James Arnold (Jimmy) La Guma is one of the very few New African intellectuals who actively participated in arguably the three most important South African political organizations in the twentieth-century: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and the African National Congress (ANC). In this he went beyond the venerable and noble Coloured political tradition represented by major New African intellectuals such Abdullah Abdurahman and Harold Cressy in the African People’s Organization (APO) who could only conceive of alliances between different political organizations representing different racial groups. James La Guma did not believe that an accident of racial birth should determine his participation in the political organizations of the oppressed seeking to overthrow economic and political oppression. Locating himself beyond the historical vision of the African members of the New African Movement who were hostile to Marxism, James La Guma presciently  understood that Marxism and modernity were a unified dialectical expression of the present moment. It is because of his deep understanding of the contradictory unity of modernity that made James La Guma such a central political figure in the first half of the twentieth-century. In 1920 he was the founding secretary of the ICU in Luderitz (then South West Africa, today Namibia). Later he was summoned by Clements Kadalie, president of the ICU, to a position as secretary of the ICU branch in Port Elizabeth. Later still, James La Guma became Clements Kadalie’s right hand man in that in 1925 he became assistant general secretary of the ICU. When Clements Kadalie expelled Communists like James La Guma from the ICU executive in 1926, ‘Jimmy’ shifted and intensified his work within the CPSA and the ANC. La Guma was elected secretary of the Cape Town branch of the ANC in 1927. In the same year, he went to Brussels as a CPSA delegate to the first international conference of the League Against Imperialism. Also in this active year of 1927, he visited the Soviet Union with John T. Gumede, the gemeral-president of the ANC. In the leader 1930s he was the founder and leader of the National Liberation League, an organization of progressive and enlightened Coloured intellectuals and political leaders who sought to form deep alliances with the African masses. From 1957 to his death in 1961, James La Guma was the president of the South African Coloured People’s Congress (previously known as the South African Coloured People’s Organization). In the early 1960s, following his father’s death, Alex La Guma, who later in the 1960s and in the 1970s became an internationally renowned novelist in exile but was then under a banning order for his uncompromising political activities, was commissioned to write a political-biographical sketch of James Arnold La Guma. Alex La Guma’s biographical sketch of his father was published posthumously in 1997, that is 12 years after his own death. Although it was never completed, it has some moving and revealing passages which profoundly reveal the extraordinary political imagination of his father. The concluding section of his 87-page biography, Jimmy La Guma: A Biography, is more than sufficient in revealing the depth of the political commitment of his father: “But it appeared that politics refused to leave him alone. In March 1960, the Pan African Congress launched its capaign against the oass laws, and at Sharpeville and Langa demonstrators were shot down by the police. The Congress Alliance called for countrywide demonstrations in protest and the Nationalist Government declared a state of emergency. Thousands of people were arrested and detained without trial throughout the country. La Guma and John Gomas were arrested in April, incidentally on the same day, and on the latter’s birthday. After the dissolution of the Communist Party, Gomas, then a trade union secretary, had been banned under the Suppression of Communism Act, and had reverted to his old trade of tailoring, and had also virtually retired from political activity. La Guma spent over three months in detention, and was finally released from Worcester Prison in the Cape. Alex, among the first to be arrested, was released at the end of the state of emergency in August 1960. in spite of having borne imprisonment with fortitude, the long detention helped to impair still further La Guma’s failing health. A few months afterwards, he was struck down in his garden by cerebral thrombosis and confined to bed for several weeks. He recovbered from the attack, however, but towards the middle of 1961 was taken ill again and once more sent to bed. Later he was sent to Groote Schuur hospital for examination, and specialists discovered that he was suffering from a sever ailment and was kept at the hospital for treatment. The last people to see Jimmy La guma alive were his son, Alex, and daughter-in-law, Blanche. He appeared in good spirits and introduced them to his fellow-patients. The next morning, Saturday, July 29, 1961, a month before his sixty-seventh birthday, he was found in his bed, of a heart attack which had occurred during the night. He was buried with the honour due to a staunch Socialist and fighter on behalf of the working-class and the oppressed of South Africa. His funeral was attended by old comrades and new. political associates who had worked with him in the past, trade unionists, personal friends and relatives, Africans, Coloured and Whites and Indian South Africans, and many young recruits to the movement which he had loved. His old comrades of the old struggle of the trade union and Communist movement, John Gomas and Ray Alexander, and the young vice-president of the Coloured People’s Congress, Barney Desai, officiated at the funeral. So, to the singing of Nkosi Sikelele iAfrika, The Red Flag and the Internationale, he was lowered into his grave. James Arnold La guma did not die a disappointed man. He had seen the Non-European people’s movement grow to strength and the ideas of Socialism adopted by many young people. He lived to see the advance of Socialism across Europe and Asia, and the emergence of new independent states in Africa. Of these things he often spoke during the latter years of his life, and he was infinitely proud of the contribution he had made to the political struggle in South Africa. Throughout his life he was a man who loved simple things, the common people, books and singing, all children and the workers of the world. A political fighter to the end, his last discussion was with a young white hospital nurse who supported the Progressive Party’s policy of qualified franchise. Addressing political workers at a reception given in honour of Chief A. J. Luthuli who had occasion to visit Cape Town, Jimmy La Guma’s advice was, ‘Love the people, love your leaders and work hard.’” (p. 79-80). Beside Alex La Guma’s short book, another short biographical sketch on James La Guma was published in 1990s written by Mohamed Adhikari. This text is more scholarly and historical in approach. Contextualizing the conflict between James La Guma and Clements Kadalie within the ICU, Adhikari writes the following in James La Guma: “There [in Johannesburg], Jimmy broadened his contact with the CP and so impressed its leadership that they elected him as the CP delegate to the first International Conference of the League Against Imperialism to be held in Belgium in 1927. Jimmy’s links with the CP, however, soon spelt trouble fo him in the ICU. He saw nothing wrong with being a member of both groups because he considered the struggle for freedom to me more important than organisational rivalries. Hoever, not only did the ICU see the CP as a rival but Jimmy soon found that he often disagreed with the ICU leadership. Since the ICU had grown and the money it got from membership fees had increased, enthusiasm for the workers’ struggle had faded among its leaders. Many officials, including Kadalie, tended to view their positions in the ICU more as away of making a living than as a responsibility towards the workers. Jimmy spoke out against this tendency. Jimmy was part of a minority group within the Icu that wanted to return the organisation to its focus on workers’ rights. . . Kadalie viewed this group as a threat. He took swift action, calling a meeting of the ICU’s national executive council to discuss the issue of dual membership of the ICU and the CP. It was a stormy meeting. Kadalie demanded that the Communists resign from the CP and pledge loyalty to the ICU alone. . . The members voted on the issue. . . Jimmy was not sorry about his expulsion. . . The ICU continued to be racked by corruption, inefficiency and in-fighting between its leaders. By the end of the 1920s it had split into several factions, never again to return to the powerful organisation it had once been” (pp. 19-20). These two passages from these biographical sketches show James La Guma to have been a New African of principles and governed by serious political commitments.