ALEX LA GUMA - QUOTATION

African Thought: A Tribute to Alex La Guma

by

Dennis Brutus

By living in the
minds of others we achieve
immortality.

I knew Alex fairly well, having met him both in South Africa and Britain where we worked on anti-apartheid causes together, particularly in an effort to revive the Colored People’s Congress (CPC) in exile.

I first got to know him when I visited him at his home in a segregated township called Garlandale which was part of the segregated area called Athlone.

We were different in many ways: his continuation of the activism of his radical trade union father, his involvement with trade unionist and other workers, and his association with radical journalists white and black, all these things set us apart. But we shared an interest in creative writing. It was through his association with the Nigerian journal titled Black Orpheus I learned of publishing possibilities outside South Africa. Later I was to read his A Walk in the Night published by Mbari and smuggled into South Africa. He was already banned in South Africa and it was illegal to read him.

He explained how he did his writing with one page in the typewriter and the completed pages hidden under the linoleum so that if he was raided by the police they would find only the single page in the mimeo machine and he would not have to redo the pages he had already done.

What was particularly impressive about Alex was the seriousness with which he approached the craft of the writer and the intensity he gave to his work. He was determined, as a craftsman, to do the best job that could possibly do. This implied other very noticeable characteristics. He made a conscious and consistent effort to catch the quality and the rhythms of life in that particular section of the oppressed the “colored” in which he found himself. He was satisfied that there was a specific cultural flavor and identity in that ethnic section of the oppressed that he belonged to. He was proud of it and relished it, and tried to reproduce it in his work. It explained his pleasure of sharing a bottle of cheap Cape wine, of swapping raucous tales into the small hours of the night, of strumming vaguely obscene and sentimental ballads or volksliedjies on a guitar while he plucked at the strings and sucked away at a cigarette butt.

But he could swing quite suddenly into the other well known ballads as well: I enjoyed hearing him sing the ballads that Josh White or Arlo Guthrie or Pete Seeger had made famous. He also had a vast repertoire of the songs composed by the minstrels of klopse of the Cape ghettos.

Because he was already banned when I got to know him well, travelling periodically from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape to where he lived in the Western Cape, it was his wife Blanche, a midwife, who I got to know better. She served with me on a planning committee which was building a national convention of the colored section of the oppressed which was to meet in October 1961 to draft an alternative constitution to the apartheid Constitution. Thus, I saw much more of her in the course of the meetings. Alex was forced onto the sidelines because of his banning orders and fretted over this; but it was also the period when he was probably at his most creative.

From this period and from his acquaintance with George Peake, who spent time with him in the Colored Peoples Congress and who spent time breaking stones with me [in Robben Island] and subsequently committed suicide in Britain, comes the material which he was to incorporate in subsequent books such as The Stone Country, And a Three-Fold Cord, and In the Fog of the Season’s End.

Alex La Guma was an artist of enormous talent. He was also a man of great warmth and humanity. All his friends will remember him for his openness, his friendliness, and his easy charm. But he was also a man of uncompromising frankness. His dedication to the struggle for freedom and justice in South Africa made him blunt in his opposition to racism or oppression and forthright in his commitment to a free South Africa. He put his talent as he put his life, at the service of the struggle for freedom in South Africa.

We will remember with gratitude his contribution to the struggle.

Source: Memories of Home: The Writings of Alex La Guma, (ed.) Cecil Abrahams, African World Press, 1991.