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ALEX LA GUMA - INTELLECTUAL SKETCH |
| Of all the writers who have been designated as members of
the District Six School, which included among others, Richard Rive, James
Matthews, Peter Clark and Alfred Wannenburgh, Alex La Guma is the most difficult
to historically position within the cultural ambience of the Sophiatown
Renaissance. One factor accounting for the difficulty is that whereas practically
all the writers of this historical moment where committed to the ideology
of nationalism in one form or another, La Guma was engaged with Marxism
to the extent of being a party and labor organizer. Given this ideological
allegiance, there is direct line of continuity between the naturalism of
Peter Abraham’s Mine Boy (1946) and the realism of Alex La Guma’s A Walk
in the Night (1962), than is the case with the other writers of his literary
generation. The third factor distinguishing him from his contemporaries
is that he attempted to realize Communism as a literary project in his fiction:
in other words, he attempted to forge a proletarian novel in South Africa.
These factors account for his peculiarity in being situated within the hegemonic
literary formation of the 1950s. Two strong intellectual voices have grappled
with the literary belongingness of La Guma: Lewis Nkosi and J. M. Coetzee.
In one of his major literary pieces written within a year of being forced
into self-imposed exile in 1960, assessing the literary history of the New
African Movement from J. J. J. Jolobe and Solomon T. Plaatje to Ezekiel
Mphahlele and Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi made the following observation
about Alex La Guma: “The world of the Negro writers in South Africa is a
familiar one to those who have lived in race-torn areas: the ugly leer on
the claustrophobic face of violence, the sweltering heat of talk about to
simmer into social explosion, the senseless arbitrary death, the frenzied
quest for emotional release in sex and drink. They are concerned with the
phantasies evoked by a black-and-white world which, though divided, simultaneously
seeks and is terrified by social fusion. South African fiction is loud,
melodramatic. Its language is brassy, it concerns itself with a particular
moment in a series of socially incoherent events. . . . Though violence
plays a large part in the works of all these writers, nowhere is it explored
with such frightening effect as in the works of four Cape Town writers,
Peter Clark, who sometimes uses the pen name of ‘Peter Kumalo,’ Richard
Rive, James Matthews, and Alex La Guma. . . . These stories remind one strongly
of books such as Black Boy or Native Son by the American Negro writer, Richard
Wright.” (“African Fiction: Part I: South Africa: Protest”, Africa Report,
October 1962). Giving particularity to this formulation three years later,
in the context of comparing the styles of La Guma and Rive as determined
by the dialectical struggle between modernity and tradition, Lewis Nkosi
reflected: “Frequently the hero of the modern African novel comes
to grief because of a certain disharmony between his private vision and
the ossified forms of moral behaviour prescribed by tradition. This is no
less true of South African fiction than it is of fiction elsewhere in Africa.
And since prescribed moral behaviour was sanctioned mainly by African religious
systems, the present rebellion of the new African hero against tribal morality
signifies a truly African secularism. It is a secularism which could have
been only delayed so long as the African communities remained closed societies;
for in the African society revolt against the moral wisdom of the tribe
was always seen to be an aberration and an evil, with excision rather than
accommodation of the defective limb, as the only solution. As I see it,
this rebellion of the African hero also constitutes the African novel’s
final subversion against the traditional forms of African art whose mode
was celebrative and whose main function was restorative through the harmonising
of individual being with that of the traditional community. . . . In the
same way in most of these stories the blacks enjoy an unearned virtue simply
because they happen to be the oppressed. Their nobility is in their suffering
and just as gratuitous. It is a nobility that is given rather than achieved,
and it is this failure to suggest a variety of human possibilities for their
characters which deprives much of the work of these writers [Richard Rive,
James Matthews and Alfred Wannenburgh] of certain universal qualities so
readily felt in the fiction of Alex La Guma. . . . It is instructive to
turn to Alex La Guma to see how he copes with this problem of limited choices
imposed by an authoritarian society. Though Threefold Cord is less successful
than La Guma’s previous novel, it still offers certain clues to his success.
