Alex La Guma

Alex La Guma (20 February 1924 – 11 October 1985) was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa.

Quotes

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (1962)

• The old man made a small, honking, animal noise and dropped back on the bed.

• The law don't like white people being finished off. Well I didn't mos mean it. Better get out before somebody comes. I never been in here. He looked at the sprawled figure that looked like a blown down scarecrow. Well he didn't have no right living here with us Coloreds.

• That's all they know. Shooting us people.

In the Fog of the Seasons' End (1972)

• We all good enough to be servants. Because we’re black, they think we good enough just to change their nappies.
  • Talk between Beukes and a nursemaid

• I’m not saying a person can change it tomorrow or next year. But even if you don’t get what you want today, soon, it’s a matter of pride, dignity....

• Trouble. There’s always trouble.’ He spoke as if trouble was something he experienced all the time, but trouble was a stranger to her.
  • p. 11

• Anger grew inside him like a ripening seed and the tendrils of its burgeoning writhed along his bones, through his muscles, into his mind.
  • p.79

• In the foyer of the offices of the petroleum company where Isaac worked, a woman with tired, bleached hair and the face of a painted wax doll accidentally left near a fire and then hastily retrieved, kept guard in the little telephone exchange behind polished plate glass and mahogany.
  • p. 110

• Life has, for Beukes, become like a gangster movie, filled with

mysterious rides, messages left in obscure places, veiled telephone conversations. The torture chambers and the third degree had been transferred from celluloid strips in segregated cinemas to the real world which still hung on to its outward visible signs of peace: the shoppers innocently crowding the sidewalks, the racing results, the Saturday night parties, the act of love.

• (p25)

External links

• A Walk in the Night
• In the Fog of the Seasons' End