SOURCE: Coetzee, J. M. “Alex La Guma and the Responsibilities of the South African Writer.” Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts, nos. 9-10 (September 1971): 5-11.

In the following essay, Coetzee, who in 2003 received the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature, defends Alex La Guma's A Walk in the Night against journalist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi's contention that the fiction of Black South African writers provides an “inadequate imaginative response” to the problems of apartheid. Coetzee argues that La Guma's fiction is not simple journalistic naturalism, but rather a cogent analysis of the political weakness of urban South African society under apartheid.

With the best will in the world it is impossible to detect in the fiction of black South Africans any significant and complex talent which responds with both the vigor of the imagination and sufficient technical resources to the problems posed by conditions in South...