SOURCE: Booker, M. Keith. “Alex La Guma: In the Fog of the Seasons' End.” In The African Novel in English: An Introduction, pp. 155-70. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Booker views In the Fog of the Seasons' End as a turning point in La Guma's revolutionary writing.]

The political commitment central to all of La Guma's work is not unusual in African literature, but In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972), in its elaboration of the possibilities for armed resistance to apartheid, represents a step toward the advocacy of violent revolution that is distinctive in African literature and a significant turning point in La Guma's career. The book focuses on the activities of a secret underground organization dedicated to the destruction of apartheid in South Africa. Its two principal protagonists are the “coloured” operative Beukes, who gives up a happy personal life to devote himself to revolutionary activity, and the black organizer Elias Tekwane, who is captured by the South African police, tortured, and beaten to death. La Guma refuses to romanticize revolutionary activity, showing starkly the sacrifices that must be made in the interest of a cause whose ultimate success is by no means certain. Tekwane's fate is gruesome; Beukes's work is more tedious than glamorous, although he is forced to endure extreme physical and mental hardship in the course of his day-to-day political activities. At the same time, In the Fog of the Seasons' End does contain a strong utopian dimension. During his torture, Tekwane refuses to reveal any information the police can use against the movement. Meanwhile, partially because of Tekwane's heroic silence, Beukes escapes from the police and succeeds in smuggling three other revolutionaries out of South Africa for military training for a possible all-out war against apartheid.

Most of the events in In the Fog of the Seasons' End involve the Beuke's efforts to distribute antipartheid pamphlets and otherwise work against the system while avoiding the South African secret police. In the course of these activities, Beukes frequently recalls earlier happy times spent with his wife Frances, though Beukes has not seen Frances or their young child since he was forced underground. Beukes sometimes longs simply to lead a normal, peaceful life with his family, apart from the dangerous world of revolutionary politics, but he also knows that as a coloured South African, he can never do so. He is willing to sacrifice his personal life for the movement because he knows that the destruction of apartheid is crucial to any hope he and his family might have of living a life free of oppression and humiliation.

If it is through Beukes that La Guma gives us a glimpse of the daily lives of those who worked in the underground resistance to apartheid, it is through the story of Tekwane that La Guma presents the brutal realities that made such resistance necessary. We are first introduced to Tekwane in Chapter 6, which briefly summarizes his childhood, including the death of his father in a mining accident. This chapter also outlines Tekwane's growing awareness of the racism of his society and of the intense regimentation of the lives of nonwhites in South Africa. They live their lives in a servitude whose bonds are “entangled chains of infinite regulations, its rivets are driven in with rubber stamps, and scratchy pens in the offices of the Native Commissioners are like branding irons which leave scars for life” (p. 80). Central to this bureaucratic nightmare is the system of government passes, which all adult nonwhite South Africans must carry when they travel outside their home areas. In Chapter 12, we see the hardships experienced by Tekwane, now in his forties and living in a squalid, prison-like single-man's barracks in a black “location.” There, he recalls an earlier humiliating experience when he applied for a pass to travel from his home to the city, where he wanted to work to help feed his family and alleviate the labor shortage brought about by World War II. To receive the pass, the young Tekwane had to undergo a humiliating interrogation in which a white official, aided by a black clerk, determined Tekwane's age by examining his genitals. He was assigned the age of twenty, though he was actually seventeen. This modification of Tekwane's age is only another of the many ways in which the lives of nonwhite South Africans were controlled and manipulated under apartheid. Tekwane's first name, for example, is not really Elias, but the African name of his great grandfather.¹ The biblical name Elias was given to him by a white missionary who found the African name too difficult to pronounce.

The absurdity (and inhumanity) of the pass system is highlighted by La Guma in a scene in Chapter 6 where an abusive South African policeman interrogates a nonwhite South African. The man attempts to be cooperative, but he finds that no matter how hard he tries, he can never fully please his interrogator. After an almost endless series of questions, the policeman concludes the interview with a brutal reminder of the realities of life under apartheid:

If these things are not followed with care, then into the prison with you or all permits cancelled so that you cease to exist. You will be nothing, nobody, in fact you will be decreated. You … you will be as nothing, perhaps even less than nothing.

