[In the following essay, JanMohamed examines the ways in which La Guma's fiction reflects the socioeconomic and spiritual effects of colonialism on native peoples.]

The life and fiction of Alex La Guma perfectly illustrate the predicament of non-whites in South Africa and the effects of apartheid on them. His formative years were spent in a society that is still colonial and characterizes the black man as the incarnation of evil and the continent as the “heart of darkness.” Fanon's description of such a society has still not been superseded:

The colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. … The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare admit it, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil.¹

The absolute negation of the very being of colonized people breeds a counter negation: “on the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the native’ the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the settler’ replies.”² This manichean organization of colonial society has reached its apogee in the “Republic” of South Africa, where the perpetuation and elaboration of “apartheid,” the policy of racial segregation and exploitation, has become the major concern of government and where the abusive term for the African, “kaffir” (infidel), implies a profound, metaphysical otherness. Given D. T. Moodie's convincing demonstration that the theological roots of apartheid ideology lie in Calvinistic notions of predestination, original sin, and in its highly polarized views of salvation and damnation,³ Fanon's characterization of colonial society as a manichean organization is by no means exaggerated. In fact, the colonial mentality is dominated by a manichean allegory of white and black, good and evil, salvation and damnation, civilization and savagery, superiority and inferiority, intelligence and emotion, and self and other. It is a society replete with profound contradictions and antagonisms.

La Guma's reaction to this society, his participation in anti-apartheid politics, and his subsequent imprisonment and exile provide him with a first-hand knowledge of the aspirations, frustrations, and deprivations of the disfranchised and enslaved segment of the South African population. Due to the racial basis of all South African social organization, his political and social experience can be viewed as generic to the extent that all non-whites are treated as interchangeable objects by the Afrikaner regime. Thus La Guma is able to articulate this generic experience of the disfranchised South African in two ways. The substance of his novels depicts the poverty, squalor, arbitrary justice, imprisonment, and political oppression of the blacks and “coloured” (i.e. racially mixed people) as well as their attempt to fight apartheid, while the structure and style of his writing reflect the spiritual attenuation of life that results from socio-political disfranchisement.

Born in Cape Town in 1925, Alex La Guma has been surrounded and formed by the acrimonious, antagonistic political atmosphere of the South African society.⁴ He became aware of politics not through literature but through the fact of his political exclusion on racial grounds and through a radical family tradition. Jimmy La Guma, Alex's father, was a noted leader of the non-white struggle against apartheid and a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party. His entire life was dedicated to the formation of various trade unions and political organizations that attempted to overcome white supremacy. Alex himself joined the Communist Party when he was quite young and became a member of its Cape Town District Committee until it was banned in 1950. Thereafter, he participated in the preparations for the Congress of the People, a non-racial political convention held in Johannesburg in 1955, which drew up the freedom charter, but for his dedication to democratic rights, he was arrested, along with 155 other men and women, and charged with attempting a violent overthrow of the government. The ensuing Treason Trials lasted five years before the defendants were acquitted and allowed to return to their normal lives. However, even before the trial was over the government arrested 20,000 people of various races throughout South Africa during the state of emergency that followed the Sharpeville and Langa massacre of those protesting against the Pass system. La Guma, who was jailed along with the others during the emergency, was once again arrested in 1961 for planning a strike to protest the inauguration of the Verwoerd Republic.

The government responded to Alex La Guma's increasing prominence in anti-apartheid politics by systematically harassing and isolating him. To counter the growing violence against apartheid, the government passed the Sabotage Act which permitted the Minister of Justice to place anyone under house arrest by a simple decree. Among the first casualties of this Act, La Guma was confined from December 1962 onwards to his own house for twenty-four hours a day for five years. The Sabotage Act also allowed the government to isolate him further by prohibiting the reproduction of his statements in any form. Following the passage of the thirty-day no-trial act, La Guma was taken from house arrest and put into solitary confinement but eventually released. Thereafter, he continued to live in isolation in South Africa until he managed to escape to London in September 1966, where he has lived since.

La Guma's writing career began in 1956 when he joined the staff of a progressive newspaper, New Age, for which he wrote striking vignettes about life in Cape Town. However, when he was forced to abandon journalism in 1962 because shortage of funds forced the newspaper to reduce drastically its staff, La Guma became completely isolated from his community; his house-arrest precluded any reemployment and participation in the social and political life of his country, and because he was a banned person, all his novels were published outside South Africa. A Walk In the Night (1962) was published in Nigeria, And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967) in Berlin, In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1973) in New York, and Time of the Butcherbird (1979) in London.⁵

His novels graphically depict various facets of South Africa's disfranchised population: his first novel draws a portrait of the precarious and alienated life in the slums of Cape Town; his second records the dignified attempt of shanty-town dwellers to survive amidst hunger, apartheid, and the winter; The Stone Country depicts life in a South African jail; his fourth and best novel, upon which this paper will focus, describes a few days in the life of a man working in the political underground; and the latest novel depicts the poverty to which rural black South Africans are consigned and their powerful desire to seek revenge for their oppression. In spite of their diversity, all these novels have one fundamental factor in common: the marginality of life for the non-white in South Africa. Although not all his novels take up the theme of marginality, they inevitably end up commenting on and indirectly depicting the material, social, political, and spiritual poverty to which apartheid relegates the darker, “inferior” people. Thus La Guma's novels constitute a transformed, fictive version of his own marginality, which initially consists in his social and political disfranchisement and then is followed by his enforced internal isolation and later “voluntary” external exile. His personal experience of exclusion from a full and free life is only a more dramatic version of the generic exclusion experienced by all non-white South Africans. His novels, then, represent the effects of the manichean bifurcation imposed by apartheid.

