Between 1957 and 1962, and while he was working on A Walk in the Night, La Guma's short stories and journalism dealt with perceptions of race and social mobility, and with the relationship between racial identity and political consciousness. This period also saw the banning of the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress, the Sharpeville and Langa massacres and the Coloured National Convention. La Guma was detained without trial, banned and placed under house arrest. There is a fluid and dynamic relationship between his journalism and fiction of this period, for each influenced the other, and his journalism and short stories hinted at issues that would soon appear in his longer fiction. There were differences between his political, journalistic and literary interpretations of the ways in which coloured identity could be experienced and lived, with the result that the same literary and stylistic devices simultaneously undermined his political goals and reinforced them.

‘Still king of the jungle’

During the early years of the Treason Trial and SACPO's 1958 election campaign, La Guma published only two short stories – ‘Out of Darkness’ and ‘Battle for Honour’. For the former he received a welcome £10 from Africa South editor Ronald Segal. He was on the road to becoming a full-time, though not necessarily well-paid, writer. Both stories suggest that access to the dominant European metropolitan culture, whether through emigration or passing for white, could not resolve South Africa's problems.