(p. 82)

The man interrogated in this scene might be Tekwane, but he is not specifically identified, suggesting that nonwhites were never viewed as individuals under apartheid but were seen merely as members of a racial group. La Guma achieves a similar effect by beginning his book with a prologue that describes the brutal torture/interrogation of an unnamed black prisoner by the South African police. It is only in chapter 17, nearly at the end of the book, that we return to this scene, with the prisoner now identified as Tekwane. This method of presentation makes it clear that Tekwane's case is not unique and that his experience, however horrifying, is that of many nonwhites in South Africa. JanMohamed identifies this aspect of La Guma's fiction as crucially important:

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” (devil), as an interchangeable unit of a homogeneous group.

(JanMohamed 1983, 228)

This motif in La Guma's work functions largely as a commentary on the racism of South African society under apartheid. On the other hand, from La Guma's Marxist point of view, this reduction of individuals to interchangeable things is a particularly brutal and overt example of the ways in which individuals are inevitably reduced to the status of commodities under capitalism. Tekwane, the most theoretically sophisticated of the major characters in In the Fog of the Seasons' End, is perfectly well aware that there is more than racism at stake in apartheid. There is also a strong economic motivation behind the system. Tekwane thus realizes as he watches a crowd of blacks standing outside a government labor bureau hoping to be assigned menial jobs, that these men, like himself, are oppressed at least as much because of their class as their skin color. “We are not only humbled as Blacks,” he thinks to himself, “but also as workers; our blackness is only a pretext” (p. 131).

Tekwane (like La Guma) believes that South African workers must band together to oppose their exploitation by their rich bosses. Indeed, La Guma is careful to make the revolutionary movement in In the Fog of the Seasons' End multiracial, emphasizing that its members belong to a common class rather than a common race and that their ultimate struggle is against the class structure of capitalism, of which apartheid is but a particularly perverse and brutal form.² La Guma thus emphasizes the need for the development of a strong proletarian class consciousness, that is, of a sense of solidarity and common interest among workers of whatever race. In this sense, La Guma's work recalls that of Frantz Fanon, who insists that any genuine liberation from the brutal racial inequities of colonialism (of which apartheid is an extension) requires a complete transformation not simply of racial power structures, but of class structure. As JanMohamed puts it, the “major imperative” of La Guma's fiction is a search for viable, nonexploitative communities that will allow their members to escape the oppression they have experienced under apartheid, and JanMohamed identifies the “mutual care, concern, and respect” of the members of the underground movement in In the Fog of the Seasons' End as an important example of such a community (JanMohamed 1983, 255). The movement, in short, represents an important step toward the development of a viable proletarian class consciousness that can lead to a class-based revolution.

In this sense, La Guma's fiction is extremely complex. It is, in fact, what Marxist thinkers refer to as dialectical. That is, it draws its conclusions only after a careful delineation and consideration of opposing alternatives. On the one hand, nonwhite South Africans are brutalized and dehumanized by a system that treats them as members of a racial group rather than as individuals. On the other hand, their only hope for emancipation lies in their ability to act not as individuals, but as members of a group. There is, however, no contradiction in this position. For one thing, the first kind of group involves race, while the second involves class; and class, in the Marxist vision, is a temporary category that will cease to exist after the successful establishment of socialism. For another, racism involves a genuine obliteration of individuality and humanity, while class solidarity creates a nurturing social context within which the individual can thrive and grow, reaching his or her own potential as a human being. As Emmanuel Ngara notes, La Guma's characters “tend to be ‘types’ rather than individuals” (Ngara 1985, 92). But literary characters are never literally individuals: they are textual constructs with specific narrative functions. And the function of the “types” portrayed by La Guma is to convey the large historical forces that impinge upon individuals in the real world, much in the mode praised by the Hungarian Marxist theorist George Lukács.

