Alex La Guma

Justin Alexander "Alex" La Guma was born on the twentieth of February 1924 in District Six, the vibrant working-class quarter at the heart of Cape Town. He was the son of James (Jimmy) La Guma, a leading trade unionist and political figure prominent in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union and the South African Communist Party. Raised amid struggle and political conviction, the young Alex absorbed both the injustices of a segregated society and the discipline of organised resistance.

He came of age as a committed activist, joining the Young Communist League in 1947 and the South African Communist Party soon after, and helping found the South African Coloured People's Organisation in 1953. He stood among the accused in the historic Treason Trial and endured repeated arrest, detention, and house arrest for his defiance of apartheid, bearing each imposition without surrendering his principles.

From that furnace of experience emerged a writer of rare force. His 1962 novella A Walk in the Night rendered the streets of District Six with unflinching honesty and deep compassion, followed by And a Threefold Cord, The Stone Country, In the Fog of the Seasons' End, and Time of the Butcherbird. In 1969 he was honoured with the Lotus Prize for Literature, a recognition from the Afro-Asian community of letters.

Forced into exile in 1966, he continued to write and to serve the African National Congress abroad, later becoming its chief representative in the Caribbean and Latin America from Havana, where he died on the eleventh of October 1985. We honour Alex La Guma, whose pen gave dignity and voice to the silenced.