The predicament of non-white South Africans manifests itself in La Guma's fiction primarily and most forcefully in the dialectic opposition between his assumption that each individual has the right to live a decent life and his depiction of the actual deprivation of that right. The first term of the dialectic is usually tacit, whereas the elaboration of the second term constitutes the bulk of La Guma's fiction. The individual's right to self-fulfillment—the right to elect his own government, to live where he wants, to receive adequate compensation for his labor, to shape his children's education, to marry whomever he wishes, etc.—is not generally articulated in the novels because La Guma, assuming its universal theoretical acceptance, chooses to focus on its absence by describing in detail the abject deprivation of the black people's lives. The absence of the first term and the ineluctable presence of the second in La Guma's novels also accurately reflect the actual conditions in South Africa: the vast majority of non-whites in that country, though perfectly aware of their disfranchisement and their aspiration, are not in the habit of articulating the demand for their rights. Only when a character is actively and systematically engaged in pursuing his rights, as In The Fog of the Seasons' End, does the author allow him to elaborate the first term of the dialectic.

The second major condition of South African life that underlies all of La Guma's fiction is the nature of the non-white individual's racial experience. While each black, “coloured,” or Indian person in South Africa is intuitively aware of himself as a unique being, the white society that controls him recognizes and treats him only as a generic being, as a “kaffir,” as an interchangeable unit of a homogeneous group, and, in moments of extreme hostility and deliberate rejection, as a “thing.” Thus his experience of self as an individual is constantly accompanied and negated by experience of self as a generic being who, in spite of his individual qualities, is inevitably condemned to poverty, pseudo-humanity, and an absence of dignity and pride. His life is constantly characterized by a sense of oppression and inferiority because even if he does not believe himself to be deficient he is politically and socially unable to reject the inferiority that is imposed on him. This feeling is also accompanied by a pervasive sense of guilt caused by his enforced acceptance of a subjugated status and by his awareness that from the white viewpoint he is guilty of various crimes and attributes simply because of his race. Thus in a practical sense the South African non-white, like the Indian untouchable, experiences his generic condemnation as a hereditary quasi-ontological fact.

The opposition and tension between the experience of self as a significant individual and as an insignificant unit of a condemned caste as well as the dialectical opposition between the assumption of self-fulfillment and the actual deprivation lead to a profound alienation of the individual that La Guma's fiction tries to remedy by defining various communities within which his characters can find an optimal and fecund balance between personal freedom and communal obligations. The societies that he creates range from those that are held together by arbitrary circumstances to those that are shaped by the pursuit of definite political goals, but in comparison to normal communities the ones in La Guma's fiction remain politically, socially, economically, emotionally, and legally marginal. Furthermore, the life of each person in these societies is rendered even more precarious by internal conflicts and contradictions between individual freedom and communal demands and between the sacrifice of viable but limited present communities for those of the political underground or the potentially more comprehensive ones of the future. La Guma's fiction explores these experiences of deprivation, alienation, and marginality, and its major imperative is the search for viable communities that do not exploit their constituents.

La Guma's style is also a product of these social tensions and contradictions. His novels verge on naturalism: often his heroes are entirely at the mercy of an authoritarian society and an oppressive environment. The politically unaware characters of his early novels are condemned to suffer the fate of people without initiative or resources, whereas his later heroes, involved in organizations attempting to overthrow apartheid, seem capable of changing their environment. However, whether the protagonists are victims or rebels, La Guma makes their experiences available to us through a careful and detailed description of the specific and concrete immediacy; rarely does he discuss poverty or lack of freedom in abstract terms, nor does he spend much time in articulating the consciousness of his characters. He confines himself to placid and factual descriptions of concrete human behavior and the material surface of society. Yet these calm descriptions are deceptive since the concrete objectivity masks a powerful and explosive hostility of the characters as well as of the narrators. This aspect of La Guma's style is best illustrated by an example from A Walk in the Night, his most violent novel.

Michael Adonis, the protagonist of the novel, has just been stopped for no particular reason by two white policemen who proceed to search him. In spite of his anger and humiliation, Michael knows that instead of looking into their eyes, which would be construed as a challenge to their authority, he should focus his attention on “some other spot on their uniforms.” This realization is immediately followed by a detailed, qualified description of one of the policemen's hands:

The backs of his hands where they dropped over the leather of the belt were broad and white, and the outlines of the veins were pale blue under the skin, the skin covered with a field of tiny, slanting ginger-colored hair. His fingers were thick and the knuckles big and creased and pink, the nails shiny and healthy and carefully kept.

(AWTN [A Walk in the Night], pp. 10-11)

Just as Michael avoids the recognition of his humiliation and represses and controls his rage by focusing on the minute details of the policeman's exterior, so the quasi-naturalistic style of La Guma masks the seething rage and frustration of the non-white experience in South Africa. The strategy that Michael uses to repress the emotions involved in the confrontation with the police is also employed by the narrator to avoid the elaboration of Michael's emotions. Just after Michael has been fired from his job, the narrator describes him as follows:

Around him the buzz and hum of voices and the growl of traffic blended into one solid mutter of sound which he only half-heard, his thoughts concentrated upon the pustule of rage and humiliation that was continuing to ripen deep down within him.