As many Marxist critics have pointed out, the individualistic rhetoric of Western bourgeois ideology is merely a disguise for the thorough subjection of the individual through the operation of complex ideological practices. Central to this idea is the Marxist notion that individuals exist as human beings only within a certain social context in which they become who they are through interaction with others. As a result, individuals assume their identities in ways that are greatly determined by their context. As Marx puts it in a famous passage in The German Ideology, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (Marx and Engels 1978, 155). Socialism would presumably provide a context in which individuals could develop freely according to their own desires and abilities. Capitalism, on the other hand, is based on economic competition that inevitably leads to conflict between individuals. It requires that individuals have enough sense of individualism to compete in a free market and thus make the economy function, but it also requires that this surface individualism be supported by a fundamental conformism that leads each individual to participate unquestioningly in a system that is by and large not to his or her advantage. Under apartheid, as In the Fog of the Seasons' End graphically shows, the kind of identities available to individuals were especially limited. In this sense, one of the most useful Marxist concepts for understanding La Guma's work is Louis Althusser's notion of “interpellation,” or the “hailing of the subject”—the process whereby powerful forces (working in the interest of the prevailing ideology of a given society) form individuals as subjects. For Althusser, we do not form our attitudes so much as they form us, and “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects” (Althusser 1971, 171).

At stake in the notion of interpellation are the complex and subtle ways through which capitalist society attempts to convince the subordinated classes that the ideas of the ruling (bourgeois) class are right and natural, thus causing the working classes to accept their domination and exploitation willingly. Here, Althusser is influenced by the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the European bourgeoisie gained and maintained their power through a complex of political and cultural practices that convinced the more numerous “subaltern” classes to accede willingly to bourgeois authority as natural and proper. The effectiveness of this technique of power, which Gramsci terms “hegemony,” resides principally in the ability of the bourgeoisie to obtain the

“spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.

(Gramsci 1971, 12)

If absolutely necessary, this consensual obedience can be supplemented by “the apparatus of state coercive power,” that is, by institutions such as the police and the army, which use physical force to impose obedience “on those groups who do not ‘consent’ either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed” (p. 12).

Hegemony is a complex and plural strategy that is by definition never fully successful, making it necessary to keep the police and the military in the background in case of emergency. Such emergencies seldom occur in the metropolitan centers of Europe, but they were more frequent in the colonies, where hegemonic practices of power were always supplemented by brute force, theatrical display, and other techniques held over from the era of feudal-aristocratic rule in Europe. Despite complex cultural interchanges and the Europeanization of certain members of the indigenous elite, most colonial peoples would never mistake the position and attitudes of the British bourgeoisie for their own because of the radical racial and cultural duality of the colonial situation. To put it in Althusserian terms, interpellation occurs when the individual subject is created in the image of official ideology, not when that ideology proclaims the subject an alien (and racially inferior) “other.”

Frantz Fanon notes that in a colonial situation, official power depends far more on physical violence than psychological persuasion (Fanon 1968, 38). In this sense, as in many others, the apartheid system closely resembled the earlier colonial systems in Africa, and In the Fog of the Seasons' End graphically demonstrates the reliance on physical violence and other coercive practices used by official power in South Africa. Perhaps the most vivid of these demonstrations is La Guma's detailed description of the ruthless torture/murder of Tekwane at the hands of the South African secret police. This murder occurs behind the closed doors of a prison, but La Guma also shows that the authorities are not above committing such atrocities in plain view. In Chapter 9, for example, he describes a brutal and deadly police assault on a peaceful crowd of demonstrators. This description gains power from the fact that it is obviously rooted in the 1960 Sharpeville massacre and other similar events in South African history. At the same time, the incident is recounted in a generalized, rather allegorical fashion that makes it clear that such atrocities were not aberrations in apartheid South Africa, but were the fabric of everyday life. Much as the torture of Tekwane is first described as the experience of an unnamed South African, the victims killed in this attack are identified by designations such as the Washerwoman, the Child, and the Bicycle Messenger. These “typical” names make it clear that in South Africa any nonwhite citizen was in danger at any time of becoming a victim of violence at the hands of a state apparatus that did not stop to make fine distinctions between individuals.

Gramsci's work reminds us that the same might be said for citizens of western Europe and North America, and indeed there are historical instances of police violence against peaceful political demonstrators in such places. But it clear that the level and frequency of such violence were far higher in an apartheid South Africa that continued to rely more on traditional colonial techniques of power than on the more subtle methods of Western industrial countries. La Guma responds to the overt brutality and physical violence of apartheid with a direct call to militant action. This is not to say, however, that La Guma pays no attention to the ideological and cultural practices that were long used to shore up the system of apartheid. In particular, La Guma clearly indicates that the popular culture of global capitalism (largely American in origin) helped create a mind-set in South Africa that perpetuated apartheid. For one thing, La Guma suggests that the images of violence so central to Western popular culture created a decadent attitude that made the brutalities of apartheid seem more thinkable and less monstrous. One motif that runs through the entire book involves newspaper reports of a sensational murder case: an Afrikaner woman in a country town murdered her abusive husband by gradually poisoning him until he was so weak that she was able to overpower and strangle him. On one level, this murder simply illustrates the cruelty and violence that is central to South African society. On another level, it suggests the possibility of successful resistance to oppression because the woman was eventually able to overpower her stronger husband through perseverance and determined effort. But also important are the prominence the media gives to the case and the fascination it elicits from the populace, which treats it like an event from a soap opera. Attuned to violence through the images conveyed to them by popular culture, most people are not horrified by the story, but merely entertained by it.

