses to accept the argument. The experience of humiliation that he suffers on account of his racial origin remains uppermost in his mind, and Adonis retorts angrily, ‘Can't a boy have a bloody piss without getting kicked in the backside by a lot of effing law?’ (p. 28).

In spite of of being a victim of attitudes of racial superiority, Adonis succumbs to the logic of ethnic separateness and questions the right of Doughty to stay in the midst of the Coloureds, ‘Well, he didn't have no right living here with us Coloureds’ (p. 29). His reaction to Doughty's death is but an extension of his attitude of racial separateness, or degrees of racial separateness shown earlier in the novel. While narrating the events at the factory which led to his dismissal Adonis tells his friend Willieboy:

[Foreman Schofield] called me a cheeky black bastard. Me, I'm not black. Anyway I said he was no-good-pore-white and he calls the manager and they gave me my pay and tell me muck off out of it. White sonofabitch.

(p. 4)

Incensed by the events of the day, such as his dismissal from the job, Adonis sees his problem exclusively in terms of his ethnicity. At the pub he refuses to accept the argument put forward by the taxi-driver that ‘Whites act like that [brutally] because of the capitalis' system [… and that the] Colour bar was because of the system’ (p. 17). Thus, buried within Adonis' reaction is an option, the option of trans-ethnicity, that he chose not to exercise. Adonis' reaction arises as a result of an exercise of free will, though the conditions that constrain the scope of the free will lie in the social environment. Consequently, Adonis emerges as a symbolic character representing an attitude of ethnic exclusiveness. Ethnic exclusiveness leaves Adonis in a moral cul-de-sac, and in the pervading atmosphere of criminality of District Six Adonis' ending up as a member of Foxy's criminal gang was only a matter of time.

La Guma's concern with issues of ethnicity and trans-ethnicity illuminates the character and fate of Willieboy. He is shown as a product of material deprivation and a consequent depravity of moral values. He drifts to criminality as a result of the environment around him. He was forced to sell newspapers even from the tender age of seven often on a hungry stomach. His mother beat him if he failed to take home the paltry earnings and ate something out of it instead. He had to run away from home very often to escape the lashings from his father. These bitter childhood experiences and the alienating atmosphere of District Six lead to the problem of identity crisis. The omniscient narrator describes:

He [Willieboy] was also aware of his inferiority. All his youthful life he had cherished dreams of becoming a big shot. He had seen others to rise to some sort of power in the confined underworld of this district [District Six] and found himself left behind […]. He had affected a slouch wore gaudy shirts and peg bottomed trousers brushed his hair into flamboyant peak. He had been thinking of piercing one ear and decorating it with a gold ring […].

(p 72)

The sense of inadequacy within makes Willieboy seek compensation without. His resistance to social conditions takes the form of a nonchalant attitude. Willieboy finds no point in working for wages. He tells Adonis, ‘Me, I never work for no white john. Not even brown one. To hell with work. Work, work, work, where does it get you? Not me, pally’ (p. 4). His hatred is not so much directed at the ethnic origin of the employer but at work itself. In an ironic way his attitude is non-discriminatingly ‘trans-ethnic’. But this form of rejection of society and anarchic passivity does not save him from becoming a victim of the attitudes of ethnic superiority of the White police constable, Raalt.

Willieboy goes to Michael Adonis' apartment to borrow money. Finding the door locked he thinks of borrowing it from Doughty. He opens the door and finds the dead body. He runs away from the tenement, but while doing so he is seen by two occupants of the tenement. During the questioning by the police they indicate that they had seen somebody with kinky hair and a yellow shirt. This sets Raalt on Willieboy's trail. Willieboy, meanwhile, hoping to get some drink on credit, goes to the tavern run by Gypsy. In a drunken mood he gets into argument and later fights with Gypsy's ‘real customers’, the American sailors who had come to spend their time there. Willieboy gets thrown out of the house. He sobers up, and while walking along a deserted street tries to rob Mr. Green. Soon afterwards Willieboy is caught in the glare of Raalt's patrol van. His yellow shirt and kinky hair are enough evidence for Raalt to conclude that he is the murderer. Willieboy's instant reaction is to run away. A chase ensues.

The narrator tries to explain the reaction of Raalt in terms of acting out of private frustrations. Raalt suffers from an acute sense of inferiority because of his inability to control his wife, whom he suspects of carrying on an extra-marital affair. While on the patrol Raalt found it difficult to concentrate wholly on the radio messages. Only half of his mind was on the job; ‘the other half of Raalt's mind was thinking, I am getting fed up with all that nonsense, if she doesn't stop, I'll do something serious. […] She won't get away with it though. The Bitch’ (pp. 30-31). He is very angry about the affair, and tells himself ‘It's enough to make a man commit murder. […] I'd wring her bloody neck. […] If I ever find out something definite she'll know all about it’ (pp. 38-39).

Raalt's anger against his wife smoothly slides to anger against ‘bushmen’, the derogatory stereotype for all Coloureds. He tells the patrol van driver Andries, ‘I wish something would happen [while they are on the patrol]. I'd like to lay my hands on one of those bushman bastards and wring his bloody neck’ (p. 39). The narrator informs: ‘He [Raalt] found little relief in transferring his rage to some other unknown victim, but he took pleasure in the vindictiveness’ (p. 39). Raalt's anger against his wife (‘The Bitch’) is transformed into his anger against the Coloureds (‘bushmen bastards’). The hope of catching his wife red handed (‘If I ever find out something definite’) changes into the hope of apprehending a Coloured person at fault (‘I wish something would happen’). The distinction between his wife and the unknown ‘bushman’ victim totally disappears when he thinks of what he would do if ever he finds the guilty person; he would ‘wring [… the] bloody neck’. La Guma, thus, suggests very early in the delineation of Raalt's character a link between his private frustrations on one hand, and on the other his brutal behaviour in the discharge of his public affairs.