The young man wore jeans that had been washed several times …

(AWTN, p. 1)

The mention of rage is followed by a minute description of Michael's jeans and clothing. Thus the concrete and detailed surface of the novels is a deliberate mode of controlling the feelings of the characters and the narrators: rage and violence are violently suppressed by the calm, naturalistic objectivity of the prose.

Although the tension between the experience of self as a unique individual, a subject, and as a member of a caste, a generic object, pervades all of La Guma's fiction, his first two novels clearly focus on the latter experience. In fact, what he depicts here is a political form of seriality deliberately imposed on and internalized by the non-whites. (Put simply, the members of a “series” are human individuals who are forced to possess an inorganic character and to join one another only in their status of individuals-as-objects.)⁶A Walk in the Night represents such seriality in the interchangeability of individuals, in the easy transference of emotions, in the repeated transformation of victim into oppressor, and in the utter lack of political initiative among the residents of the slum. These people suffer a collective impotence due to the systematic suppression, negation, and destruction of their being by the apartheid regime. The underlying sense of fatality manifests itself in the ironic plot that relies entirely on coincidence and chance for its development: the degree of its arbitrariness almost negates the very idea of plot. Superficially, it demonstrates the characters' inability to control their lives and shape their destinies. However, a more subtle though still arbitrary causality underlies the circumstantiality: the characters are linked by the transference of hate and violence, which is facilitated by the individual's acceptance of himself as a generic being. The initial murder and series of assaults, which are sudden transferences of hostility down a hierarchy of powerlessness, culminate in a suspenseful and tense depiction of a deliberate, brutal, and callous murder of an innocent victim by an Afrikaner policeman. By presenting the latter victim as a scapegoat whose murder purges the violence of that evening and by showing him as the final recipient of diachronic as well as synchronic transferences, La Guma stresses the helplessness and insignificance of the individual-as-an-object.

La Guma opposes and balances the resultant despair with the desire to belong to a viable community which will recognize a black man's individuality and treat him as a complete rather than marginal being, as a subject rather than an object. A Walk in the Night simultaneously depicts the need for and the absence of such a community: the characters are only subconsciously aware of their need for such a society, whereas the novel itself only provides unworkable alternatives. Michael unhesitatingly rejects the first possibility, a genuine moral Christian fraternity, because it is too saintly and self-abnegating in the violent and unjust world of the novel. The second alternative, a gang of thieves, which is a community to the extent that it defines mutual responsibilities and dependencies among its members, is presented by La Guma not as a choice but rather as a fate for the hero.

La Guma thus forces his hero to choose between two incompatible communities. The white, economically productive, and “legitimate” society, from which the hero has just been ejected for insubordination, is diametrically opposed to the black, parasitic, and illegitimate underworld of the gang. Either the hero can belong to the former by accepting his subservient, enslaved status, or he can share the general quasi-ontological guilt of his caste by actually becoming a criminal. Thus to the deprivation and degradation that apartheid imposes on non-whites La Guma only replies in kind: to arbitrary persecution the characters respond with equally arbitrary and emotional violence; to apartheid's exclusionist legal and economic policies they can only reply with crime and theft. La Guma does not allow his characters or narrator to transcend the terms defined by apartheid. Thus the plot as well as the emotional, conceptual, and political structures of the novel are metonymic: all relations and developments are based on contiguity. The plot proceeds through coincidence, and the generic nature of race relations allows one individual to be substituted for another without any significant alteration in the original intention or function of an act or event.

The “naturalism” of this novel, then, is a logical extension of its acceptance and representation of seriality as the major experience of life. As we saw earlier, La Guma uses the description of external surface in order to repress the seething, angry reaction against apartheid. Yet the emotions are all reactive: none of La Guma's characters evidence a coherent project in life; they are constantly at the mercy of events. Similarly, none of the alternative solutions offered by the novel have any originality: they have all been predefined by the manichean allegory. La Guma's reliance on description, rather than narration, on contiguity, rather than causality or desire, as principles of novelistic organization, and on emotional and cognitive categories prearranged by the manichean bifurcation indicate that the external world is felt to be alienated from human activity—society is viewed as a static, if oppressive, thing-in-itself. Human will and initiative have been crushed. Naturalism is here the product of a radical shrinking of human potentiality.

La Guma's next novel, And a Threefold Cord, where the human will begins to emerge in a rudimentary form, clarifies this characteristic of his naturalism. The plot of this novel is virtually nonexistent: it simply consists of Charlie Pauls's constant attempts to repair his family's house in a dilapidated shantytown while various disasters befall his friends and family members. In the process of this “activity” he begins to perceive the need for unity in the face of apartheid. Judged purely by this plot, the novel is a weak and paltry affair. However, it is saved from such a fate by the excellence of its descriptive passages which are clearly more important than the narrative. The novel is best appreciated as a prose painting: La Guma's brilliant and deliberate, at times precise, at times evocative and almost fond descriptions of the atmosphere, the shantytown, the Pauls's house, and the constant rain, which menacingly brackets the lives of people, better depict the oppressive conditions of existence than do the actions of the characters. And A Threefold Cord thus divides itself into two unequal segments. On the one hand, we have the excellent descriptions of the physical environment, the impoverished conditions, and the stoicism and dignity of the characters; on the other hand, we have the simplicity and poverty of the theme which is essentially expressed as a slogan—“we should unite” or simply “unite.” These differences are reducible to an unusual opposition and tension between the richness and precision of the indicative segment (or mood) of the story—the description of physical environment and human dignity—and the vagueness and simplicity of the imperative segment (or mood) which has neither an articulated subject nor a well-defined complement or object—it exists simply as an exclamation, as a vague but urgent desire. However, the desire cannot be mediated by human activity because apartheid policies completely deprive the people of any control over their lives. Thus in his relation to the socio-historical and natural environment man exists as a spectator in this novel. And it is this attitude of the alienated, impotent spectator that defines the essence of La Guma's naturalism. The style as well as the socio-political and ontological stance represented by this novel are in turn reflections of, or certainly influenced by, an actual and specific historical moment: La Guma wrote this novel while he was confined under constant house-arrest, which indubitably made him feel impotent and rendered his past and future quite uncertain and indefinite.