Beukes himself sometimes feels that his cloak-and-dagger existence is like something from a film (p. 25). At the same time, he realizes that this film-like nature is an aberration brought about by the unnatural system of apartheid. But other South Africans are not as adept at seeing beyond the complex entanglement of fiction and reality that characterizes their society. This motif is most obvious in the portrayal of Beukes's friend, Tommy, a decent young man who has little interest in political activism, largely because he is too immersed in the escapist world of popular culture. Tommy responds to almost every event in his life by referring to the images and ideas conveyed by (mostly American) film and popular music. Tommy, in short, retreats into the escapist world of popular culture to avoid dealing with the cruel world of reality in South Africa. As the narrator puts it (filtered through Beukes's consciousness), reality for Tommy “could be shut out by the blare of dance-bands and the voices of crooners. From this cocoon he emerged only to find the means of subsistence, food and drink. Politics meant nothing to him” (p. 53).

What in the West passes for “high” art (that is, art intended for consumption by the ruling classes rather than the working classes) also comes in for criticism in In the Fog of the Seasons' End. Realizing that Tommy knows nothing about classical music despite his fascination with Western culture, Beukes remarks, “There's things poor people just don't get to hear” (p. 57). Meanwhile, at one point the South African authorities attempt to demonstrate their enlightened attitude by proposing (in the manner of Marie Antoinette's famous “Let them eat cake”) to allow nonwhites occasional access to a new opera house, though they will in fact be unlikely to be able to afford to go there. Beukes dismisses the plan as a ruse, and Elias rejects it as well. Access to an opera house is of very little use to a population that is starving to death: “What a peculiar way of thinking they have,” he tells Beukes. “Opera house and no bread” (p. 131).

Indeed, for South Africa's oppressed majority, access to this opera house may not only be of little use, but may also contribute to the problem by creating a diversion from the real problems of their society. This suggestion that the niceties of Western bourgeois aesthetics are irrelevant or even harmful in the crisis context of apartheid South Africa can be read as an allegorization of La Guma's literary project, which dispenses with common Western expectations that art will present pleasant and beautiful images disengaged from the world of politics. Decades of New Critical dominance in American literature studies produced a vision of literature as a realm divorced from history and politics, a vision that is only now beginning to be challenged by newer trends in American criticism. Indeed, as Peter Bürger (1984) has shown, Western notions of the aesthetic inherently tend toward a vision of art as separate from the social world—and as therefore unable to contribute to change in that world. Moreover, Western literature has long been particularly opposed to revolutionary politics. One need only consider the novels of Charles Dickens, sometimes seen as a literary champion of the poor and the downtrodden, to see the central element of horror of revolution that runs through Western literature. In works such as Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens depicts popular rebellions in which the participants are shown as crazed and vicious members of lawless mobs.

Most of our modern Western notions of literary aesthetics arose in the nineteenth century, when literature was one of the central tools used by a newly dominant bourgeois class to explain and justify their rise to power in Europe. In the Fog of the Seasons' End, however, seeks not to rationalize a revolution from the recent past, but to promote revolution in the future. The book has a fundamentally different purpose from that of most Western literature and therefore necessarily departs in significant ways from Western aesthetic values. Critics such as Adrian Roscoe, who regrets the book's lack of a “rich poetic quality” (Roscoe 1977, 255), or David Rabkin (1973), who laments the book's lack of richly subjective characters, may thus be missing the point, though it should also be said that critics such as Balutansky, who praises the book's effective use of formal techniques, may be diverting attention from La Guma's central intention as well (Balutansky 1990).³ Indeed, critics such as Leonard Kibera (1976) and Cecil Abrahams (1985), censured by Balutansky for limiting their analyses to the “scope of La Guma's political concerns,” may actually come the closest to doing justice to the book (Balutansky 1990, 82).