The ethnic divisions and the resultant group attitudes add complexity to the private/public continuum in Raalt's individual frustrations, and his brutal acts in the outer society. Raalt is mentally prepared to be more brutal if the criminals he apprehends are ‘effing hotnot bastards’ (p. 31) or ‘bushman bastards’ (p. 39). The sharp dichotomy in Raalt's attitudes is revealed during his investigation of the murder of Doughty. Initially, thinking that the dead man was a Coloured, Raalt comments, ‘What a peculiar name. These people have bloody peculiar names’ (p. 62). Then he realises that the body is that of a White man. Changing his attitudes almost instantly he says, ‘What was he doing here? How did he get there?’ (p. 62). Similarly, when Raalt comes to know that the suspected murderer has kinky hair his craving for violence takes racial overtones. While writing down the details of the suspect killer of Doughty Raalt thought:

one of those who will disgrace us whites. In his scorn for the hottentots and kaffirs he is exposing the whole race to shame. He will do something violent to one of those black bastards and as a result our superiority will suffer. They ought to post him somewhere, in a white area, where he will have little opportunity of doing anything dishonourable.

(pp. 39-40)

Andries', instead, would like to use subtle methods:

Train them [the “hotnots”] like dogs to have respect for you. If you whip them they'll turn on you. You've got to know how to handle these people. Pa knew how to handle these people. […] He's got a lot of these hotnots working out in the orchards and the vineyards and he's never had any trouble with them. Give them some wine and drive them into town Saturday nights and they're all right.

(p. 79)

Andries, thus, in spite of his differences about the methods, shares with Raalt the goal of keeping ‘the hotnots’ subordinate, much in the fashion of dogs. The animal imagery used by La Guma to describe the attitudes—Raalt hunting his prey, and Andries training them like dogs and driving them into town—is indicative of the author's suggestion that Raalt and Andries are two sides of the same coin. Failure to notice the closeness of Raalt's and Andries' intentions has resulted in Andries getting a more compassionate critical appraisal than he deserves. Michael Wade argues that through Andries ‘La Guma expresses his scorn for […] a tradition in South African life that apparently easy-going but easily rattled form of benevolent paternalism known as Cape Liberalism’.⁹¹

Examining Andries' attitude more closely one can notice that Wade's interpretation is only partially tenable. Even if it is presumed that La Guma's ‘scorn’ is for the worst aspect of Cape Liberals—their expediency in sacrificing the interests of the Cape Coloureds for the sake of personal/party electoral ends⁹²—Andries fails to stand as a fully representative figure of Cape Liberals. Andries does not have any trace of idealism or theoretical willingness to treat the Coloured man as a human being, as some of the Cape Liberals did or at least professed.⁹³ La Guma uses the character of Andries to highlight some of the stereotypes that illuminate differing attitudes of Whites towards the Coloureds. Raalt's anger against Willieboy, or any ‘hotnot bastard’, is so great that the hesitant Andries is not able to save the life of Willieboy. Ironically, he ends up helping Raalt to ‘trap’ the stalk by blocking the escape route of Willieboy. The death of Willieboy is not random, but a logical outcome of attitudes of ethnic superiority, and the acting out of these attitudes.

The tensions between ethnicity and trans-ethnicity determine the fate of Joe, another character in the novel who detested regular employment. While Adonis and Willieboy get pushed into criminality by the pressures of social environment, Joe escapes a similar fate by running away from it. He remains an outsider to the society of District Six, as the narrator points out. Introducing Joe to the readers the narrator says:

Nobody knew where Joe came from, or anything about him. He just seemed to have happened, appearing in the District like a cockroach emerging through a floorboard. Most of the time he wandered around the harbour gathering fish discarded by fishermen and anglers, or along the beaches of the coast, picking limpets and mussels. He had a strange passion for things that came from the sea.

(p. 9)

Joe, thus, stands out as a representative of Strandlopers, the beachcombers near Cape Town who survived on animals washed up by sea. The strandlopers, as Schapera points out, ‘were merely Bushmen who took to the seashore, so that we have to deal with a particular mode of life rather than with particular people’.⁹⁴

The Khoisan, as Schapera's studies suggest, have a highly developed sense of communalistic concern and mutual help which finds expression in the food sharing rituals and practises: ‘[…] it can safely be asserted that among the Bushmen all game is shared out among the members of the band’.⁹⁵ This characteristic feature of Khoisan life is stressed by Dorethea F. Bleek as well: ‘that they [the Khoisan] do share their goods is well known to the border farmers, who have a saying: ‘If there are four Bushmen and one sheep's trotter, they must each have a bit’.⁹⁶ Lorna Marshall's study of !Kung San provides further evidence:

The !Kung custom of sharing meat helps to keep stress and hostility over food at low intensity […]. The fear of hunger is mitigated: the person with whom one shares will share in turn when he gets meat; People are sustained by a web of mutual obligation. […]. One is not alone.⁹⁷

This aspect of sharing and caring that is a part of Joe's communal heritage illuminates his character in the novel.

The informal bond of mutual concern that existed between Adonis and Joe gets shattered when Adonis decides to join the criminal gang of Foxy. In a last minute attempt to re-establish the bond Joe asserts his right to take care of his ‘pal’. Running behind Adonis who is on his way to join Foxy's gang Joe says, ‘Mike […] maybe it isn't my business, you see? Maybe it got nothing to do with me, but you like my brother. I got to mos think about you’ (p. 74). A little later, still running behind Adonis who refuses to listen to him, Joe ‘looked as if he was going to cry’ (p. 7). His appeal to Adonis is based on a concern for mutual wellbeing, ‘I am your pal. A man's got a right to look after another man. Jesus, isn't we all people?’ (p. 75).

