Novel
A Walk in the Night
Alex La Guma · 1962
Synopsis
Michael Adonis, a young coloured man from District Six, in Cape Town, has just been dismissed from his sheet-metal factory for insulting a white foreman. He wanders the neighbourhood, runs into his friend Willieboy, a gang planning a burglary, two white policemen who rough him up for no reason. Back in his building, in his anger he strikes a drunken old Irish actor who compares himself to Hamlet's ghost, and the man dies. Willieboy finds the body and flees; he is thought guilty, and Constable Raalt, a brutal Afrikaner policeman, sets out in pursuit through the night of the neighbourhood.
Context
The author's first book, the short novel appeared in 1962 in Ibadan, Nigeria, from Mbari, then five years later in London, which opened it to readers in Europe and the United States. Written after Sharpeville and the state of emergency, it sought to make Western readers aware of life in District Six. It remained banned in South Africa during its author's lifetime, and could not be quoted there before 1990. Nadine Gordimer praised characters who do not discuss apartheid but bear its marks; the French translation appeared from Hatier in 1984.
Who it is for
A short novel in English, in a spare style, which reproduces the speech of District Six; translated into French.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the most widely read works by a Black South African writer, and discussed by Lewis Nkosi as well as by J. M. Coetzee.
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