However, La Guma's succeeding novels define in clearer and sharper manner the nature of the political imperative for non-white South Africans imprisoned by apartheid. His next novel, The Stone Country, an allegory set in a prison, examines how quite minor demands for political rights made by one prisoner affect the rest. By deliberately choosing as his political “agitator” a mild-mannered, non-intellectual man who gradually transforms the prisoners by treating them as dignified subjects of their own life and world and who demands similar respect for himself from the guards, La Guma shows how the demands for equality, for respect and responsibility for oneself and others, and the desire for vengeance can coalesce to overthrow apartheid and to form a viable alternative community. Yet he does not allow himself to romanticize these changes into a utopian view of revolution. Rather, through reversals in the rebellion, he implies that neither can one overturn apartheid's entrenchment in violence nor can a new enduring community be established by sudden and dramatic changes: freedom from apartheid can only be achieved by steady, incremental efforts of the whole community. After being placed in solitary confinement for insubordination, the hero is returned at the end of the novel to the main part of the prison, where presumably he will start agitating again. The novel thus implies an open-ended struggle.

For La Guma, freedom seems to depend on the recognition of political and communal necessity. Since the prison represents the absence of liberty, the imperative and indicative aspects of this novel are inextricably intertwined. A description of the prison, a definition of the restriction it imposes on the inmates, is a necessary first condition for a description of the prisoners' goals and their struggle against bondage. The imperative to regain control over one's destiny is the obverse side of the necessity for describing and defining the oppressive conditions of society. Imprisonment and rebellion, deprivation and the struggle for a decent life, are in perfect opposition in this novel: each one can be defined only in terms of its antithesis. The dialectical tension between oppression and the desire for freedom as well as the coalescence of the indicative and imperative aspects of this novel, which together define the basis of its excellence, are accompanied by another major change. The life of George Adams, the “agitator,” is even more marginal than that of Michael Adonis or Charlie Pauls, but it is so voluntarily: George chooses to be involved in anti-apartheid politics, for which he is imprisoned, and he chooses to be insubordinate, for which he is put in isolation. His control over his own destiny marks the end of the naturalistic tendency in La Guma's fiction, and his deliberate choice of a particular form of marginality, his subordination and sacrifice of personal freedom and self-concern for a larger communal interest, marks the beginning of a new phase.

La Guma's fourth novel, In the Fog of the Seasons' End, extends and clarifies the different preoccupations of his earlier novels. What had previously been an opposition between the assumption that individuals have a right of access to certain basic forms of self-fulfillment and the deprivation of this right, with the major stress falling on the latter, now becomes an overt and explicit struggle between the colonized non-white and the colonizing white sections of the South African population: the initial overt statement of the issues involved in this fight, in the form of a brief debate between a political prisoner, Elias, and a Major in the secret police, is followed by the story of a sustained struggle between the police and one cell of an underground revolutionary movement which is attempting to depose the South African government. Yet since the depiction of this struggle necessarily involves some cloak-and-dagger scenes, La Guma cautiously avoids sensationalism by understating the drama, by making his characters weary rather than elated, and by ironically equating the precarious conditions of the fight to the unreality of “gangster” and “western” films, which will restore one to the normal world of complex reality at the end. He is perfectly able to eschew a romantic view of revolution, for by the end of the novel one is left with a feeling of an arduous and precarious struggle that will probably kill all the protagonists and continue into the next generation.

The debate between the Major and Elias, the latter a relatively important leader of the underground, states the classic arguments of the proponents and opponents of apartheid. The Major claims that because blacks are inherently incapable of governing themselves the benevolent white government is providing them with jobs, houses education, etc., but that Africans like Elias, forever dissatisfied and ungrateful, are being misled by clever priests, lawyers, Communists, and Jews, and that in turn they are corrupting other blacks. The Major finds African demands for better education an absurd impertinence:

I have heard that some of your young people even want to learn mathematics. What good is mathematics to you? You see, you people are not the same as we are. We can understand these things which are best for you. We have gone far to help you, do things for you. Yet you want to be like the Whites. It's impossible.

(FSE [In the Fog of the Seasons' End], p. 4)

The African presumption to equality arouses the Major's wrath, which he expresses in the description of his duty: “It is my duty to destroy your organization. Already you people are on your knees; soon you will be on your bellies. Soon we will stomp you out altogether” (FSE, p. 5). The Major's antipathy and adamant beliefs collide with Elias's equally strong sense of bitterness and desperate pride. For Elias the South African government is nothing but a source of injustice and exploitation:

You have shot my people when they have protested against unjust treatment; you have torn our people from their homes, imprisoned them, not for stealing or murder, but for not having your permission to live. Our children live in rags and die of hunger. And you want me to co-operate with you? It is impossible.

