The novelist and activist is Cape Town’s “forgotten colossus” and it’s time to get him the literary recognition he deserves, Lindsay Johns tells Michael Morris.
Cape Town - Londoner Lindsay Johns grew up wanting to be like Charlie Pauls. It may seem a concession of sorts that he admits he was a recalcitrant teenager at the time. You could say, though, that for anybody with heart, Pauls is as fine an exemplar as you could wish for, imaginative, optimistic, resilient, a man who cares, and strives.
What animates – agitates, even angers – Johns all these years later is that so few people know who Pauls was, or is – because, for all his obscurity, he lives and breathes still in a narrative by one of Cape Town’s most sorely overlooked writers whose work is, moreover, as deeply resonant today as it was when Pauls ducked along the alleys of his and his creator’s embattled District Six.
How can it be, Johns wants to know, that the protagonist of And a Threefold Cord, the novel Alex la Guma published in 1964, is not more obviously a part of the imaginative landscape of Cape Town in 2015?
Here is a novel, he has written, that “changed my life for ever and made me who I am today”. Yet, he asks, how is it that La Guma’s novels are not setworks, or the writer himself a familiar figure in bronze or stone in the streets he last walked in 1966?
Johns has come a long way with La Guma, whose novels he counts as the most formative influences of his life – all the more striking for the fact that their worlds are, in many ways, worlds apart.
Justin Alexander la Guma was born in District Six in 1925, the son of Wilhelmina Alexander and her husband James – Jimmy – la Guma, a trade union organiser and prominent member of the then Communist Party of South Africa.
After school at Trafalgar High, he started out as a factory hand (and was fired for helping to organise a strike). After a spell as a clerk and bookkeeper, he became a reporter and cartoonist for the leftist weekly The Guardian, superseded by New Age.
Following his father into the Communist Party in the late 1940s, he became a founder member and chair of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation in 1954, whose delegation to the Kliptown Congress a year later was arrested at Beaufort West.
He was one of the 156 accused in the Treason Trial (all acquitted in 1960), yet, on suspicion of underground political activity, was placed under house arrest in 1963.
He and his family left the country on an exit permit three years later, settling first in London – he worked there as a journalist and radio scriptwriter – then Havana, Cuba from 1978, serving as the ANC’s Caribbean representative, and dying there in 1985.
He was a long way from the haunting, enchanting Cape of his childhood and early adulthood, and distant, too, no doubt, from the metropolitan centres in which the ANC’s international campaign became increasingly unignorable through the 1980s.
But he reached far and wide through his writing. Several short stories were followed by three novels written in South Africa; A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967). In exile, he wrote In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), several short stories, a travelogue, A Soviet Journey, and a number of essays on politics and culture. Among his literary awards were the prize of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1969 and France’s Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1985.
Though the literary force of La Guma’s fiction was brought chiefly to bear on apartheid oppression and the growth of revolutionary resistance to it, a critic wrote in the 1990s that “perhaps because La Guma was a more deliberate and accomplished craftsman, his didacticism was generally unobtrusive” and that, in its intensity, his “act of seeing seemed sometimes… to have reached beyond the abjection of a particular social order to embrace the human condition itself”.
Johns – whose father, Michael also went to Trafalgar High – is a testament to La Guma’s deep and long-distance literary range.
Their encounter was serendipitous. Born in 1976 and brought up in south London, Johns went on to read modern languages at Oxford, and embark on post-graduate research in London in medieval Latin and Italian literature and philosophy before becoming a writer and broadcaster.
He counts himself a political conservative, though with strong social convictions: for the past decade he has been a volunteer mentor in his spare time with a youth leadership scheme in Peckham, south London, and a Christmas volunteer at a homeless shelter.
He is a volunteer for the Mayor of London’s Classics initiative, in which he goes into schools across London giving talks on the joys of Latin and the classical world, and is also a supporter of the nationwide charity Classics For All.
Johns regularly appears on BBC TV and radio, and has written for leading British and American media.
