[Alex La Guma's novels] tell a long continuous story of oppression, exploitation and dehumanization of blacks by a ruthless social machine.

La Guma's appraisal of the agony of South African blacks and coloureds is well represented in two suggestively dramatic and symbolic situations in And A Threefold Cord and The Stone Country, respectively, accounts of a fly trapped in a cup, and of a prison cat sadistically chasing a mouse. In the first, we are given an insight into the gruesome struggle against the stifling, almost elemental, force of apartheid. In the second, La Guma attempts to capture the life of haunted blacks as they enact their tragic drama against the parched background of "the stone country."… (p. 77)

La Guma's main success in [the passage about the cat and mouse] lies in the sympathetic relationship which is established between the prison inmates and the mouse in this symbolic...