Lindsay Johns

the New Age newspaper, and then a novelist.

After being a defendant in the infamous 1956 Rivonia Freedom Trial, surviving an assassination attempt by the secret police in 1958, then spells in the notorious Roeland Street prison and five arduous years of house arrest and brutal police harassment, La Guma finally went to London in exile with his wife Blanche and two children in September 1966.

He eked out a precarious existence as a penurious novelist while also flying all over the world on anti-apartheid business.

In 1978, he was appointed chief representative of the ANC in Havana, Cuba, where he lived until he died of a heart attack, aged 60, in 1985.

La Guma dedicated his life to the Struggle. He was a man of thought and action living in dangerous times, who had the rare talent, the indomitable spirit and the unyielding courage to both “talk the talk” and “walk the walk”. His literary oeuvre, his moral fortitude and his uncommon valour all merit being lauded and globally applauded.

In addition to being the

“Black Dickens” – a consummate storyteller and a distinguished prose stylist – La Guma was a liberator, a fearlessly brave man who gave a voice in his fiction to the poor, the downtrodden, and the dispossessed.

Amid the cauldron of insanity which was South Africa, he strove for human freedom and dignity for all. When little was known of the horrors of apartheid internationally, he alerted the world to the nefarious legacy of man’s inhumanity to man.

Even though his novels are set in a very racially and socially specific milieu, La Guma, like Dickens, created beautifully delineated, nuanced characters and told timeless, universal stories of abiding contemporary relevance.

The great Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o said of him: “La Guma dramatised the resilience of the human spirit.”

Very few writers have been able to dramatise that resilience and articulate the majesty and meaninglessness of the human condition with as much aplomb, wry humour and stylistic felicity as La Guma did.

La Guma was a proudly African writer, a black revolutionary hero and vocal on the topic of coloured identity, but crucially one whose message of non-racial, compassionate humanism is exceedingly relevant in today’s

Alex La Guma was a novellist and a Struggle icon, yet many young people in Cape Town have never heard of him, says the writer.