Published by the government of Zimbabwe
5 October 2009
book review
Harare — In the Fog of the Season's End; By Alex La Guma; Harare; Baobab Books (1992); 181 Pages ISBN: 978-0-435-90980-2 (Paperback)
LIBERATION movements across the African continent in general and South Africa in particular, have been portrayed differently by various writers. Emerging from a society where racism had been institutionalised to the point of being normal, most works have come from liberal white South African writers like Alan Paton, and Nadine Gordimer, among others.
While Black South Africans have also written widely, very striking accounts of apartheid have come from the coloured population of South Africa, themselves not a privileged race in the southern African country.
Having been colonised by both the Dutch and the English, South Africa endured one of the longest and most gruelling kinds of brutality at the hands of their colonisers than most of their neighbours and brothers alike on the continent.
One of the most accurate accounts of these struggles with colonisers whose belief in their own "natural" and "God-given" superiority are given by Alex La Guma, a writer who emerged from this period.
La Guma has written widely on how bad apartheid as a system was to humanity. His novella titled A Walk in the Night portrays the trials and tribulations in the political and social existence of the coloured population in District Six of Cape Town, South Africa.
This he does through the actions of four characters drawn from that community during the course of a single night.
Besides their brushes with the police, the reader gets to see the decay and despair of the slum settlement which represents the conditions in which the majority of South Africans live. So exquisite is La Guma's power of description that one feels the miserable state of the inhabitants of the slum.
However, one of the most brilliant works of fiction ever to come from La Guma is In the Fog of the Season's End, a book that seeks to mirror the day-to-day lives of people who risk their survival in the underground movements against the entrenched system of apartheid.
These are the people who were at the forefront of a political organisation against apartheid, the system that has demoted the non-white population of the country to second-rate citizens.
Although they are part and parcel, if not the fulcrum of the struggle, their dying bodies are only paraded on television screens during the last moments of their lives.
This writer remembers how, at the thick of the liberation war in Zimbabwe, the Rhodesian authorities would parade people they had captured, at times civilians for that matter, before the public. Typical of this period were bodies that would be hung to a low-flying military chopper with a voice booming from a microphone that whoever dared to join the "terrorists" would meet the same fate. Obviously this was a deterrent tactic, the mould of which is found in, In the Fog of the Season's End.
Central in La Guma's fiction is the quest to show the economic contradictions of South Africa's hitherto separatist policies.
In the Fog of the Season's End is an autobiographical work chronicling the life of Beukes and several of his colleagues involved in political organisation against apartheid.
The author deals with the conflict between races in apartheid South Africa. In this novel, La Guma successfully shows the importance of collective action in human life. It is only through this that the society's aspirations are achieved.
Through Beukes, who is actively involved in political resistance, readers also realise the centrality of the need to care for others. Beukes is not self-centred and endures the horror of police cells alone.
The sacrifice Beukes makes is a result of the squalor and despair that force the community into political movement. This squalor and despair can be seen in La Guma's earlier works.
The apartheid regime's pass laws represented one of pre-independence South Africa's most inhuman pieces of legislation that were designed to give the Afrikaaner regime unlimited time at the helm in the country's political system. This was aided by a tailor-made police control system.
The country had become a police state and the force's involvement was meant to fortify the apartheid system.
"Around the police block the stream swirled against the dam of blue uniforms and the jerking flash lights, then slowly trickled through accompanied by shouts and curses. Lunchboxes, bundles, bags were being searched, papers examined." (p66) The placing of a police block in itself is a restrictive measure.
Inherent in this is the suspicion that the system has in the people. What is important is the fact that these are people who are coming back from work and desirous of a rest so that they would be prepared for the next day's toil.
It is in incidents like these that people see the tension between human rights and social responsibility all placed against the background of the apartheid system's separatist policies.
The resistance of the people that La Guma documents portrays them demonstrating against the pass laws.
Despite the fact that almost every citizen wanted the oppressive law discarded, the system found the pass laws sustaining it and hence continued to uphold the unpopular legislation.
"In the Township the word had gone around for the surrender or destruction of all passes that day. The passes would be taken to the White man's police station and dumped there." (p101)
What is evident here is a people's determination against a law they felt was against some of their basic rights.
One other striking importance of this incident is, however, the extent to which it goes in showing the determination of the system to remain in place regardless of whether it had outlived its relevance or not.
Those who are familiar with Zimbabwean colonial history would remember Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith's infamous "Not in a thousand years" speech with reference to the possibility of black majority rule in the country.
South Africa's apartheid system was determined to extend its life-span even if it meant going to the extent of spilling innocent blood.
"Then for some reason or another, a policeman shot into the noise. The sound of the shot was almost lost in the chanting, the singing, the laughter." (p104) The characters who are slain in the incident are not identified by name.
There is the Washerwoman, the Outlaw, the Bicycle Messenger and the Child, among others. These characters assume typical roles and represent some of the most common people in this society.
The way their deaths are described is pathetic.
The Washerwoman's "femoral arteries in the comfortable thighs had been torn through" while the Child "lay on her face and there seemed hardly a mark on her except when she was turned over and they saw the exit hole the heavy slug had made on her meagre chest".
The Bicycle Messenger "sprawled jointlessly over his fallen cycle which he had refused to abandon in flight, his flesh burst open, his spine shattered and his splintered ribs thrust into heart and lungs". (p105) So brutal were the police that they used live ammunition on defenceless civilians.
La Guma was born in Cape Town in 1925 to parents who were very active in political and labour issues.
As a result, he grew up aware of the political and socio-economic contradictions of his society. He was harassed repeatedly by the South African government and was forced to emigrate to England in 1966. La Guma died in 1985.
However, there is a stunning resemblence between La Guma and the major character, Beukes and this is the reason why the book has been widely referred to as an autobiography.
When the book ends, there is a lot of optimism in the chances of the struggle and like happens in reality, the political movement thrives at the expense of apartheid. For the discerning reader, La Guma's book remains a treasure that one would aspire to have on the bookshelf.
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