SOURCE: Coetzee, J. M. “Man's Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma.” In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell, pp. 344-60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Coetzee evaluates La Guma's novels against literary criticism of the late 1960s that questioned the artistic merit of much African literature.

The Writer in South Africa

By the late 1960s, in reaction against a degree of overestimation of African writing by the literary establishments of East and West, a skeptical reassessment of its achievement was in full swing among African intellectuals. The harshest critics were writers themselves. Thus Wole Soyinka:

The curiosity of the outside world far exceeded their critical faculties, and publishers hovered like benevolent vultures on the still foetus of the African Muse … The average published writer in the first few years of the post-colonial era was the...