He is a fellow (non-residential) at the Hutchins Centre for African and African-American Research at Harvard. Recent public speaking engagements have included BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking festival, the 2013 Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, the Sunday Times Festival of Education at Wellington College and the Franco-British Council in Paris.
All of this, he says, he owes to the inspiration of La Guma.
In an interview this week, Johns recalled: “Growing up in late 1980s and early 1990s Britain, other kids worshipped Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson and Nelson Mandela. My hero, however, was someone very different: Alex la Guma, a recondite Coloured South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist.”
As a “recalcitrant ‘mixed-up’ teenager”, he “devoured all La Guma’s five novels and short stories set in apartheid-era Cape Town, after having discovered with palpable joy when I was 14 his protagonists with light brown skin like mine who stood up for themselves and fought the system, at a time when I was trying to understand my own racial identity and trying to ascertain exactly where I fitted in to British society”.
He stumbled on La Guma quite by chance.
“I first read his debut novel A Walk In the Night, when I was 14. My parents had been storing some books for a South African writer friend of theirs in my room, and I just happened to discover La Guma’s novels in that dusty pile one rainy Saturday afternoon.”
He rated it an “epiphany”.
“I can directly trace wanting to be a writer back to discovering Alex’s work when I was 14 and the desire to use my voice to say meaningful things to try and help people.” It “imbued” him with a love of literature and led directly to his studying modern languages at Oxford.
“Alex la Guma became my hero because, in addition to being the Black Dickens – a consummate storyteller and an awesome prose stylist – he was a liberator, a fearsomely brave man who dedicated his life to the struggle for racial equality and who gave a voice in his fiction to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the outcasts and the oppressed, in short, society’s marginalised and ostracised.”
There was a deeply personal, and fruitful, struggle at play, too.
“Moreover, as an intellectual of colour, the tension in La Guma’s work between an ardent love of the Western literary canon (the titles of his first two novels are quotations from Hamlet and the book of Ecclesiastes respectively) and the often heinous things which have been done in its name mirror my own inner struggle, as I have striven for the past 20 years to reconcile being steeped in the classics, my social conservatism and seeking equality of opportunity for all.”
With a nod to his interest in the classics, Johns said: “At the risk of sounding too Dantean, La Guma has truly been the Statius to my Virgil.
“To this day, he has been the biggest racial, literary and social influence on my life, a guiding light who has illuminated my own path, from helping me to define my own racial identity to my prose style, and from my interests in literature, journalism, mentoring young people and helping the homeless to my commitment to freedom and human dignity.”
It is no surprise that La Guma’s obscurity pains him.
Writing in 2012, Johns noted: “This year has been full of celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth. But it is worth sparing more than a thought for La Guma – whose work has the sweep and moral power of his Victorian predecessor – and his formidable but neglected oeuvre.”
La Guma’s entry in the New Dictionary of South African Biography of 1995 ends on a pregnant note: “La Guma’s reputation outside South Africa was high, and yet his writings were banned and virtually unknown within South Africa until the late 1980s. New assessments of his achievement are awaited as his work… is assimilated into the South African literary and critical tradition.”
Writing elsewhere more recently, Johns – who has just begun a book about the impact of La Guma’s life and work on his own travels and worldview – noted: “Despite several recent biographies and critical works, he has singularly failed to move beyond the confines of marginal black South African protest writing and hermetic PhD theses onto the mainstream stage.”
Overcoming this deficiency is the work Johns has cut out for himself. It is simply stated.
“I want,” he said this week, “to revive interest in this forgotten colossus, and to try and get him the literary recognition he so richly deserves.”
* Lindsay Johns will be in South Africa next week at the Montagu Literary Festival on Saturday at 11.30am to talk about La Guma and his own introductory essay in a reissue of the novelist’s work, A Colossus Revisited (Otterley Press).
The foreword is written by Albie Sachs, who will join Johns at the Cape Town launch of the book at the Book Lounge on July 15. The book includes commentary from La Guma’s wife, Blanche la Guma.
Weekend Argus