Of course, this is not to say that aesthetic and formal concerns are irrelevant to La Guma's project in In the Fog of the Seasons' End. For example, JanMohamed comments that the fragmented formal structure of the book helps convey the chaotic nature of life for guerrillas involved in revolutionary activity (JanMohamed 1983, 257).⁴ It is important, however, to recognize that La Guma's use of formal techniques is intended not to set his work apart from the world of politics and history, but to effect a more intense engagement with that world. In short, La Guma's work, like all literature, depends on a certain aesthetic dimension for its effects, but the aesthetics of the book differ significantly from those of Western bourgeois literature. The particular urgency of the political message of In the Fog of the Seasons' End marks it as an African—and especially as a South African—text. Indeed, African revolutionary writers such as Ngugi and Sembène are clearly La Guma's closest literary comrades. Nevertheless, it is valuable for us as Western readers to realize that La Guma's work has important European antecedents as well. Many of these are Russians, whose marginality to European history may have appealed to La Guma. But La Guma's most important Russian influence, Maxim Gorky, is regarded worldwide as one of the great figures of socially-engaged literature, and leftist writers all over the world have identified Gorky as an important model.⁵ This mutual interest in Gorky suggests that readers who wish to find Western analogues to La Guma's fiction should search for them not in the canonical “great tradition” of Western bourgeois literature, but in the works of American proletarian writers such as Mike Gold and Jack Conroy, or British socialist writers such as Robert Tressell and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

These writers' works, like La Guma's, are fundamentally opposed to a capitalist system that includes bourgeois literature and aesthetics. However, because of the hegemonic nature of bourgeois power in Europe and America, leftist fiction there is generally oriented toward a deconstruction of ideological practices of manipulation rather than a call for violent revolution. Comparing In the Fog of the Seasons' End to Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1955, first published in 1914), perhaps the most important modern novel in the British socialist tradition, Robert Green correctly notes that the emphasis on direct political action in La Guma's book differs substantially from the more theoretical and abstract focus of Tressell's book (Green 1979, 88-89). This difference, no doubt, can be attributed to the greater social stability of England relative to a highly volatile South Africa. In South Africa, apartheid adds urgency to political action, and the actual existence of organized armed resistance adds concreteness to the literary theme of revolution by making revolution a genuine historical possibility. Tressell's book focuses on the ideological practices through which the British ruling classes secure the willing obedience of the working classes by convincing them to accept the rightness and naturalness of a capitalist system that leads to fabulous wealth for an elite few and dismal poverty for most workers. Tressell's title refers to the way in which the British working classes, ragged trousers and all, ignore their miserable living and working conditions to labor generously for the benefit of their rich bosses. He attempts to disrupt this process by showing his readers the ways in which British workers are exploited by their capitalist bosses.⁶ The system of apartheid in South Africa, despite its fundamentally economic underpinnings, was far less subtle than the capitalist system in England, and few nonwhites in South Africa needed to be convinced that the system was not to their advantage. La Guma can thus dispense with the arguments for an alternative system that are central to Tressell's book. Instead, his task is to exhort the South African populace to take action against a system they already realize is brutally unjust.

Both Tressell and La Guma, in short, employ literary strategies that are designed to counter the specific techniques through which the systems they criticize maintain their power.⁷ Tressell's book works primarily at the level of logical argument and persuasion, like the hegemonic practices of capitalist power in England and other industrialized Western countries. In the Fog of the Seasons' End, on the other hand, responds to an emergency situation by urging immediate violent opposition to apartheid. However, La Guma's book exceeds those of writers such as Tressell and Gold not only in its negative depiction of the violent workings of official power, but also in its positive suggestion of the possibilities of opposition. Indeed, one of the implications of La Guma's work is that the brutalities of apartheid arise largely out of a sense of weakness on the part of a ruling elite that realizes the fragility of its power. In the Fog of the Seasons' End is ultimately far more optimistic than most Western socialist fiction. Not only do the revolutionaries in the book score certain successes against all odds, but the book also ends with the strongly utopian image of children gathered in a sunlit yard and with the strongly hopeful declaration that the system of apartheid has prepared its own downfall (p. 181).