(FSE, pp. 5-6)

These equally uncompromising positions are in fact only the intellectual manifestations of a complex political and military struggle which has been underway in South Africa since the middle sixties and a small segment of which is depicted in this novel. La Guma's narrative, a complex series of retrospections and juxtapositions that depict the lives of people involved in various underground operations, simultaneously presents the different forms of deprivations, the political and paramilitary fight to depose the government, the price paid by the individuals involved in this struggle, and the new kinds of communities that are formed in the process. A separate consideration of each of these areas will inevitably distort the series of juxtapositions and retrospections that create a formal pattern perfectly consonant with the secretive, discontinuous, anxious, and uncertain experiences of the underground protagonists.

In the process of furnishing details about the background of various characters, La Guma builds up in this novel the most thorough portrait of deprivation thus far. He presents the economic exploitation of the non-whites as the pervasive and fundamental fact of South African society. According to the apartheid doctrine, whites always have preference over other races: “coloured” workers are displaced from their jobs in order to make room for whites; residents of “coloured” and black sections of towns are moved en masse whenever whites desire to appropriate those areas; black widows of miners are awarded a total of £40 in compensation, whereas white widows receive £15 per month for the rest of their lives. The life of the rural African is plagued by starvation and disease. If he is lucky enough to immigrate to the city, like Elias, he finds himself condemned to live in racially and sexually segregated workers' quarters that are combinations of prisons and slums. He then has to work at underpaid menial jobs that sap all his strength and leave him a broken, penniless man.

Although the anti-apartheid movement seeks to alleviate this material lack, the characters in the novel seem more aroused by the social and political injustices they suffer, for these are the avenues through which they are controlled. Through a deliberately stylized, hypothetical ritual in which an African everyman is interrogated and given his pass, La Guma shows the nature of bondage that this system imposes. The pass completely controls a person's movements and employments—he even needs permission to leave a job. La Guma characterizes this modern form of slavery as follows:

When African people turn sixteen they are born again, or even worse, they are accepted into the mysteries of the Devil's mass, confirmed into the blood rites of a servitude as cruel as Caligula, as merciless as Nero. Its bonds are the entangled chains of infinite regulations, its rivets are driven in with rubber stamps, and the scratchy pens in the offices of the Native Commissioners are the branding irons which leave scars for life.

(FSE, p. 80)

Elias's initial acquisition of the pass provides a specific instance of the humiliation caused by this ritual and bondage: since the officials do not believe that he is seventeen, they force him to take off his trousers and, judging by his genitals, they peg his age at twenty. This degradation seems to haunt Elias for the rest of his life.

This kind of debasement is a generally effective means of controlling the black psyche—it is a part of the strategy of dehumanizing the African: in this novel the worst insult that whites hurl at a native is to call him a “thing.” However, the apartheid regime tries to control the Africans in a more thorough and doctrinal manner through their education: a colored teacher complains to Beukes, the protagonist, about being forced to teach his students that the present order in South Africa is pre-ordained, that it is useless, even sinful, to struggle against it, that the Boer War was a holy crusade, that the theory of evolution is a heresy, and that modern psychology is a cardinal sin (FSE, p. 86). However, instead of reading such propaganda, the students are surreptitiously studying theories of guerrilla warfare. Caught between manichean oppositions, the students receive a paltry education.

When the South African government's political control over the non-white population became absolute during the sixties and when all the overt parliamentary and civil channels for black political aspirations were systematically blocked, the African had no choice but to develop a clandestine opposition that would attempt to depose the government by force. This shift to covert political and military activity is echoed in this novel by Elias's gradual involvement in the underground after he is dismissed from his job for participation in a strike, and by Issac's similar change in allegiance after he witnesses the indiscriminate whipping of blacks during the course of a national strike. An important landmark in this shift was the Sharpeville massacre, which La Guma depicts, once again in a stylized manner, as a confrontation between rather festive Africans who have gathered simply to return their passbooks and the highly suspicious and nervous police who see the gathering as part of a diabolical plot and consequently kill indiscriminately. The absence of political rights for nonwhites culminates in the ability of the police to imprison a man indefinitely on mere suspicion of crime or political activity. La Guma represents this epitome of political deprivation through Elias's arrest and torture, which begins with a security agent urinating on his face and progresses through severe beatings that culminate in the application of electric shock to his legs and genitals.

La Guma thus presents a highly charged manichean political situation: the exploitation and humiliation suffered by the Africans arouse in them a violent hatred which the narrator depicts through Elias's repeated fantasies of killing his oppressors and through Issac's constant doodling of guns on scraps of paper. Yet once more La Guma eschews a romantic view of black rebellion by showing that Beukes's political motives are mixed and his commitment somewhat uncertain: Beukes perseveres because “… sometimes … he understood why, often because there was nothing else to do” (FSE, p. 49). Beukes's rebellion due to the lack of an alternative not only stresses the realism of a reluctant uprising but also represents a political transformation of the fatalism that characterized A Walk in the Night. Whereas Michael Adonis has no alternative but the acceptance of his socio-political predicament, Beukes has no choice but to rebel against apartheid society: what was earlier viewed as a quasiontological situation is now understood as a political necessity to fight. Thus the goal of the underground movement is now clearly stated in the pamphlets that Beukes is distributing.

