Political activist, journalist, and author, Alex La Guma is best known for his fiction concerning racial oppression under the apartheid system in South Africa. Through his novels and short stories he conveys, as Nadine Gordimer says in her The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing (1973), "the sight, sound and smell of poverty and misery, so that the flesh-and-blood meaning of the colour bar becomes a shocking, sensuous impact." Driven into exile in the mid 1960s, with his books banned in his own country, La Guma gained international recognition for his efforts to bring down white-minority rule.

Justin Alexander La Guma was born 20 February 1925 in District Six, a working-class ghetto of Cape Town. He was the son of Jimmy La Guma, president of the South African Coloured People's Congress and member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, and Wilhelmina Alexander La Guma, a worker in...