In Alex La Guma: A Literary Political Biography (Jacana), Roger Field charts the life and creativity of a prominent South African novelist who was also the leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation and a defendant in the Treason Trial. This is an edited extract:
The other noteworthy expression of La Guma’s graphic skills was the comic strip, Liberation Chabalala, which appeared in 37 consecutive issues of New Age between March 5 and November 12 1959. Because it precedes his longer prose fiction, there is a good case for arguing that it, not A Walk in the Night, was La Guma’s first major published work, and that exploration of La Guma’s interest in, and debt to, aspects of popular culture may provide us with additional perspectives on the novelist in whose work most critics have found echoes of Gorky, Dostoyevsky and American Naturalism.
Although several critics have used graphic or artistic images to describe La Guma’s prose fiction, they have paid little attention to his graphic work, and La Guma himself has contributed to this oversight by stressing interest dating from childhood in “serious works, both political and literary”. Despite the steady and welcome erosion of barriers between “high” and “popular” culture in the analysis of images and texts, few critics have explored the numerous signs of La Guma’s interest in popular culture scattered throughout his novels. Friends and relatives, however, have indicated other interests: James Hadley Chase and Raymond Chandler, Damon Runyon’s romanticised New York underworld, the Katzenjammer Kids, Big Ben Bolt and The Heart of Juliet Jones, the Coon Carnival, the cinema in general and Westerns in particular. Those critics who have acknowledged the impact of the cartoon strip have either regarded it as a staging post en route to more serious matters or concentrated on its political content — the representation of ethnic groups, for example — rather than its graphic and experimental qualities.
Content was important. According to Albie Sachs, La Guma “deliberately chose an African Liberation Chabalala to give it [the comic] a more universal appeal … it was part of the broad nonracialism of New Age“, and this also accounts for La Guma’s use of “Asihamba” [‘as we go along’] as a link” between episodes instead of “to be continued”, but they have not considered the possibility that a more subversive, anarchic and anti-establishment La Guma existed alongside the serious and politically correct public persona.
The Treason Trial brought La Guma to Johannesburg for the first time since infancy, and the narrator of [New Age column] Up My Alley and the comic strip saw it as “the big city”. This view coincides with popular perceptions of Cape Town as smaller and more easy-going than brash, bustling and dangerous Johannesburg, which he compared with “Chicago in the heyday of Al Capone, John Dillinger and the hectic days of illegal booze”. In this respect, his image of Johannesburg consolidated the Americanisation of urban African experience that Drum had already popularised and mythologised.
Other more specific references from Up My Alley found their way into the strip: Johannesburg’s Chinatown, “a quartet of the ‘Ghost squad'” (a plain-clothes police snatch squad that enforced the pass laws), the ruins of Sophiatown, and Vrededorp, former home of the novelist Peter Abrahams, now on the eve of its destruction and “awaiting the Group Areas axe”. By the time Little Libby appeared, La Guma had a useful “bank” of textual images familiar to readers of his Up My Alley column. Some, like the Drum-oriented images, were public property, whereas others stemmed from his own writing and sense of humour.
Because the trial restricted the news-gathering opportunities of New Age and Fighting Talk journalists, La Guma and his colleagues had to find material that could travel well between Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria and adapt to unpredictable interruptions.
From this perspective, his reviews, the Up My Alley column and Little Libby were convenient and pragmatic solutions, ones that also provide us with insights into his views on the relationship between popular and high culture and their audiences.
In his review of Emlyn Williams’s performance at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre, he does not argue that “folk” art is the product of an egalitarian society, or that there is no distinction between “popular” and “fine” art. In the comic he can act out an unmediated relationship between performer and audience because American popular culture was so pervasive and its conventions so widely accepted that they had become invisible. Longing for social unity would re-emerge in his cultural and literary criticism towards the end of his life.