It is difficult to separate Alex La Guma's novel, And a Threefold Cord, from its author's life and the circumstances of its writing. One of the Coloured leaders against apartheid in Cape Town, where he was born, Mr. La Guma … wrote the book between two terms of imprisonment while under house arrest in 1963…. [The novel] is a restrained account of a few days in one family's life in the shanty slums on the outer fringes of Cape Town. The book has no overt message—save the simple one of its epigraph, from Ecclesiastes, which gives the work its title—yet it is impossible to read the description of death, birth, crime, tragedy and brutality in these lower depths of South Africa, of the maggot-infested rubbish-dump which is the children's favourite playground and of the incessant struggle to keep the crazy shacks standing against wind and rain, without saluting...