The scene in A Walk in the Night where Joe tries to persuade Adonis has been interpreted by Wade as illustrating certain Judaeo-Christian precepts:

[…] adumbrated in this scene is a simple but powerful and comprehensive moral system, resting on certain basic Judaeo-Christian precepts: one should love one's neighbour and try to help him because one is one's brother's keeper and one is involved in his fate. Put in another way it is a system based on shared responsibility, mutual recognition between human beings of their obligations to each other in a hostile environment.⁹⁸

Wade's argument regarding the moral basis of the scene fails to do sufficient justice to Joe's communal heritage. La Guma does not show Joe as being religiously minded, least of all as a Judaeo-Christian, except in his name. Joe uses the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘Hell’ in a general way as accepted words of everyday language. Joe stands as an example of the communal concerns of mutual help that governed the lives of the Khoisan. By attributing Judaeo-Christian basis to Joe's morality Wade delinks Joe from his native communal heritage which pre-dates the alien Judaeo-Christian precepts.

Joe's response to the material problems facing him in the industrial society of South Africa is to retreat to the beaches and the rocks. He is not a part of the society of District Six. He himself admits his peripheral position when he says ‘[…] I got nothing. No house, no people, no place’ (p. 69). ‘[…] most of the time I do what I can on the rocks’ (p. 74). Joe's response is essentially a repetition of the response of his father who, unable to find work and feed his family, runs away to an unknown place: ‘He just went out one morning and we [Joe and his family] never saw him again’ (p. 69). When Joe finds out that his family is being evicted for non-payment of rent and is returning to the ‘outside’ of Cape Town he ‘just ran away like my [Joe's] old man (p. 70).

Retreating to the beachcombing habits of his historical past does not save Joe from the problems or the ‘troubles’ of the industrial society. He is constrained from bringing the dead fish he finds on the beach into the city. Otherwise, as Adonis tells him, ‘City Council would be on your neck’ (p. 10). On one hand the colour-blind laws of the City Council of an industrial city prevents him from bringing in dead and stinking fish into the city: and on the other the colour-bound laws of the City Council condemn him, on account of his ethnic origin, to a situation where he cannot even have access to the beaches his forefathers freely moved about. Talking about the City Council moves to reserve beaches for Whites Joe tells Adonis, ‘I hear they're going to make the beaches so only white people can go there. […]. It's going to get so's nobody can go nowhere’ (p. 10). The only option open to Joe, which he takes up towards the end of the novel, is to retreat further away from the society of Cape Town, to make ‘his way towards the sea, walking alone through the starlit darkness’ (p. 96). Joe's failure to prevent Adonis from joining Foxy's gang shows the failure of the old form of communal caring, ‘Isn't we all people?’ (p. 75), to influence the society of twentieth century South Africa. By implication, La Guma points to the need for new forms of communal caring that still raise the question ‘Isn't we all people?’.

La Guma's attempt in A Walk in the Night has been to show the intertwined nature of ethnic and trans-ethnic issues affecting the Coloured characters. He elaborated his view of this intertwined nature of the problems in an article in Sechaba in 1967 in which he argued that:

In the face of increasing forms of apartheid and racial discrimination in politics and economics, it is not surprising that the physical and social life of the Coloured Community is deteriorating at an alarming degree […]. Social problems which might exist under ‘normal’ capitalist conditions are aggravated seriously by racial discrimination.⁹⁹

Thus, similarities exist in the views of Alex La Guma in his non-fictional works and the portrayal of Coloured characters and their social situation in A Walk in the Night. La Guma articulates the same viewpoint even in situations where the Coloureds do not constitute the overwhelming majority as in District Six. La Guma's next novel And A Threefold Cord deals with a community composed of the Coloureds and Africans.

One of the aims that La Guma had in writing And A Threefold Cord is to inform his readers about the conditions in the slums of South Africa. The area of Cape Town that provided the model for La Guma to undertake such a venture was Cape Flats, a dry sandy area on the Eastern and North-Eastern outskirts of the city in which Windermere and other Black slums are located. La Guma explains:

I was interested in recording creatively the life of a community under various conditions. I thought it would help to bring to the reader an idea of what goes on in the various black areas of the Cape and that through a novel this would be done. And having had some experience of the Cape Flats and having met some of the people there and having had some idea of their lives, well I just got stuck into And A Threefold Cord.¹⁰⁰

There are several similarities between the known details of Cape Flats and the descriptions of the locale in the novel.

The circumstances under which And A Threefold Cord was written made the overseas reader a significant factor in the delineation of the character, and the description of the locale. In 1963 the Seven Seas Publishers approached La Guma for ‘something’ to publish.¹⁰¹ He was, at that time, under severe restrictions and was serving a five-year term of house arrest. He was prohibited from attending any gatherings or joining any political organisations and ordered to resign from political organisations. He was a ‘banned’ person. The laws under which La Guma's writings were banned had a wide scope that covered almost everything he wrote or spoke. Reporting on the nature of La Guma's banning that made A Walk in the Night unavailable to South African readers. ‘B.P.B.’ of New Age wrote:

The Act [The General Laws Amendment Act] makes it an offence, without the consent of the Minister or except for the purposes of any proceedings in any court of law, to record or reproduce by mechanical or other means or print, publish or disseminate any speech, utterance, writing or statement or any extract from or recording or reproduction of any speech, utterance, writing or statement made or produced or purporting to have been made or produced anywhere at any time by any person banned under the Supression Communism Act from attending gatherings. La Guma has been banned from attending gatherings.¹⁰²

Against the background of these wide-ranging bannings that virtually denied any possibility of publishing his works in South Africa La Guma accepted the offer from the Seven Seas Publishers and wrote And A Threefold Cord.

The immediate intended audience for And A Threefold Cord was, therefore, the overseas readers the Seven Seas Publishers had in mind. Two significant concessions are made in the book for non-South African readers. Firstly, there is a long foreword by Brian Bunting giving a description of the social and political conditions in South Africa. The other concession is in the appending of a glossary mainly of Afrikaans words used in the text. The glossary contains very common words such as baas and Ou which a South African reader of any race in any region of the country would be in a position to understand. Obviously, the glossary is for the non-South African readers. It is difficult to conclude as to what extent the publisher's concern with the overseas readers influenced La Guma. However, one could speculate that banning resulted in a new author-reader relationship.

