SOURCE: Maja-Pearce, Adewale. “The Victim as Hero: Alex La Guma's Short Stories.” London Magazine 24, no. 3 (June 1984): 71-4.

In the following essay, Maja-Pearce explores La Guma's handling of the victims of apartheid as characters in his short stories.

It seems odd, on the face of it, that Africa has produced more novelists than short-story writers. One would have imagined the African condition to be perfectly suited to a literary form which, in the words of Bernard Bergonzi, ‘deals with life's victims, the insulted and injured, the forlorn and alienated’,—in a nutshell, the history of modern Africa. And the case for the short story, as opposed to the novel, is further supported by the absence of a stable social order against which the novelist can set his characters: it was out of such order and stability that the great European novelists of the 19th century were born; it is...