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The life and works of South African writer, political activist and artist, from his early life in District Six, his arrest and trial for treason, to his eventual reluctant exile in Cuba.
In the Dark with my dress on fire is the remarkable life story of Blanche La Guma, a South African woman who dedicated her life to ending apartheid through her various roles as professional nurse, wife and mother, and underground Communist activist.
Of French and Malagasy stock, involved in South African politics from an early age, Alex La Guma was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. He died in 1986. A Walk in the Night and Other Stories reveals La Guma as one of the most important African writers of his time. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shantytowns.
This text explores Alex La Guma's five novels. Though concerned with the interaction of politics with aesthetics, it does not allow the political thrust of the work to dominate the symbolic structures and literary aspects of La Guma's fiction.
One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC's diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma's political and literary li...
A novel of great sensitivity about people in Cape Town organizing underground opposition to apartheid
Explores the multifaceted dialogues with apartheid that are found in the novels.
In this previously banned collection of seven short stories, Alex La Guma vividly reveals the plight of the poor and oppressed in apartheid South Africa. Characterised by his striking style and colourful dialogue, La Guma's stories explore experiences of racism and social inequality in various settings, from an overcrowded prison to a Portuguese restaurant. In the title story, 'A Walk in the Night', a factory worker loses his job after an argument with a white supervisor. His subsequent descent into helpless rage is played out in rich detail, illuminating the toxic effects of poverty, police brutality, and gang violence. Each story in the collection lays bare the struggles of those living in 1960s South Africa, offering poignant moments of hope and cementing Alex La Guma as one of the most important writers of his time. 'The greatest South African novelist of the 20th century.' The Times 'Achieved in 90 pages what other African writers had tried to achieve in the course of many years.' Wole Soyinka 'A central figure alongside Chinua Achebe.' Ngugi wa Thiong'o
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In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice ...