Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A man in an ordinary cloth cap’
- 2 ‘Brown Sons of Africa’
- 3 ‘The honey of a satirical philosophy’
- 4 ‘This is the time for practical politics’
- 5 ‘Maybe he thought it was a disgrace too’
- 6 ‘The clouds pregnant with moisture’
- 7 ‘Well, I'll just start again, won't I’
- 8 ‘You had to be contented with history’
- 9 ‘Y eso, lo tenemos aquí en Cuba!’
- 10 Coming Home
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A man in an ordinary cloth cap’
- 2 ‘Brown Sons of Africa’
- 3 ‘The honey of a satirical philosophy’
- 4 ‘This is the time for practical politics’
- 5 ‘Maybe he thought it was a disgrace too’
- 6 ‘The clouds pregnant with moisture’
- 7 ‘Well, I'll just start again, won't I’
- 8 ‘You had to be contented with history’
- 9 ‘Y eso, lo tenemos aquí en Cuba!’
- 10 Coming Home
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Perhaps it is more difficult than most for a historian to speak of memory, for one who practices this profession – and for what deep-seated reasons? – whose essence is the act of juxtaposing debris with explosions of often barely recognizable remembrances, which are then clad by the imagination in order to conjoin them, to reconstruct an image, according to schema that arise, willy-nilly, from oneself; to compose a figure that often stems less from the past than from the historian's dream.
(G. Duby, ‘Memories with no Historian’, p. 9)J.M. Coetzee's often-quoted comment that Alex la Guma is ‘plausibly … the most substantial writer the Western Cape had produced’ is as widely known as it is problematic, for his observation invites us to cut off La Guma's world from the lived present and to view him as a regional writer. La Guma wrote almost all his work as a banned person, an exile, and member of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), and his unbanning coincided with a literary and political shift away from Marxist theories and practices, particularly those which supported the Soviet model of socialism to which he was so committed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Alex la GumaA Literary and Political Biography, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010