The vast bulk of the novel is dedicated to the depiction of how Beukes as well as Elias and Issac play their parts in this embryonic revolution. Beukes's function, distributing pamphlets to sub-agents, recruiting new members for the movement, and smuggling some volunteers out of the country for guerrilla training, provides the plot and the drama of the novel. In order to avoid the vigilance of the security police, he is constantly on the move—changing his name, shunning his own home, traveling only at night whenever possible, and sleeping at different people's houses. When we first see Beukes, he has just spent two nights in a gully because he has been unable to use the house of a fearful friend. He then continues, with the help of a sympathetic taxi-driver, to his next resting place, and the next day he begins to distribute the leaflets, first visiting a school teacher, then an Indian garment worker, and finally arriving at his last contact, Issac, only to find that the latter is absent because the security police are chasing him. The day after the pamphlets have been distributed to the public, Beukes meets Elias in the house of an unknown person to discuss the transportation of some guerrilla volunteers. In the ensuing police raid Elias is captured, and subsequently tortured to death, while Beukes manages to escape with a flesh wound. He successfully takes a chance in being treated by a colored doctor, who turns out to be sympathetic to the underground, and then proceeds to his next rendezvous, with the driver who will smuggle recruits to the north, and discovers delightfully that one of the volunteers is his good friend Issac. The novel ends with Issac leaving the country and Beukes returning to his precarious work.

The narrative of these seven or eight days is so discontinuous that it matches perfectly the abnormality, marginality, and precariousness of the protagonists' experiences. The abnormality of Beukes's life can be measured by his sytematic avoidance of his home: during the course of the narrative he can only think with a mixture of anxiety and pleasure about his wife and child, but he can never see them because he is afraid that the security police might be waiting outside his home or that he might lead them to his family, which exists in the narrative only as a poignant absence. His constant fear is another index of his marginality: he is almost paranoid about footsteps in corridors and people whom he mistakes for security police; he makes elaborate detours to avoid any policemen and always attempts to become anonymous by mixing with crowds; and he moves about at night and hugs the shadows of buildings in the daytime whenever possible. The nature of Beukes's work prevents him from enjoying most of the normal aspects of his life and distorts his personality: it leads to an emptiness, a “hollowness of abandonment” (FSE, p. 147), that renders him as marginal as Michael Adonis. He is sustained by the belief in his struggle, but the uncertainty and remoteness of the goal are disheartening. La Guma reveals the oppressive weight of this marginality through the reaction of Issac who, after successfully evading arrest by the security police, realizes that he can no longer function effectively in the underground since his identity is known. His choices are now simple: he must fight openly, within or from outside the country, or he must succumb to arrest, torture, and death. Thus the freedom from the secretiveness and marginality of the underground produces a feeling of elation and liberty in him.

Yet La Guma's portrayal of the burdens of marginality is profoundly ironic. Issac, like all of La Guma's other non-white characters, resents being regarded as an object, a “thing”: he wishes to be treated as a subject. But like Beukes, once he joins the underground he avoids recognition since anonymity is so important to his work. Thus the desire to be recognized as a subject will never be fulfilled so long as the manichean doctrine of apartheid is not entirely discarded. The irony of this position is that he can only overcome involuntary marginality, to which he is consigned by the political system, by choosing another form necessitated by the clandestine nature of his struggle. By opting for voluntary marginality the oppressed South African finds a form of liberation in the recognition of his own imprisonment.

In this novel the South African (colonialist) society and the underground movement become locked in a fatal manichean struggle. The apartheid regime, by destroying the old African communities, by forcefully dissolving any new groups that black individuals attempt to form (trade unions, political parties, etc.), by prohibiting integration into white society, and by preaching a doctrine of superiority and inferiority, completely atomizes black society and renders the individual radically marginal. Beukes and his friends attempt to counter this destructive control by forming a community the sole purpose of which is the violent overthrow of its oppressor and the survival of which is entirely dependent on its success in doing so. In the Fog of the Seasons' End, then, marks the apogee of the manichean struggle in colonial society. However, in the process of depicting this struggle, La Guma poignantly portrays the painful growth of a precarious community.

As we have already seen, the characters pay a high price in personal marginality and the sacrifice of normal family life for the generation of this new community. Elias has no family, Issac leaves his parents and siblings behind when he goes off for guerrilla training, and Beukes pines for his wife and child whom he dares not contact. Thus a new organization can be formed only at the expense of human warmth and companionship. In addition to these sacrifices, membership in the underground community confers its own rewards and exacts its own price. The mutual care, concern, and respect within the group are a marked departure from the sense of victimization and abandonment experienced by La Guma's previous characters. Within this ambience the individual is perceived by others as a dignified subject for the first time: Issac breaks his initial appointment with Beukes in order not to lead the police to his friend; Beukes is overjoyed to see at the end of the novel that Issac has avoided arrest; and during the police raid Elias makes sure that Beukes escapes even if he himself is captured. Thus the individual begins to sacrifice himself for other members of the community. When Elias is being tortured, Beukes's fate depends entirely on Elias's courage and perseverance. This burden of responsibility for others weighs heavily on both men, for many lives depend on them, and they often wonder about their ability to withhold information under torture. As Beukes clearly realizes, his work obliges him to trust his life to those above and below him in the underground hierarchy, yet he can never be sure that one of them is not an agent of the security police. Thus the burden of responsibility for others is balanced by an absolute, radical dependence on others, both of which create a community that is an understandably distorted version of the obligations and supports of a normal society and that lifts the individual out of his status as a helpless object of apartheid society.

