A Walk in the Night and Other Stories

by Alex La Guma

Overview

In the title story, in a Cape Town shantytown called District Six in the 1960s, Michael Adonis has lost his job at a metal sheet factory after an argument with a white supervisor. Illuminating the toxic effects of poverty, police brutality, and violence, the book paints a stark and unforgettable portrait of Adonis's emotional and physical destruction in apartheid South Africa. These works reveal the plight of non-whites in apartheid South Africa, laying bare the lives of the poor and the outcasts who filled the ghettoes and shantytowns.
 
Of French and Malagasy stock, involved in South African politics from an early age, Alex La Guma was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. He died in 1986. A Walk in the Night and Other Stories reveals La Guma as one of the most important African writers of his time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810101395
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1968
Edition description:	1
Pages:	129
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ALEX LA GUMA was arrested for treason with 155 others in 1956 and finally acquitted in 1960. During the State of Emergency following the Sharpeville massacre he was detained for five months. Continuing to write, he endured house arrest and solitary confinement. La Guma left South Africa as a refugee in 1966 and lived in exile in London and Havana. La Guma was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature. He died in 1986.

Editorial Reviews

"...one of the world’s great novelists, arguably the greatest Africa—let alone South Africa—has ever produced, a man who was not only a prodigiously talented writer but also a valiant hero of the anti-apartheid struggle." —The Root

From the Publisher