In terms of this novel, at least, Samuel Omo Asein is thus correct when he concludes that “the pervasive note then in La Guma's novels is not that of despair and flight into a protective world of political negativism, but that of hope in the eventual overthrow of the oppressive regime in South Africa” (Asein 1978, 86).⁸ Granted, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ends on a similarly hopeful note, but, more than eighty years later, the revolution foreseen by Tressell has not materialized. La Guma's utopian vision, meanwhile, gains a certain power from the fact that the system of apartheid has now nominally been destroyed. Indeed, the fall of apartheid makes La Guma's work more relevant now than ever, partially for the simple reason that his work can finally be read in South Africa, but mostly because it sounds an important warning against complacency by providing ominous reminders of a past that must never be repeated. From a Fanonian perspective, of course, La Guma's work also urges continued vigilance because the fall of apartheid does not guarantee justice and equality for all South Africans. La Guma's careful association of apartheid with capitalism implies that the destruction of apartheid is only the first step in a revolutionary process that can ultimately succeed only when the class structure of capitalist society has itself been obliterated.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Alex La Guma, like Nadine Gordimer, is a South African writer whose work grows directly out of South African history and in particular out of an opposition to apartheid. The reader should thus consult chapter 7 for historical background to La Guma's work. However, La Guma, as a coloured South African and an active participant in radical opposition to the apartheid regime, occupies a somewhat different position in relation to South African history than Gordimer. For example, while the “Treason Trials” of 1956-1961 involved Gordimer's character Lionel Burger, they involved La Guma directly: he was one of the more than 150 men and women tried (and finally acquitted of) treason for their opposition to apartheid.

BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

Born in Cape Town in 1925, Alex La Guma was the son of Jimmy La Guma, a noted crusader for the civil rights of nonwhites in South Africa. The elder La Guma was a union organizer, coloured secretary of the Cape Branch of the African National Congress, president of the South African Coloured Peoples' Congress, and a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party. The young Alex followed very much in his father's footsteps. In 1946, at age twenty-one, he organized and led a strike among the workers at a metal box factory where he was employed. The next year, he joined the Young Communist League. In 1948, when the victory of the Boer Nationalist Party led to the beginnings of apartheid as a formal government policy, La Guma became a member of the South African Communist Party and remained so until 1950 when the party was officially banned. La Guma continued his political activities as apartheid was solidified in the next few years, and he was eventually arrested in 1956 on charges of treason.

The ensuing Treason Trials lasted for nearly five years. All of those charged were eventually acquitted, but the trials absorbed the energies and attention of so many antiapartheid leaders that the opposition to apartheid was seriously hampered. Meanwhile, the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 led the government to declare a state of emergency that further curtailed the civil rights of South African citizens. La Guma himself was arrested again in 1961 for his political activities. From this point on he was continually harassed by the government. By 1962, a new Sabotage Act allowed the minister of justice to order anyone placed under house arrest without trial. La Guma was one of the first so detained, and he was officially confined to his house twenty-four hours a day from 1962 until 1966, except for one period in 1963 when he was taken to prison and placed in solitary confinement in an attempt to ensure that he could have no contact with the resistance movement. La Guma was again arrested in 1966, but in September of that year he and his family were granted permanent exit visas that allowed them to move to London in what amounted to political exile.

Once abroad, La Guma continued to crusade for justice in South Africa, traveling widely and giving numerous talks describing the evils of apartheid and promoting the resistance efforts of the ANC and other groups. This project took La Guma around the world, especially to countries sympathetic to his leftist political beliefs. He visited the Soviet Union, Chile (when Allende was president), Vietnam, and Tanzania, where he stayed for a time as writer in residence at the University of Dar es Salaam. He gained a great deal of international prominence during these years. In 1969, for example, he was given India's Lotus Prize for Literature, and in the same year he became the chairman of the ANC's London branch. In 1977, La Guma was elected secretary-general of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, and in 1978 he moved to Cuba, where he took up residence in Havana as the chief representative of the ANC to the Caribbean and Central and South America. He remained in Cuba until his death (by heart attack) in 1986.

