Alex La Guma

Justin Alexander La Guma was born on the twentieth of February 1924 at District Six, the Cape Coloured working-class quarter at the centre of Cape Town, the son of James Arnold La Guma — a tobacco factory worker and one of the founding members of the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921 — and Wilhelmina La Guma. He was raised in the Communist Party household of his father in District Six.

He was educated at the Trafalgar High School at Cape Town through the secondary level and apprenticed in 1940 at the Cape Times newspaper as a clerk. He left the apprenticeship at sixteen and took factory work at the Metal Box Company at Cape Town from 1942 to 1948.

He joined the Communist Party of South Africa in 1947 — the year before the National Party victory of May 1948 inaugurated the apartheid period — and was active across the following ten years as an organiser of the South African Coloured People’s Congress.

He was arrested in December 1956 as one of the 156 defendants of the Treason Trial of 1956–1961 — the principal apartheid-era political trial of the period — and acquitted in March 1961 along with all the remaining co-defendants. He was placed under the first of his apartheid banning orders in March 1962, restricting his movement to the Cape Town magisterial district, and was placed under house arrest from 1963 to 1966.

He wrote the principal four novels of his fiction under the banning order — A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), and In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972). A Walk in the Night was completed in 1961 and published in 1962 at Ibadan by the Mbari Writers’ Club — the small publishing house of the Chinua Achebe (placed in this archive) and Wole Soyinka circle. The novel chronicled a single night in the District Six of his childhood at the hands of the apartheid pass-law police.

He and his family left South Africa under exit permit in September 1966 — the equivalent of one-way exile — and settled in London, where he worked as a journalist and Communist Party organiser until 1978, then at Havana as the African National Congress chief representative to the Caribbean.

He was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association — the foremost socialist-bloc literary prize of the period — for the four novels of the apartheid period.

He died at Havana on the eleventh of October 1985 of a heart attack, at sixty-one.

He is honored here as the chronicler of District Six.