Pan-Africanism: Freedom for Africa

The Pan-Africanist dream of freedom as expressed in South African political writings and literature from the 1940s to 1970s is the focus of the final chapter. The Pan-Africanist dreams expressed in political discourse that are discussed include: the ANC Youth League’s Manifesto (1944); the ANC’s Programme of Action (1949); the political writings of Muziwakhe Anton Lembede, A. P. Mda and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe; the PAC’s Manifesto of the Africanist Movement (1959); and the articles and reviews in PAC publications like The Africanist and Mafube. Pan-Africanist dreams of freedom expressed in literary terms are discussed in sections on Lembede’s thoughts on individual literary works; Mda’s prescriptions for literature; Sobukwe’s wide reading and eclectic literary tastes; Melikhaya Mbutumu’s praise poems; novels hostile to the PAC by Peter Abrahams, Richard Rive and Alex la Guma; and novels sympathetic to the PAC by Lauretta Ngcobo and Bessie Head. The popularity within the PAC of Howard Fast’s novels My Glorious Brothers (1948) and Spartacus (1951) is also assessed.

Resistance, Liberation, and Aesthetics in the Early Novels of Alex La Guma

Alex La Guma, the late South African Coloured novelist and short-story writer, died in exile in Cuba in 1985. Until his death, he was clearly the most ambitious novelist in South Africa of the apartheid era. Even while he was in exile, he kept in touch with the momentum of the anti-apartheid struggle, which culminated in the abrogation of apartheid and the attainment of independence with the ascendance of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first non-white president in 1994. Resistance and liberation are unmistakably the credos enshrined in La Guma’s fiction. But these thematic preoccupations did not distract him from his calling as a consummate writer who also needed to pay particular attention to the dictates of the art of fiction in his novels and short stories. Thus, in his fiction we find a true blend or matrix of resistance, liberation, and aesthetics. This essay sets out to unravel the trajectory of La Guma’s depiction of this matrix in some of his early novels which, by and large, could be said to have anticipated the revolutionary imperatives of his later fiction.