LaGuma, Alex 1925–1985

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Alex LaGuma 1925–1985

Writer and activist

Journalist and Organizer

Poverty Bred Rage

A Career in Exile

“The Parasite That Threatens”

Selected writings

Sources

Alex LaGuma was an internationally recognized writer whose works laid bare the painful realities of life under apartheid for blacks in South Africa. A native of Cape Town, LaGuma became an ardent anti-apartheid activist as a young man, and when he began to achieve fame as a novelist as well, his works were officially banned by the censorious South African government. He emigrated to England in the mid-1960s after spending time in prison but continued to write fiction set in the abysmal slum of Cape Town, to which the city’s blacks were confined during the apartheid era. A longtime member of the African National Congress (ANC), LaGuma eventually settled in Cuba, where he served as the organization’s representative in the Caribbean until his death in 1985.

LaGuma was born in 1925 in Cape Town, South Africa’s legislative capital, and was raised in a ghetto there known as District Six. It was a place he later “depicted in sensuous detail, organic in its decay and brutish in its sounds and smells,” noted Paul A. Scanlon in an essay on LaGuma for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. The LaGumas were a mixed race family, officially classified as “Coloured” under South Africa’s racial segregation laws, and as such had few rights and even fewer economic opportunities. LaGuma’s father Jimmy was a local politician in District Six and led the South African Coloured People’s Congress for a time. Like his father, LaGuma joined the Communist Party as a young man.

Journalist and Organizer

After leaving high school in 1942, LaGuma took night school courses at Cape Technical College. In November of 1954 he married a nurse and midwife, Blanche Herman, with whom he had two sons. For a time, he toiled as a clerk, bookkeeper, and even a factory worker, and joined the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s oldest black political organization, in 1955.

That same year, he began writing for an activist newspaper, New Age, that was based in Cape Town. He eventually contributed a weekly column, “Up My Alley,” and a political cartoon strip called “Little Libby: The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala.” During this period, LaGuma began to enjoy some small success with his short fiction, such as “A Christmas Story” published in the December, 1956 issue of Fighting Talk.

In 1956 LaGuma was part of a committee that drafted a declaration of rights for South Africa’s blacks. For his role in the Freedom Charter, LaGuma was charged and tried at the infamous Treason Trial in Johannesburg as one of several dozen activists. Two crucial events that occurred in 1960 shaped both LaGuma’s career and the anti-apartheid struggle: at the Sharpeville Massacre, white police troops shot at unarmed black demonstrators; also that year, the ANC was officially outlawed by South Africa’s harsh regime. In 1961, LaGuma was involved in organizing a general strike, and subsequently arrested. He was jailed and officially banned as a person under the Suppression of Communism Act.

Poverty Bred Rage

Typical of LaGuma’s early work was the novelette A

At a Glance…

Born Justin Alexander LaGuma, February 20, 1925, in Cape Town, South Africa; emigrated to England, 1966; died October 11, 1985, in Havana, Cuba; son of Jimmy and Wilhelmina (Alexander) LaGuma; married Blanche Valerie Herman (an office manager and former midwife), November 13, 1954; children: Eugene, Bartholomew. Education: Cape Technical College, student, 1941-42, correspondence student, 1965; London School of Journalism, correspondence student. Politics: African National Congress.

Career: Worked as a clerk, bookkeeper, and factory worker; New Age (weekly newspaper), Cape Town, South Africa, staff journalist, 1955-62; free-lance writer and journalist, 1962-85. Member of African National Congress, 1955-85; member of editorial board, Afro-Asian Writers Bureau, 1965-85.

Memberships: Afro-Asian Writers Association, deputy secretary-general, 1973-85.

Awards: Afro-Asian Lotus Award for literature, 1969.

Walk in the Night, first published in Nigeria in 1962 and immediately banned in South Africa. It appeared as A Walk in the Night and Other Stories in 1967. In the title story, a Coloured man in Cape Town, Michael Adonis, works in a factory and is fired one day for insubordination to his white boss. Distraught, already impoverished, he drinks along his way home to the District Six tenement house where he lives. He detests the place. Its very floor seems to have “taken on the appearance of a kind of loathsome skin disease. A row of dustbins lined one side of the entrance and exhaled the smell of rotten fruit, stale food, stagnant water and general decay. A cat, the colour of dishwater, was trying to paw the remains of a fishhead from one of the bins.” At the building, Adonis encounters an old derelict of British heritage and murders him in a senseless rage. Raalt, the local white constable, accuses a known hoodlum, Willieboy, of the slaying; Willieboy flees, while Adonis sees little recourse for his own life and joins a gang.

In 1963, the courts handed down a five-year house-arrest sentence, and LaGuma was prohibited from communicating with non-family members and unable to work. The confinement allowed him time to write, however, and he began working on more short stories. “Set in cheap cafes, prison cells, tenements, and backyards, they reflect the author’s preoccupation with the effects of the color bar, whether expressed through the immorality act or liquor raids by police,” noted Scanlon about this shorter fiction in the Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. LaGuma also found a publisher in the capital of Communist East Germany in 1964 for a longer manuscript, written during his prison time. And a Threefold Cord is set in Cape Town and centers upon the impoverished Pauls family, who live in a cardboard shack. The novel opens with the onset of South Africa’s rainy winter, and the abode is soon soaked through. “The world of the South African slum is one of bare survival, where corrugated cardboard cartons, rusted sheets of iron and tin, bitumen, and old sacking are stuffed into the cracks and joints of shacks,” noted another Dictionary of Literary Biography writer, Cecil A. Abrahams. Like most of his work, this story was written in what literary analysts term “Engli-kaans,” a form of Cape Town dialect that combined words and terms from Afrikaans, the language of white South Africans, with English.

