ALEX LA GUMA, culture and liberation, exile writings, 1966-1985, foreword by Albie Sachs, afterword by Bill Nasson

581pp., hardback, d.w., Calcutta, 2022.

Alex La Guma's political journalism, literary criticism, and other essays published while he was in exile.

"Alex La Guma's novels of the 1960s and 1970s, banned in South Africa during his lifetime, form an important part of the literature of resistance to apartheid. This new collection of hard-to-come-by shorter pieces ... is a welcome edition to the La Guma oeuvre. Though La Guma's Soviet-inflected essays, speeches and journalism reflect the doctrine of their time, the stories and essays set in South Africa and working class Cape Town remain particularly valuable." J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate 

"Christopher J Lee has gathered together a weighty assortment of essays, reports, reviews, interviews and stories penned over the course of La Guma’s career. These ancillary texts, the sort of thing writers do out of interest, obligation and a need to support life, are a vital if unwieldy archive through which La Guma’s abiding preoccupations can be traced."  Johannesburg Review of Books

Activist and writer Alex La Guma (1925-1985) was leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO), a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress and one of the Treason Trialists. He went into exile in the UK in 1966, and later served as the ANC’s diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba, where he died. His books include A Walk in the Night, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, and Time of the Butcherbird.