[In the Fog of the Season's End] marks a new and refreshing direction in South African literature. For in this novel the characters are no longer merely acted upon by events but are themselves acting, showing a marked determination to control their future through positive struggle. (p. 59)

La Guma is still as angry about apartheid as he was in his earlier works. But here the anger is carefully controlled and the self-pity that his characters indulged in A Walk in the Night is here absent. In that bitter work the oppressed of South Africa were capable only of turning their anger on themselves. Michael Adonis was caught without having done anything more to recognise the real enemy in practical terms than to kill a defenceless white man who had been exiled into the coloured community. Since mere bitterness is equivalent to blindness, the people in A Walk in...