Unlike in the case of A Walk in the Night which was completed before the offer of publication by Mbari Publishers, And A Threefold Cord was written with the knowledge that the book was for an overseas readership. La Guma thus envisages certain aspects of the novel as propaganda or, more precisely, as counter-propaganda against the rosy picture of South Africa propagated abroad by the South African government. For example, the title of the novel is a symbolic invitation to the readers outside South Africa to treat the problems of the South African slum dwellers as their own. Explaining the wider context of the experiences of the characters portrayed in the novel La Guma said:

The title (And A Threefold Cord) comes as an excerpt from a biblical quotation. I think it is Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. This excerpt emphasises the idea that the individual alone cannot survive, that he has to have somebody around him to which to cling in times of difficulty and adversity and I tried to convey the idea that loneliness of people, loneliness of individuals is one thing, but at some time or another they've got to turn away from their loneliness and try to associate with other people. And I try throughout this novel to show that while people have got their own problems, or what they believe to be their own problems, these problems are not actually entirely their own but they are shared by other people.¹⁰³

La Guma's intention to address the non-South African readers is partly responsible for the repeated use of the motif of incessant rain causing misery and suffering. The descriptions of rain in the novel have purposes other than creating the atmosphere. La Guma explains:

There is also the fact that overseas people believe the South African regime's tourist propaganda that it is a country with perfect weather. I had an idea that we could use the weather as a feature of South Africa, but also in terms of its symbolic potential, and thus at the same time make it or try to make it genuinely South African. In other words, I am contesting the official propaganda of South Africa's natural beauty and trying to show the world that the tourist poster world of wonderful beaches and beautiful golf links is not the total picture¹⁰⁴.

The reader that La Guma had in mind was not, however, wholly non-South African. Given the regional divides that exist in South Africa between the Cape and other parts of the country, La Guma's attempt was aimed at least in part in recording what was happening in Cape Town's slums. To act as a social historian of the Cape was one of La Guma's aims in writing And A Threefold Cord. Speaking on his motivations to write the novel La Guma remarked that the novel ‘is a matter of recording history or recording situation’¹⁰⁵, a motivation that many writers from Africa had. Thus, in this regard, And A Threefold Cord is in the same category as Things Fall Apart,¹⁰⁶, and The River Between,¹⁰⁷ novels that examine communities engaged in the struggle for survival when faced with outside forces.

The primary focus in And A Threefold Cord is on recording the happenings in the community. Its main character Charlie Pauls serves as a convenient string to hang different sketches of life in the shanty town of Windermere. The plot is, JanMohamed notes, ‘virtually non-existent; it simply consists of Charlie Pauls' constant attempts to repair his family house in a dilapidated shanty town while various disasters befall his friends and family members’.¹⁰⁸ Throughout the novel, as Fatton notes, ‘La Guma uses interpolated sketches to juxtapose the life of the Pauls family to that of the community’.¹⁰⁹ What holds the story together is the way the social community of the location survives the intertwined problems of poverty and racial disadvantage.

The squatter camps of Cape Flats sprang up in the 1930s when there was a large influx of people from the hinterland of Cape Town. The influx was a combination of ‘pull factors’ associated with the boom in manufacturing industries around Cape Town and ‘push factors’ of rural poverty associated, among other things, with the cumulative effects of divisions of land holdings into uneconomically small units. The population influx consisted of people of Coloured, African and White ethnic origins. The ‘poor whites’ did not become a part of the Cape Flats squatter camps as they were protected by the ‘Civilised Labour’ policies; and they moved on to more affluent areas.¹¹⁰ The rest of the migrants became part of racially mixed shanty towns such as Windermere or of predominantly African townships such as Nyanga and Langa. In the locations, J.S. Marais points out, ‘Coloured inhabitants often live side by side with the Bantu […]’.¹¹¹ In the ‘notoriously squalid shantytown’ of Windermere, John Western points out, ‘both Coloureds and Black Africans lived in tin pondoks[…]’.¹¹² Windermere, thus, is distinguished by two features, its poverty, and its ethnically-mixed Black populace. Both these features are reflected in the novel.

In And a Threefold Cord La Guma portrays in graphic details the poverty in which the people of Windermere live. In his descriptions of the locale and the people La Guma shows a concern for naturalistic detail, as he had done earlier in A Walk in the Night. La Guma's concern for detail is continued in the novel in the descriptions of the dilapidated surroundings, the leaking pondoks that offer no protection against the incessant rain and cold wind to the undernourished inhabitants of Windermere. The racially mixed character of Windermere is reflected in the racial range of the characters in the shanty town area of And A Threefold Cord. There are Coloured characters such as the Pauls and Freda, African characters such as Brother Bombatta and Missus Nzuba and a Cape Malay character Aunt Mina. Among the characters who intrude into the community for a short period are Mostert, the White owner of the petrol-station across the road that acts as a boundary of the shanty town, and the Afrikaner police constable Van Den Woud. What unites the people of the shantytown is their poverty, and the need for mutual help and solidarity, irrespective of their ethnic origins, in times of crises. It is only the threefold cord between the poor that enables them to survive the dehumanising forces of poverty and racial disadvantage in the locations.