Within the limited choices available to his characters what La Guma does
suggest is the unlimited range in which they can show their humanity. Most
of La Guma’s characters have the weight and value of real living people;
they wage their fight for survival against a brutal regime, and what is
left after they have spilled their blood is their undeniable humanity. Where
Rive’s characters are unable to make love convincingly simply because they
are cardboard boxes and not human beings, La Guma’s characters carry the
very stench and sweat of living people” (“Against the Tribe”, The New African,
May 1965). Within a decade of this penetrative appraisal by Lewis Nkosi,
J. M. Coetzee was to undertake his own estimation of the literary project
of Alex La Guma: “La Guma’s achievement is to present a particularly lucid
description of the resultants of white oppression in self-destructive black
violence and to embody his novels a growing political understanding of the
process in the consciousness of a developing protagonist. His four novels
do not cohere closely enough to form a tetralogy, but read in sequence their
political meaning is quite plain. They portray a Colored working class that
initially has little consciousness of how its energies are redirected against
it by its rulers as the anarchic force of crime. The representative of its
best qualities grows a puzzled stevedore to a laborer who has begun his
psychic liberation, to a declassed activist, at first cautious, then freed
for armed struggle by a heroic African example. Plotting and characterization
are deliberate enough to leave the uncommitted reader perhaps resentful
of La Guma’s palpable design, but as social taxonomy the characterization
must be acknowledged to be rich in insight. However, style is the great
betrayer. La Guma is the inheritor of the worst excesses of realism” (“Man’s
Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma”, Studies in Black Literature, vol. 5
no. 1, 1974). Although the criticism of J. M. Coetzee is perceptive on the
whole, in its postulation that Alex La Guma’s literary practice was a bad
form of realism, it fails to examine whether the particularity of South
African history compelled or necessitated such an undertaking. The failure
of Coetzee’s criticism is its failure to contextualize the literary practice
of La Guma within an international context. What La Guma was preoccupied
with was with creation of a literary modernism which would not be a mere
appropriation of hegemonic European modernism. In the avant-garde act of
attempting to create a specific form of modernism in South Africa by appropriating
and transforming the poetics of socialist realism in Maxim Gorky’s Mother
and those of naturalism in Richard Wright’s Native Son, Alex La Guma was
engaging two fundamental issues at the center South African cultural history
at this time in the making of modernism and modernity in our country: reconciling
the relationship between New Negro modernity and New African modernity on
the one hand, and that between Marxism and nationalism on the other hand.
These were the ideas broached by Peter Abrahams in the 1940s, but explored
with greater depth and complexity by Alex La Guma in the 1950s. This is
what makes La Guma such a fascinating figure in our cultural and literary
history. As an end note, it needs to be recognized that while Bessie Head
enables a relationship of simultaneity and intercrossing between District
Six writers and the Sophiatown Renaissance writers, Alex La Guma’s literary
practice postulates the principle of non-synchronicity between them. It
is in this that the uniqueness of this brilliant writer resides. [The following was written during my West Berlin stay between 1985 to
1989 when I was attempting to historicize the cultural moment of the Drum
writers, or as they are known by another name, the Sophiatown Renaissance.
I could not historically locate them because at this time I had no historical
conceptualization of the writers who preceded them. Although at this time
I was well aware that behind Lewis Nkosi stood H. I. E. Dhlomo and behind
Ezekiel Mphahlele there was Solomon T. Plaatje, I had no construct by
which to conceptually inter-link the generation of Alex La Guma to that
of A. C. Jordan. At the moment of the writing of this essay in 1987 or
in 1988, I was not aware that Lewis Nkosi had in 1955 in the form of a
poem in Ilanga lase Natal paid homage to Dhlomo, as the great lay dying
in the last year of his life. At the moment of our occasional meetings
in these years in West Germany Nkosi was always reticent when I asked
him about Dhlomo. This is similar to Mazisi Kunene’s refusal in the 1970s
in Los Angeles to broach the subject of his own relationship to R. R.
R. Dhlomo whenever I pestered him. Concerning Mphahlele, I was note aware
that in the middle of 1980s he had given a memorial lecture on Plaatje
at the University of Bophathutswana as well as that he had written a short
brilliant essay that ecapsulated South African cultural history from Tiyo
Soga to Henry Selby Msimang. It is only with the fall of apartheid in
1994, a historic event that freed us to undertake archival examination
of our cultural history, that the historical connection between say Allan
Kirkland Soga and Henry Nxumalo became apparent. It the systematic reading
of all the writings of H. I. E. Dhlomo in Ilanga lase Natal between 1926
to 1955 and those in Umteteli wa Bantu between 1924 and 1931 that supplied
the concepts that made sense of the cultural logic informing our intellectual
history: modernity and modernism. Reading H. I. E. Dhlomo clarified completely
for this author the real drama of South African intellectual history,
which is the theme of this web-site. The essay that follows was
a search for historical conceptualization that was found eight years later
in Dhlomo: the fact that the Sophiatown Renaissance and the cultural currents
preceding it were part of New African Movement. This is the understanding
Dhlomo gave the present author. Possessing this understanding made the
encounter with Ezekiel Mphahlele in April 1999 under the auspices of Pitzer
College (where I teach in Los Angeles) for approximately a week a quite
different learning from the one when I last saw our eminent man of letters
in Nairobi in 1966 when I was a High School student.] |
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