The liberation of the individual-as-subject, his acceptance of full responsibility for his and the community's destiny, results in a more constructive awareness and deliberate use of his past and a more definite projection of values and goals into the future. Elias's personal past, like that of most of La Guma's characters, is full of poverty, degradation, sickness, and bitterness. Yet because he has grown up in the countryside he has been exposed through folklore and myth to the oral history of his ancestors who fought against the initial Afrikaner and British invaders. He deliberately uses his image of their dignified and heroic challenge to the colonizers in order to sustain his moral strength while being tortured by the security police. Thus for the first time La Guma uses the African past, which is more powerful because it is a mythic past, to sustain a character's dignity and belief in his present task and the future community. La Guma similarly employs children to create a sense of posterity that will inherit the real benefits of the present sacrifice and struggle. In spite of both his family's and his own dangerous predicament, Beukes is happy that he has had a child, for the child's potential freedom sustains Beukes's beliefs and endeavors in the present. The school children who are reading manuals of guerrilla warfare provide a more definite link to future continuation of the struggle. The novel ends as Beukes, after waving to Issac and two younger men leaving for guerrilla training, turns to “the children [who] had gathered in the sunlit yard” (FSE, p. 181). In this novel the desire to overthrow the South African government, to create a new community, and to accept the responsibility for one's life leads to a new awareness of and participation in one's own history. Political awareness and struggle allow the characters to become agents of their history. Past, present, and future are understood and defined in terms of the single most important imperative—the African control of African destiny and culture.

In the Fog of the Seasons' End is a very tense novel finely balanced on the equilibrium of its contradictions and tensions produced by the opposition of social and personal forces. The novel juxtaposes different scenes from the lives of the three main protagonists, contrasting past happiness with present anxiety, past humiliation with present hatred, scenes of torture with reminiscences of love, the lives of frivolous people with those of the dedicated. It balances captivity and torture against freedom and elation, hate against love, and fear against hope; it sacrifices one form of community for another, the family for the underground, one desire for another; it pits the continued Afrikaner domination, subjugation, and enslavement of Africans against the black people's attempt to depose the apartheid government; it locks the whites and blacks in a fatal manichean struggle without room for compromise; and it mythologizes the African past for present consumption and then sacrifices the present for a future freedom. The presentation of these tensions and contradictions through swift juxtapositions and flashbacks is perfectly consonant with the discontinuous experience of the characters which, as Beukes says, is like “being on a ferris wheel” (FSE, p. 174).

From a purely formal viewpoint the novel initially appears to be circular. It opens with a prologue describing the torture of Elias by the secret police, and after a series of flashbacks that constitute its bulk the novel ends with two chapters that are located on the same temporal plane as the prologue—the penultimate one depicts the continued torture of Elias and the final one shows Beukes dispatching volunteers for guerrilla training. Thus the “real” present of the beginning and end brackets the immediate past consisting of the activities that lead to the real present. Both these temporal planes are in turn irregularly punctuated by retrospections of varied lengths that take us into the distant past of the major characters. The discontinuity created by these temporal juxtapositions is enhanced by scenic, sociological contrasts such as the one between Elias's torture, on the one hand, and the depiction of a black nanny worrying about the possible diaper-rash of her white charge, on the other hand. Finally, the disjunctive quality of the novel is intensified by the manner in which various minor characters connected with the guerrilla cell are presented: in the present they are portrayed with striking specificity and concreteness, but in keeping with the secrecy of clandestine guerrilla contacts their pasts are allowed to remain completely unknown and their futures are left as intriguing loose ends. All these formal devices produce not a circular but a helical novel, the apparent circularity of which is, on another plane, a perfectly straight line. The formal characteristics of the novel, then, accurately reflect the lives of the guerrillas, who deliberately espouse marginality, discontinuity, and indirectness in order singularly and coherently to pursue and reach their goal in the shortest possible time under the given circumstances.

These formal characteristics not only reflect the mundane, tactical experiences of the guerrillas but also reveal the development of a more profound ontological understanding. When Elias is being tortured he is aware that because of the nature of his clandestine activity he is, and always has been, poised on the edge of extinction. This clear perception of death, of one's radical finitude, leads the guerrilla to a certain anxiety about his being and potentiality. While he firmly dedicates himself to a definite goal in life (the violent overthrow of the apartheid system), he is aware that the rest of his life will remain an open-ended existential struggle, that the concrete potentiality of the self will only manifest itself through praxis. Thus, for instance, Elias and Beukes often wonder how they will behave under torture, whether or not they will betray the cell. While characterization reveals these insights, the temporal structure of the novel, that is, the series of retrospections embedded in and often provoked by the characters' present concerns, shows that for them history, the scrutiny of their past, is also a product of personal political praxis. Whereas in the first two novels accidents (historical contingencies) are oppressive because they lead not to the actualization of potentialities but to an attenuation of control, in the next two novels the characters arrive at moments for political action by understanding past oppressions and contingencies, and in turn they later incorporate these moments into an articulate awareness of history. It is because of this comprehension of the unending, cyclical nature of political struggle and their own history that the guerrillas now project themselves with anxiety and care into the future.

This projection, accompanied by a transformation of the individual from seriality to group consciousness, is entirely free from egocentric motives. Instead of the oppressor-victim-oppressor transferences that characterize serial relations, we have in this novel a liberation of the individual through the group: since the freedom of the individual is now dependent on and bound with the freedom of other cell members, each person gives through the group the power, recognition, respect, and freedom that he receives through the same group. Through this form of rebounding reciprocity the self recognizes its freedom in the communal political action in which it has become involved. Thus freedom is defined as responsibility and dependence, while authentic being emerges as being-for-the-other.