The squalid conditions of the locations and the poverty of the people who live in the locations have been a subject of many sociological studies and reports of Government Commissions. Describing the conditions in a typical location the Tuberculosis Commission noted in 1914:

[The location was frequently placed on] stony and irregular [ground] fit for no purpose, generally […] in the vicinity of […] the town sanitary tip, the refuse dump, and the slaughter poles and […] away from the possibility of procuring any proper domestic water supply [… The dwellings are] with a few exceptions […] a disgrace, and the majority quite unfit for human inhabitation. [The locations are] mere shanties, often nothing more than hovels, constructed out of old packing case lining, flattened kerosine tins, sacking and other scraps and odds and ends […] put up on the bare ground.¹¹³

The conditions in the locations hardly improved for years and in 1937 Cape Coloured Commission repeated many of the findings of the Tuberculosis Commission and noted that the conditions prevailing in most locations ‘are insanitary and unhygienic to a degree that can hardly be described’.¹¹⁴

Literary attempts to describe the Cape Flats locations have been very few. Peter Abrahams highlighted the conditions in the Cape Flats in his autobiography Tell Freedom:

Entering the Cape Flats was stepping into a new Dark Age. The earth, here, is barren of all but the hardiest shrub. It is a dirty white, sandy earth. The sea had once been here. In its retreat it had left a white unyielding sand, grown dirty with time. Almost, it had left a desert. And in this desert strip, on the fringes of a beautiful garden city, men had made their homes. They had taken pieces of corrugated iron and tied them together with bits of string, wire and rope. They had piled sacking on top of this. The ‘fortunate’ had made floors; the unfortunate had sandy earth for floor. Into these hovels men had taken their women. […] They had called these places homes. They had lain with their women. And their women had brought forth children. And the children grew, stunted as the shrubs on this desert strip.¹¹⁵

La Guma's And A Threefold Cord is probably the first full-length novel set entirely in a Cape Town location. The textual evidence suggests that the novel deals with a location with mixed racial population in Cape Town in the early 1950s before the rigorous implementation of the Group Areas Act or the introduction of the passes for women. La Guma's attempt in the novel has been to make it ‘really another record of the general life of the people as reflected through the experience of one particular family [the Pauls] and its associates’.¹¹⁶ The poverty in which the Pauls live serves as a metaphor for the poverty of the location as a whole. Intertwined with the poverty that afflicts most of the Coloured and African characters is the burden of racial disadvantage. The hardships of poverty are made even more unbearable by the psychological humiliation at the hands of the police who enforce the racially discriminatory laws.

Poverty is omnipresent at different levels in the location in And A Threefold Cord. Incessant rain and inclement weather only add to the sufferings of the poor people of the location whose leaky pondoks provide no adequate protection. The narrator provides a detailed description of Pauls' pondok and how it was built:

Dad [Pauls] had rented the lot, one of the several empty ones in the sand waste just beginning to be crowded in by the collection of dilapidated shanties that was springing up like sores of the legs of land off the highway. […] Dad and Charlie had scavenged, begged and, on dark nights, stolen the materials for the house. They had dragged for miles sheets of rusty corrugated iron, planks, pieces of cardboard, and all the astonishing miscellany that had gone into building the house. […] And now and then [with] the other help, Coloured and African shack dwellers, had filled four-gallon cans with crudely made concrete and allowed it to set. Then they had arranged the concrete-filled containers in a square and had laid the floor of the kitchen and the bed room across them […]. Then the walls had gone up, and assortment of rusty galvanished sheets and flattened oil drums nailed and bound to uprights with a square hole left in the bedroom for a window. […] The roof had been nailed down and they had heaved heavy stones on to it for additional security.

(pp. 39-41)

The shack in which Charlie's sister Caroline and her husband Alfred lived was even worse. It was a big motor-car crate resting a few inches off the ground on pieces of timber. Houses such as those of the Pauls or of Alfred and Caroline make up the location which the narrator describes as follows:

It could hardly be called a street, not even a lane; just a hollowed track that stumbled and sprawled between and around and through the patchwork of shacks, cabins, huts and wickiups: a maze of cracks between the jigsaw pieces of settlement, a writhing battle-field of mud and straggling entanglements of wet and rusty barbed wire, sagging sheets of tin, topping pickets, twigs and peeled branches and collapsing odds and ends with edges and points as dangerous as sharks' teeth, which made up the fencework around the quagmires of lots.

(p. 45)

Most of the people in the location are either unemployed or are dependent on earnings from doing odd jobs when available. Charlie Pauls is unemployed; his uncle, Uncle Ben, who lives by doing odd house-painting jobs is also temporarily out of work on account of the downpour. Only Ronald Pauls has a steady job, and after his arrest for the murder of Susie Myres, his girlfriend whom he suspects of going out with other men, the family loses even that small income. Thus, the Pauls family does not have money to eat sufficient food, or have proper medicines for Pa Pauls who is sick, or even to buy adequate amount of water to wash Pa Paul's body when he dies. Alfred's earnings are so meagre that the City Council refuses to allot him a house. Freda is relatively lucky, and through her work as a house-maid with a White family in the town is able to survive and feed her two children by her former husband. She loses all her belongings and the children in the fire accident that burns down her shack.

The people of the location are faced with the humiliation forced on them in everyday life because of their ethnic origins. Their low status in the racial hierarchy of South African society prevents the possibilities of social interaction even with Mostert, the owner of the petrol station just across the road from the location. Mostert is a dropout of the White society. His wife had run away with a used-car salesman after getting tired of Mostert's ‘lack of ambition or his premature surrender to encroaching competition’ (p. 66) and he is leading a lonely existence lacking human company. He is unable to get over ‘his wretched pride in a false racial superiority’ (p. 67) and mix with the people of the location. Later, when he does take the plunge, and walks to the location and chances to bump into Susie Myres who shows her willing to ‘have a wake-up time’ (p. 129) he is afraid of the association: ‘One didn't go with coloured girls; it was against the law anyway’ (p. 128). A combination of social attitudes and legal barriers generate and sustain ethnic separateness reinforcing the racial/social walls that enclose the location.

Charlie Pauls, the central character of the novel, is aware of the intertwining nature of the forces that are responsible for the pain and suffering of his family and himself. In the course of a chat with his uncle, Uncle Ben, Charlie speaks of the relative poverty and racial humiliation the Coloureds undergo:

Listen, Uncle Ben, one time I went up to see Freda [the women he loves and later marries] up by that people she works for, cleaning and washing. Hell, that people got a house mos, big as the effing city hall, almost, and there's an old bitch with purple hair and fat backsides and her husband eating off a table a mile long and dingus on it. And a juba like me can't even touch the handle of the front door. You got to go round the back.