La Guma's political activism was accompanied by (and indeed included) a productive writing career. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he worked as a staff journalist for the progressive Cape Town newspaper New Age, for which he managed to write a weekly column until 1962 despite his persecution by the South African authorities. He also began to write fiction during the 1950s, and his first novel, A Walk in the Night (1967b), was apparently completed by early in 1960. This book was eventually published in Nigeria in 1962, after considerable difficulty in getting the manuscript out of South Africa. Thus began a career that saw all of La Guma's novels published abroad because they were banned in South Africa. And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967) were originally published in Berlin, while In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972) originally appeared in New York, and Time of the Butcherbird (1979) was first published in London.

All of La Guma's fiction is deeply committed to the political opposition to apartheid, though the different novels employ a variety of strategies in their attempt to reveal the abusive and dehumanizing effects of apartheid and to suggest possible alternatives for a better future. A Walk in the Night is an extremely violent and essentially naturalistic novel that devotes most of its energy to vivid depictions of the degrading poverty of Cape Town's nonwhite slums and the humiliation of the slums' residents due to the squalor in which they are forced to live and the mistreatment they suffer at the hands of the police and other officials. The plot of the novel, set in the seamy underworld of District Six, the coloured slum of Cape Town, is simple and unfolds within a few hours. The protagonist, Michael Adonis, is a coloured South African who loses his job after his white foreman upbraids him for taking time from work to urinate. Michael is then stopped (without cause) by two white policeman, who insult and humiliate him merely because of his race. Filled with rage, Michael drinks in a pub, then returns to his tenement where he unintentionally kills an old Irishmen in a drunken altercation. Michael escapes, and Willieboy, a young street tough, is blamed for the murder and is eventually killed by a sadistic policeman, Constable Raalt. Michael, meanwhile, has been driven to crime, and he and his new gang are on their way to commit a robbery as Willieboy lies bleeding to death at the end of the novel.

A Walk in the Night is an angry and essentially pessimistic novel in which characters respond to their brutalization by the system with brutality of their own. As La Guma's career developed, however, his delineation of South African society became more sophisticated and his fiction began to include suggestions of more positive modes of resistance. And a Threefold Cord contains many of the same suggestions that the characters are at the mercy of large, impersonal forces, but it is less violent and more subdued than its predecessor. The depiction of the lives of the coloured Pauls family resembles the striking depictions of poverty that characterized his first novel, though La Guma's technique in And a Threefold Cord is somewhat more symbolic and less naturalistic than in A Walk in the Night. Moreover, the courage and tenacity of the Pauls family in the face of its difficulties point toward a greater sense of hopefulness, especially through the solidarity of oppressed people working together.

La Guma's third novel, The Stone Country is a highly allegorical account of life in a South African prison that in many ways represents South Africa as a whole. The book focuses on the experiences of George Adams, a political prisoner who has been incarcerated for distributing political pamphlets urging resistance to apartheid. Another prominent character is the Casbah Kid, whose squalid childhood has led him to a life of crime. The Casbah Kid is thus a character who might have fit very well in La Guma's earlier novels. Adams, however, possesses a highly evolved political consciousness that represents a clear movement forward in La Guma's development as a political writer. Though he is not a sophisticated intellectual, Adams's ability to sense the brutality of apartheid and to articulate the kind of individual dignity that should be possible in a just society is unmatched by any of the characters in La Guma's earlier works. And, if conditions in the prison stand in for the oppressive nature of apartheid society as a whole, George's determination to work for better conditions in the prison suggests the need for positive political action throughout South Africa.

This aspect of La Guma's career comes to full fruition in In the Fog of the Seasons' End. According to Cecil Abrahams, this book combined with The Stone Country to make La Guma a “major literary figure in African literature” (Abrahams 1985, 18). La Guma's brief final novel, Time of the Butcherbird, is by far his most symbolic, employing intensely suggestive images in a further elaboration of La Guma's support for armed rebellion against apartheid. Its three major characters, a poor black recently released from prison, a rich Afrikaner farmer/politician, and a struggling white English-speaking salesman, are less individuals than representatives of important groups within South African society. The black, Shilling Murile, has sworn revenge against the Afrikaner, Hannes Meulen, for his involvement ten years earlier in the death of Murile's brother. The English-speaking white, Edward Stopes, has come to town on a selling trip, and he is something of an “innocent” bystander to the events of the novel, which have clear implications for the possible future of South African society. Murile kills Meulen, but in the process kills Stopes as well, suggesting the ultimate fate of those who support and enforce apartheid and those who simply stand aside and let it continue.