This specification of self defines the essential nature of La Guma's realism. For Georg Lukács a realistic novel is one which manifests in its detail and structure an ontological, dialectical conflict between self-as-an-individual and self-as-a-social-being.⁷In the Fog of the Seasons' End allows us to extend this definition because it transcends the dialectical conflict: in this novel the self-as-an-individual discovers his being in his existence for others, in his existence as a social-being. Thus the realism of this novel is simultaneously manifested in its mimetic accuracy, in its representation of the dialectical conflict, and most significantly in its revelation of authentic being through a transcendence of the dialectical conflict. And the transcendence is the product of a meditation, an exercise in phenomenological reduction, that also determines the form of the novel. The pain, torture, and imminent presence of death at the beginning and end of the novel bracket out the possibilities of the mundane, manichean world and permit a consideration of the significance of the immediate and distant past and of the authentic self and its concrete possibilities. In direct opposition to his naturalism, which reflects the shrinking of human potentiality and the stance of the impotent, alienated spectator, La Guma's realism represents the expansion of potentiality and the effects of action. Just as the guerrilla, taking his destiny into his own hands, manipulates his socio-political environment, so does the author reveal meaning in this novel through the manipulation of narrative events rather than a complete reliance on description. It is significant that the only vestiges of naturalism in In the Fog of the Seasons' End are the two stylized passages describing the ritual of obtaining the pass card and the Sharpeville massacre of Africans protesting against the pass; that is, both passages deal with the system that is used to impose the serialized, quasi-ontological racial status on the African. Both these descriptions represent the viewpoint of the hypothetical African, of the serialized, oppressed everyman. The fact that the rest of the novel consists of manipulation of the narrative about specific individuals implies that La Guma now sees seriality and its representation, naturalism, as realms from which the individual has emerged. In contrast to the predominantly indicative mood of his naturalistic fiction this novel evidences the ascendance of a modified imperative mood: although the imperative still consists of commitment to political action, it is modulated by a constant interrogative meditation about the nature of freedom, community, and the self. Politicization, then, results in an increasing awareness and transcendence of the limitation of the original quasi-ontological status.

This ability of La Guma's protagonist to take control of his own destiny represents a dramatic coming-to-consciousness not only of the social conditions in South Africa but also of the only way out of those oppressive circumstances. Initially deprived of all sociopolitical control over his own life, the black South African is confined to the extremely narrow existence of an “object” to be used for the benefit of the apartheid regime: he is relegated to the realm of abject marginality. Within these narrow limits he has only one choice: either he can acquiesce in his treatment as a marginal object or he can deliberately choose to become a marginal subject as Beukes does. His choice of the latter implies that freedom for the oppressed man lies in his recognition of his own marginality, in his awareness of his social condition. Thus the ideological function of La Guma's novel is reflexive: it brings to consciousness that absolutely necessary condition for the liberation of the black South African—his coming-to-consciousness. However, La Guma's latest novel, Time of the Butcherbird, too intent upon advocating armed rebellion, allows the interrogative meditation to be entirely overwhelmed by the imperative mood. Althought it movingly portrays the rural black South African's plight and the inevitable death of innocent people caught in an embryonic war, it is guided by and appeals primarily to the oppressed South African's desire for personal vengeance. Such a desire is perfectly understandable, and it may have important political and military functions, but it tends to displace entirely the more complex meditations and insights of the previous novel. As a consequence, the ideological function of Time of the Butcherbird becomes simpler: it straightforwardly advocates and valorizes heroic participation in an armed war.

That marginality and political awareness should play such significant roles in the content, structure, and direction of La Guma's fiction is not at all surprising. In a society founded on massive political disfranchisement political liberation will inevitably become the primary preoccupation of practical life and literary endeavor: in a state where the police, without the slightest concern for your “feelings,” can break into your bedroom at will in order to check the skin color of your lover, it must be virtually impossible to write novels about the passionate power of love or the delicacies of refined human sensibilities. As Nadine Gordimer repeatedly points out in her fiction, in such an ambience personal passion and the very act of making love are fraught with significant political implications.⁸ Clearly, for La Guma and his intended audience the political novel is more relevant and important because in a manichean society that constantly lives in a state of siege the “horizons” of authentic being are more readily revealed through political action and its contemplation than through the consideration of personal relations in a socio-political vacuum. In this atmosphere La Guma's fiction-as-socio-political-praxis, with its constant preoccupation with political reality and the various forms of marginality, leads to an awareness of history, furnishes direction and specific goals, reveals the authenticity of previously alienated being, and allows the individual once more to control his destiny.

Notes

1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 41. For a detailed psychological study of this Manicheanism see Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

2. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 93.

3. D. T. Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

4. The following biographical information about Alex La Guma is derived from Brian Bunting's introduction to And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas Publisher, 1964). Because of the nature of his work for the South African liberation movements, no substantial information about La Guma is available since this introduction.

5. Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas Publisher, 1964), The Stone Country (Berlin: Seven Seas Publisher, 1967), In the Fog of the Seasons' End (New York: The Third Press, 1973), and Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979). All further references to these novels will be abbreviated as AWTN, AATC, TSC, FSE, and TB respectively and incorporated in the text.

6. For a comprehensive definition of seriality see Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectic Reason (London: NLB, 1976), p. 253-69. For an elaboration of his theories of group formation and “rebounding reciprocity” that are used in this essay, see pp. 374-404.

7. See Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 75.

8. This is implied in all of Nadine Gordimer's novels, but it is most explicitly present in The Lying Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), Occasion for Loving (New York: The Viking Press, 1960), The Late Bourgeois World (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), and Burger's Daughter (New York: The Viking Press, 1979).