(p. 83)

On several occasions Charlie Pauls contrasts the opulence of Freda's White employers with his and his family's poverty. Charlie portrays the White/Black divisions as rich/poor divisions though the link is not seen as an absolute one. Ethnic divisions of White and Black are countered by trans-ethnic economic divisions within the Black ethnic groups. Speaking to his brother Alfy about the leaking roof of their house Charlie says:

Is funny there got to be a lot of people like us, worrying about the blerry roof everytime it rain, and ther's other people don't have to worry a damn. Living in wake-up houses like that house Freda work by […] or even just up the road here [in the location]. […] Some people got no money, some people got a little money, some people got a little more money, and other people got a helluva lot […].

(p. 89)

The events in the novel highlight the ambivalent relationship between the ethnic and the trans-ethnic factors that cause misery and suffering to the poor people of the location. When Charlie's father dies, the family is faced with the problem of buying sufficient water to wash the dead body. The location did not have a proper water supply and ‘Those who owned the plumbing and the taps sold water to those who lacked such amenities’ (p. 113). The narrator rails at the attitude of the people who were making profit out of the helplessness of those who did not have water taps. The Black ethnicity of the profiteers does not save them from the narrator's criticism. While describing the scene where ‘queues of scarecrow children form up with buckets and cans and saucepans’, the narrator comments:

Water is profit. In order to make this profit, the one who sells the water must also use it to wash his soul clean of compassion. He must rinse his heart of pity, and with the bristles of enterprise, scrub his being sterile of sympathy. He must have the heart of a stop-cock and the brain of a cistern, intestines of lead pipes.

(p. 114)

The insensitivity of the profiteer that makes the burdens of poverty even harder to bear is matched by the racial humiliation and psychological pain inflicted on the people by the police party headed by a White police constable, Van Den Woud. With the ostensible purpose of checking for Pass Law offenders, dagga smokers, and illicit liquor the police make it a point to insult every Coloured and African they come across. Every Coloured, by virtue of his race, is automatically presumed to be a dagga smoker. Thus, Van Den Woud asks Charlie ‘Alright, jong, waar's die dagga? Where's the dope? (p. 135). The sergeant insults Freda, who by then had not married Charlie, by calling her a ‘blerry black whore’ (p. 136). Nor do the police respect the privacy of Caroline's child birth. They try to barge in under the pretext of looking for illicit liquor. It is only Ma Pauls' brave defiance that prevents any possible tragedy.

The police party's behaviour towards Africans is even more insensitive and arbitrary. The police use the brief they have to implement the Pass Laws in a brutal and high-handed way. They insult and arrest Africans in an indiscriminate manner. The narrator describes one such random arrest:

[Hearing the commotion at the time of the raid] an African man came out of his cabin to the gate of his yard in order to see what was going on. He was wearing an old overcoat over his pyjamas. Light fell on him, and he was surrounded by police.

‘Where's your reference book, kaffir?’

‘It is inside, in my coat pocket.’

‘Where is it, man? You should have it on you.’

‘No pass, hey? Come, come on, come on.’

‘Listen, it is inside, sir.’

But hands were laid on him and he was led towards where others stood waiting to be loaded into the police trucks.

(p. 139)

In response to the intertwined problems of poverty and racial disadvantage the poor Coloureds and Africans forge ‘a threefold cord’. They survive deprivation and racial humiliation through mutual material help and moral support. Their poverty and the need for mutual help and solidarity, irrespective of the ethnic origins or the ethnic categories the police make during their raid, act as unifying forces. When the Pauls family does not have water to wash the dead body of Dad Pauls their neighbour Missus Nzuba offers a bucket of water. When Ma Pauls offers to return the bucket of water Nzuba says, ‘I do not want it back […] I am proud to yelp you. We been living here together a long time […] We all got to stand by each other’ (pp. 111-12).

Similarly, Charlie takes it upon himself to seek vengeance against the police for insulting his woman and the community of the location. He gets up from the bed suddenly, puts on his ‘old army boots’ (p. 138) and tells Freda that he was going out to ‘see what's happening to our people’ (p. 138). When a police man asks him to move off from the place where the police were counting off the arrested people to the police trucks, Charlie retorts ‘Can't a man watch his own people being effed off to jail?’. Charlie hits a ‘hard, snapping blow’ on the face of the police man and manages to run away to safety. In another instance of expressing solidarity in times of crisis, Charlie, when Freda loses her house and her two children in a fire accident, takes the grief-stricken women to his house: ‘I'll take her up to our place. I reckon that's the only place for her now’ (p. 159).

La Guma thus shows that the problems facing the Coloured community in general have their roots in both ethnic and trans-ethnic factors. The interlinkages between ethnic factors such as social practices and laws that segregate them into mental and physical ghettoes on one hand and trans-ethnic factors such as poverty, sexual jealousies, profiteering on people's miseries on the other are shown to be complex. The overlapping nature of the ethnic and trans-ethnic factors render any rigid categorisation both simplistic and inaccurate. By criticising sections of the Coloured communities who are willing to get rich by exploiting the poor of their own ethnic kind La Guma points out that identities other than the Coloured ethnicity do exist. An identity based on economic groups and humanitarian mutual help is shown as a viable alternative, particularly in And a Threefold Cord. The quest for a viable alternative to ethnicity is continued by La Guma in his later novels, The Stone Country and In the Fog of the Season's End.

Notes

1. La Guma in his interview with Robert Serumaga in Duerden, D., and Pieterse, C., eds., African Writers Talking, (London: Heinemann, 1972), p. 93.

2. Marks, Shula, ‘Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of African History, vol. XIII, no. 1, 1972, pp. 55-80.

3. Raven-Hart, R., Before van Riebeek, Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652 (Wynberg, Cape: Rustica Press, 1967).

4. Especially his poem ‘The Brown Hunter's Song’ in Pringle, T., Poems Illustrative of South Africa: African Sketches (Cape Town: Struik, 1834, 1966), pp. 62-63.

