ABSTRACT
Two factors, both of them intimately associated, account for the sociopolitical and ideologically charged nature of Alex La Guma’s fiction: his nurture in Cape Town’s notorious and impoverished District Six, and the political activism of his father, Jimmy La Guma. Growing up in Cape Town brought La Guma face to face with the gritty reality of the life of South Africa’s dispossessed and victimized people. When he began his career as a writer in 1955 for the New Age, a left-wing weekly, he wrote several articles on Cape Town’s street life, the matrix from which his first short novel A Walk in the Night (1962) sprang. Jimmy La Guma was a militant union organizer, a member of the South African Communist Party, and president of the South African Colored Peoples’ Congress. Alex himself became a member of the Communist Party when the Afrikaner Nationalist Party introduced apartheid to South Africa in 1948. His father’s relentless struggles against oppression must have shaped and moulded Alex’s growing sensibilities; and the son, moreover, must have inherited from the father his unflagging determination to destroy apartheid and restore equality and justice to all South Africans.
