African Revolutionary Writers, Part 6b
Alex La Guma
Among the revolutionary
writers of Africa, the South African novelist Alex La Guma started relatively early.
He was only two years younger than Ousmane Sembène (and he died 22 years before
Sembène).
The attached document contains
two chapters from La Guma’s 1972 book “In the Fog of the Season's End”. Clearly
it is a struggle novel: tough, realistic and committed.
Alex La Guma’s works included
A Walk in the Night and Other
Stories, (1962), And a Threefold Cord
(1964), The Stone-Country (1967), In the Fog of the Season's End (1972), A Soviet Journey (1978), Time of the Butcherbird (1979).
Alex La Guma was the son of
the outstanding South African revolutionary James La Guma, a member of the Communist
Party of South Africa from the year that his son Alex was born – 1925.
It is hard to exaggerate the
importance of work like this in the liberation struggle. It is work that leaves
no doubt. The reader is compelled. As much as, or more than, the propaganda
output of the liberation movement, the communist parties, and the
anti-apartheid solidarity movements in the world, novels such as these planted
an anchor for the struggle that could not be shifted.
These books need to be read;
and new books need to be written, songs sung, pictures painted, et cetera, et
cetera, to anchor the struggle again in such a way that it cannot be doubted.
This is what Alex La Guma, among other novelists, did. He anchored the
revolution in the hearts of the people.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Alex La
Guma, In the Fog of the Season’s End, extract, 1972.