5. February, V. A., Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature (London: Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 1.

6. Rabkin, D., DRUM Magazine (1951-1961): And the Works of Black South African Writers Associated with It, unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Leeds, July 1975, p. 178.

7. Cited in Stonequest, Everett, V., The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Russell & Russell, 1937), pp. 20-21.

8. Cited in February, Mind Your Colour, p. 60.

9. Millin, Sarah Gertrude, God's Step-Children (London: Constable, 1924; 1951).

10. Millin, S. G., God's Step-Children, p. 34.

11. Edelstein, M., What Do the Coloureds Think? (Johannesburg: Labour & Community Consultants, 1974), p. 77.

12. The Theron Commission: A Summary (Johannesburg: SAIRR, 1976), p. 114.

13. Western, John, Outcast Cape Town (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 346.

14. Cape Argus, 19th August 1969; cited in Whisson, M. G., ‘The Coloured People’ in Randall, P., ed., South Africa's Minorities, (Johannesburg: Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society, 1971), p. 48.

15. La Guma, Alex, ‘Culture and Apartheid in South Africa’, Tricontinental, no. 8, 1968, p. 132.

16. La Guma's interview with Robert Serumaga in 1966, in Duerden, D., and Pieterse, C., eds., African Writers Talking, p. 93.

17. For example, Adonis and Joe in A Walk in the Night.

18. La Guma, A., ‘A Walk in the Night’ in La Guma, A., ed. A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1967), pp. 1-96. All references to the text are to this edition.

19. La Guma, A., And a Threefold Cord, (Berlin: Seven Seas, 1964). All references to the text are to this edition.

20. La Guma, A., The Stone Country (London: Heinemann, 1967).

21. La Guma, A., In the Fog of the Season's End (London: Heinemann, 1972).

22. La Guma, Alex, ‘What I Learned from Maxim Gorky’, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing, no. 34-4/77, Oct-Dec 1977, p. 164.

23. Rive, Richard, ‘Growing Up in District Six’, South African Outlook, vol. 110, no. 1303, 1980, p. 8.

24. Rive, Richard, Writing Black (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981), p. 12.

25. Rabkin, D., DRUM Magazine (1951-1961): And the Works of Black South African Writers Associated with It, p. 227.

26. De Kiewiet, C. W., The Anatomy of South African Misery, (London: OUP, 1956), p. 39.

27. Gordon, Gerald, Let the Day Perish (London: Methuen, 1952).

28. Abrahams, Peter, The Path of Thunder (London: Faber, 1948; 1952).

29. Paton, Alan, Too Late the Phalarope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953).

30. Fugard, Athol, The Blood Knot (Johannesburg: Simondium Publishers, 1963).

31. La Guma, A., ‘Slipper Satin’, in Rive, R., ed., Quartet: New Voices from South Africa (London: Heinemann, 1963; 1974), pp. 67-73.

32. La Guma, A., ‘A Glass of Wine’, in Quartet, pp. 91-96.

33. La Guma, ‘A Glass of Wine’ in Quartet, p. 96.

34. Abrahams, Cecil, Alex La Guma, (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall, 1985), p. 32.

35. La Guma, A., ‘Slipper Satin’, in Quartet, p. 67.

36. La Guma, A., ‘Slipper Satin’, in Quartet, p. 68.

37. La Guma, A., ‘Slipper Satin’, in Quartet, pp. 69-70.

38. La Guma, A., ‘Out of Darkness’, in Quartet, p. 38.

39. Rive, R., ‘Resurrection’, in Quartet, pp. 41-51.

40. Rive, R., ‘Resurrection’, in Quartet, p. 42.

41. La Guma, A., ‘Out of Darkness’, in Quartet, p. 38.

42. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in La Guma, A., A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, pp. 114-120.

43. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 114.

44. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 115.

45. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 115.

46. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 115.

47. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 117.

48. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in 1978; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, pp. 4-5.

49. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 117.

50. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 117.

51. La Guma, A., ‘The Gladiators’ in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 117.

52. Cited in Mphahlele, E., The African Image, (London: Faber, 1962), p. 108.

53. Roux, E., Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964; 1972), p. 62.

54. The idea of civilisation that a British governor who was in office not long after Rhodes' government was:

    If the redemption of the pledges [made to the Government of India on indentured Indian labour] means that in fifty or one hundred years this country [South Africa] will have fallen to the inheritances of the Eastern instead of the Western populations, then from the point of view of civilisation they must be numbered among promises which it is a greater crime to keep than to break.

    [Sir Arthur Lawley, Lieutenant-Governor of Transvaal, writing to Lord Milner (13 April 1904), cited in Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour 1830-1920 (Oxford: OUP, 1974), p. 298]

55. ‘Civilised Labour’ was defined as ‘the labour rendered by persons whose standard of living conforms to the standards generally recognised as tolerable from the usual European standpoint’, and ‘Uncivilised Labour’ was ‘to be regarded as the labour rendered by persons whose aim is restricted to the bare necessities of life as understood among barbarous and undeveloped peoples’ [Cited in Hepple, Alex, South Africa: A Political and Economic History (London: Pall Mall, 1966), p. 207].

56. La Guma, A., ‘Apartheid and the Coloured People of South Africa’, Notes and Documents, (New York: United Nations Unit on Apartheid, 1972), p. 15.

57. Roux, E., Time Longer than Rope, p. 148.

58. Harmel, Michael, pseud. A. Lerumo, History of the Communist Party of South Africa: Fifty Fighting Years 1921-1971, (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1971, 1978), p. 196.

59. La Guma, A., ‘Late Edition’, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, vol. XII, 1972, pp. 152-157.

60. La Guma, A., ‘Late Edition’, p. 157.

61. July, R. W., ‘African Personality in the African Novel: Alex La Guma; Cyprian Ekwensi; Onuora Nzekwu; Cheik Amidou Kane’, in Beier, Ulli, ed., Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing (London: Longman, 1967; 1979), p. 231.

