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In his final novel, Alex La Guma explores the tensions of a South
African town fraught with the desire for revenge. Glimpsing into
precolonial days and the aftermath of the Boer War, Time of the
Butcherbird is a powerful reminder of the communities that were
wrecked by conflict and dispossessed of their own land. Out in the
flat, featureless countryside, a small mining town in South Africa
is refused access to water. Knowing that the rain is their last
chance for survival, all they can do now is wait... As the
oppressive summer wears on, the white Afrikaner townspeople are
unaware of the storm brewing around them. In the bush, a shepherd
recalls the riddle of the butcherbird. An impactful and incisive
novel, Time of the Butcherbird cements Alex La Guma as one of South
Africa's most prominent political writers, exposing the ugly
reality of the self-professed 'civilised' oppressors and a society
brimming with anger. 'The greatest South African novelist of the
20th century.' The Times '[Alex La Guma] is a central figure
alongside Chinua Achebe [in] the making and consolidation of modern
African literature.' Ngugi wa Thiong’o
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 life
in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon,
Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his
critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The
first dedicated collection of La Guma's exile writing, Culture and
Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work,
while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political
struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half
of the twentieth century.
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 through
socialism-a point of view that has since been lost with the
collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition
of A Soviet Journey-the first since 1978-restores this vision to
the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like
La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of
self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development.
The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of
La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly
within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an
emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African
literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet
Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and
non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies,
and radical political thought.
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 through
socialism-a point of view that has since been lost with the
collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition
of A Soviet Journey-the first since 1978-restores this vision to
the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like
La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of
self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development.
The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of
La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly
within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an
emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African
literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet
Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and
non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies,
and radical political thought.
In the title story, in a Cape Town shantytown called District Six
in the 1960s, Michael Adonis has lost his job at a metal sheet
factory after an argument with a white supervisor. Illuminating the
toxic effects of poverty, police brutality, and violence, the book
paints a stark and unforgettable portrait of Adonis's emotional and
physical destruction in apartheid South Africa. 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. 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.
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