Abdul JanMohamed has suggested that a consistent “marginality” is perhaps the most striking characteristic of La Guma's writing. Neither white nor black, La Guma transcends the simple polar opposition of these two racial groups. Banned from publication in apartheid South Africa, La Guma's work was pushed to the margins of the struggle against apartheid that was its major thrust. Moreover, La Guma's fiction, perhaps because of its overtly leftist political stance, has been less widely accepted in the West than the work of African writers such as Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, or Ngugi wa Thiong'o.⁹ As JanMohamed points out, there was little demand for political fiction in the West during the Cold War, when such fiction was vaguely associated with what was seen as the dogmatism of Stalinism. Thus, the only political novels to have a wide readership in the West during the Cold War were those like the fiction of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which

revives the legacy of the Cold War by once more valorizing the freedom of Western institutions against the restrictive practices of the Russian “other,” or the fiction of V. S. Naipaul, which revives the legacy of colonialism by further valorizing the goodness and civilization of the West against the unredeemable evil and barbarity of the Third World “other”.

(JanMohamed 1983, 262)

In short, La Guma's fiction, by challenging the Western stereotypes that fed both colonialism and the Cold War, had a doubly difficult time in winning a Western readership. On the other hand, Bernth Lindfors's survey of Anglophone African universities showed that among writers known primarily as novelists, La Guma is surpassed only by Ngugi, Achebe, and Armah in his prominence in the curricula of those universities (Lindfors 1990).¹⁰ La Guma is particularly prominent among African political novelists. He is thus appropriately listed with Sembène and Ngugi as the writers who “naturally come to mind” in the discussion of the development of a revolutionary African aesthetics (Udenta 1993, 9). La Guma's work is also beginning to receive more critical attention in the West, perhaps partially because of the easing of the tensions associated with the Cold War, though much published criticism attempts to divert attention from La Guma's revolutionary politics through discussion of literary form and technique. Book-length studies that show some sensitivity to the political dimension of his work include those by Abrahams (1985), Kathleen Balutansky (1990), and Balasubramanyam Chandramohan 1992). The collection entitled Memories of Home, edited by Cecil Abrahams (1991), also contains useful samples of La Guma's writing and valuable commentaries, including personal reminiscences by La Guma's widow. JanMohamed's chapter on La Guma in Manichean Aesthetics (1983) is still probably the best brief survey of his work, while numerous other critical essays discuss more specific aspects of La Guma's various novels.

Notes

1. One might compare the events related in Elie Wiesel's autobiographical novel, Night (1987), in which the prisoners in Nazi prison camps are assigned arbitrary ages and given numbers that replace their names. The apartheid regime in South Africa has, in fact, frequently been compared to Nazi Germany. La Guma's Beukes himself makes the connection (p. 131).

2. See Chandramohan (1992) for an extended discussion of the “trans-ethnicity” of La Guma's vision.

3. Balutansky does, however, understand the political mission of La Guma's work. She begins her book with an epigraph quoted from La Guma which rejects the Western notion of “Art for art's sake” as irrelevant to conditions in apartheid South Africa.

4. Balutansky makes a similar point about the fragmentation of individual sentences in the book (Balutansky 1990, 85).

5. On affinities between Gorky and La Guma, see Chandramohan (1992, 137) and Asein (1978, 75).

6. American leftist fiction is often even more localized in its task. Thus, Mike Gold's Jews Without Money (1984, first published in 1930), probably the most important American proletarian novel, seeks to demonstrate that systemic poverty exists in an America where many people seem to feel that only the lazy and the shiftless can possibly be poor.

7. It is not surprising, then, that La Guma's book has much more in common with a work such as Maxim Gorky's Mother (1972), another classic of European leftist literature, but one that arises from the crisis situation of early-twentieth-century Russia.

8. As Scanlon points out, however, In the Fog of the Seasons' End is decidedly more optimistic than some of La Guma's earlier work. As Scanlon puts it, “If La Guma's first novel traces a descent into despair, In the Fog of the Seasons' End reveals an upward movement of recovery” (Scanlon 1979, 46).

9. Ngugi's later fiction is also overtly leftist, but his reputation in the West had already been established by earlier works that are not, such as The River Between (1965).

10. La Guma is ranked seventh among all authors in Lindfors's survey, ranking behind these three novelists as well as the dramatists Soyinka and J. P. Clark and the poet Okot p'Bitek (Lindfors 1990).