62. La Guma, A., ‘At the Portagees’, in La Guma, A., A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, pp. 108-113.

63. A person of Portugese or Southern European descent.

64. La Guma, A., ‘At the Portagees’, in A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, p. 111.

65. La Guma, A., ‘Blankets’, in Walk in the Night and Other Stories, pp. 121-125.

66. Rabkin, D., DRUM Magazine, p. 205.

67. La Guma, A., ‘Blankets’ in Mphalele. ed., African Writing Today (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 268-273.

68. La Guma, A., ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’, in La Guma, A., ed. Walk in the Night and Other Stories, pp. 97-107.

69. La Guma, A., ‘A Matter of Honour’, The New African, Sept 1967, pp. 169-170. The story first appeared as ‘Battle for Honour’, Drum, vol. VIII, pt. 10, 1958, pp. 84-86.

70. La Guma, A., ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’, p. 101.

71. La Guma, A., ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’, p. 107.

72. La Guma, A., ‘A Matter of Honour’, p. 169.

73. La Guma, A., ‘Tattoo Marks and Nails’, p. 98.

74. La Guma, A., ‘The Lemon Orchard’, in La Guma, A., A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, pp. 131-136.

75. La Guma, A., ‘Lemon Orchard’, p. 133.

76. La Guma, A., ‘Lemon Orchard’, p. 135.

77. Abrahams, P., The Path of Thunder, (London: Faber and Faber, 1948; 1952).

78. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in 1978; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 49.

79. La Guma, A., ‘Literature and Life’, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, vol. I, no. 4, 1970, p. 237.

80. St. Clair Drake, ‘An Approach to the Evaluation of African Societies’, in Africa as Seen by American Negroes (Paris: Presence Africaine); cited in February, Mind Your Colour, p. 80.

81. Although the Group Areas Act was passed in 1950 its actual implementation in Cape Town was delayed till about 1957, on account of several local factors including non-cooperation from city council.

82. According to Cecil Abrahams La Guma identified the location as Windermere; Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 74.

83. Western, J., Outcast Cape Town, p. 117.

84. Western, J., Outcast Cape Town, p. 241.

85. In his interview to Abrahams La Guma says:

    I had never really consciously thought of producing a novel, as such, in terms of the formal structures and so on. I just started at the beginning and ended at the end. […] I just constructed the story in my mind, whether it was a short story or a long story. I don't call it a novel, I call it a long story. Once it had been completed in my mind, I sit down to write it and then amend it, change it and so on.

    Abrahams, Cecil, Alex La Guma, p. 69

86. ‘Alex La Guma Discussing His Story The Stone Country’, B.B.C. Radio Broadcast, 23rd March 1968.

87. Couzens, T. J., ‘The Black Press and Black Literature in South Africa’ 1900-1950, English Studies in Africa, vol. XIX, no. 2, 1976, p. 98.

88. Couzens, T. J., ‘The Black Press’, p. 96.

89. Hellmann, J., Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).

90. Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 63.

91. Wade, Michael, ‘Art and Morality in Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night’, in Parker, K., ed., The South African Novel in English (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 188.

92. ‘One suspects in the case of many Cape Liberals that their nigrophilism was only skin deep. They expressed publicly their interest in maintaining the Cape Coloured vote. This vote had provided them with safe seats in Parliament.’

    Roux, E., Time Longer than Rope, p. 71.

93. John X. Merriman, for example; for details of the legacy of Cape Liberalism in the later day politics see Robertson, J., Liberalism in South Africa 1948-1963 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

94. Schapera, I., The Khoisan People of South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1935; 1965), p. 29.

95. Schapera, I, The Khoisan People of South Africa, p. 29.

96. Bleek, D. F., The Mantis and His Friends: Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: T. Maskew Miller, 1923), pp. viii-ix.

97. Marshall, Lorna, ‘Sharing, Talking, and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions among the!Kung’ in Lee, Richard, B., and De Vore, Irvin, eds., Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the!Kung San and Their Neighbours (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 357.

98. Wade, Michael, ‘Art and Morality in Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night’ in Kenneth Parker, ed., The South African Novel in English, p. 188.

99. La Guma, Alex, ‘The Time Has Come: Part II’, Sechaba, vol. I, pt. 4, 1967, p. 14.

100. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in June 1981; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 70.

101. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in June 1981; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 69.

102. ‘B.P.B.’, ‘Alex La Guma's First Novel Banned by the Sabotage Act’, New Age, vol. VII, no. 43, p. 6.

103. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in June 1981; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 71.

104. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in June 1981; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 72.

105. La Guma's interview with Cecil Abrahams in March 1978; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 70.

106. Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958; 1962).

107. Ngugi wa Thiongo, The River Between (London: Heinemann, 1965).

108. JanMohamed, A. R. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 239.

109. Fatton, K., Novels of La Guma: Representation of a Political Conflict, Unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1984, p. 64.

110. ‘Increasing segregation also arose from the manipulations of the Civilised Labour policy. Erstwhile poor Whites were, from the later 1920s onward, improving their socio-economic status and buying segregation in newer all-White suburbs […] at the bottom of the scale, city's peripheral squatter camps, such as Windermere and Cook's Bush housed only negligible number of Whites, if any.’

     Western, John, Outcast Cape Town, p. 56.

111. Marais, J. S., The Cape Coloured People 1652-1937 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1957), p. 257.

112. Western, J., Outcast Cape Town, p. 117.

113. Union Government Publication No. 34, 1914, pp. 126-39; cited in Marais, J. S., The Cape Coloured People, pp. 257-58.

114. Union Government Publication No. 34, 1937, par. 720; cited in Marais, J. S., The Cape Coloured People, p. 259.

115. Abrahams, Peter, Tell Freedom (London: Faber & Faber, 1954; 1981), p. 287.

116. La Guma in his interview with Cecil Abrahams in June 1981; cited in Abrahams, C., Alex La Guma, p. 70.