A Career in Exile

LaGuma moved to London in 1966 and continued to write and publish from exile. The Stone Country, published not long after he arrived in England, presents a fictional version of the horrors of a South African jail. The title refers to the walls that confine men there but also to “the hierarchical social system, racial segregation, and acceptance of brutality toward blacks [which] make the prison a microcosm of South Africa as a whole,” noted an essay in Contemporary Authors. The story focuses upon George Adams, a new detainee, who is convinced of his basic human rights. His confinement is made all the more miserable by a sadistic prison guard named Fatso, and Adams realizes that prison is a place where human rights are nonexistent, and in order to survive one must join the brutal hierarchy.

Critics also applauded LaGuma’s In the Fog of the Season’s End, which appeared in 1972. Some of it was written while he was still living in South Africa. Its plot builds up to a general strike much like the one the author was involved with himself in 1961. The two protagonists, Elias and Beukes, are political activists who work to organize the shutdown by distributing leaflets while evading the secret police. Elias is captured and tortured and dies in custody, while Beukes is wounded but escapes to witness the success of the plan. The novel is set during the period when South Africa began taking a much harsher line against opponents to the system. “To think,” one strike-sympathizer remarks in the novel, “only some years ago we were holding meetings, marches, passive resistance.” The crackdown forces men like Elias and Beukes to reassess their goals and strategies. “Step by step,” Elias tells Beukes, “our people must acquire both the techniques of war and the means for fighting such a war. It is not only the advanced ones, but the entire people that must be prepared, convinced.”

“The Parasite That Threatens”

LaGuma’s fourth and final novel, Time of the Butcherbird, was published in 1979. Scanlon called it his “most socially ambitious work, providing an opportunity for him to explore character relationships and levels of perception not available to him in his earlier fiction,” the Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist declared. Behind its plot was a sweeping cultural and political history of South Africa, one that included black tribal history, British domination, the rise of the Dutch emigrant Afrikaaner population, and vivid descriptions of regional landscape and architecture. The novel is set in the rural Karoo region of the Western Cape province and centers upon an Afrikaaner family, whose head, Hannes Meulen, is an avowed racist. He becomes active in the government-sanctioned effort to remove blacks from their ancestral lands after mineral deposits are discovered there. The acreage is to be given over to white settlers, and blacks are forcibly moved to new, barren land, unsuitable for farming or raising livestock.

The Butcherbird of the title refers to a creature that preys on the ticks that are found on livestock; it is considered a symbol of good luck and health. But the forced migrations occur during a time of draught and devastation. A black chief acquiesces to the move, unwilling to take a stand. “On that hill our ancestors are buried,” the chief tells his people. “When the time was bad we weathered it and our ancestors were always with us. Good times or bad times, fat days or lean days, here was our home.” The chief’s sister, Mma-Tau, leads the opposition and recruits Shilling Murile, who has recently been released from prison. Meulen had been involved in the accidental but avoidable death of Murile’s brother and seeks revenge. “Meulen, then, is the parasite that threatens the country,” noted the Contemporary Authors essay, “and through his ultimate—and completely justifiable—death at the hand of a black agitator, the country finds itself rid of yet another destructive element threatening its health.”

LaGuma and his family relocated to Cuba in the late 1970s. He served as the official ANC representative there. Before his death in 1985, global political pressure to end apartheid was growing, and South Africa’s white government was becoming an international pariah. LaGuma believed that apartheid would end soon. He died of a heart attack in Havana in 1985 and never witnessed the final dismantling of the apartheid system and the 1994 election of ANC leader Nelson Mandela as the country’s president. Since then, however, LaGuma’s “fiction has become an important social and historical testament of the apartheid era,” Scanlon asserted in his Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. “Through his vivid descriptions of person and place, and particularly in his accurate rendition of the idioms and peculiarities of polyglot Cape Town, he was able to capture the appalling racial conditions that existed.”

Selected writings

And a Threefold Cord, Seven Seas Publishers (East Berlin), 1964.

The Stone Country, Seven Seas Publishers (East Berlin), 1967,

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, Northwestern University (Editor)

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African

Racism by South Africans, International Publishers, 1971.

In the Fog of the Season’s End, Heinemann, 1972, Third Press, 1973.

A Soviet Journey (travel), Progress Publishers (Moscow), 1978.

Time of the Butcherbird, Heinemann, 1979.

Memories of Home: The Writings of Alex LaGuma, edited by Cecil A. Abrahams, Africa World, 1991.

Sources

Books

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 117: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, edited by Bernth Lindfors, and Reinhard Sander, Gale, 1992, pp. 211-227, Volume 225: South African Writers, edited by Paul A. Scanlon, Gale, 2000, pp. 235-246.