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 died 22 years before Sembène).
The document linked below 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.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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