Quote by Alex La Guma: “Our struggle is not yet ended. That is why I write.”

Writing, for La Guma, was not a personal exercise or artistic indulgence — it was a political act required by incomplete justice. As long as oppression continues, the writer has an obligation to bear witness and to speak. This frames storytelling as a form of duty, not decoration.

La Guma published A Walk in the Night in 1962, the same year Nelson Mandela was arrested and the armed wing of the ANC launched its first sabotage campaign. South Africa's apartheid system was entering one of its most brutal phases, and Black writers faced banning orders, imprisonment, and exile for their work.

South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist whose fiction — including A Walk in the Night and In the Fog of the Seasons' End — documented life under apartheid with gritty realism. A member of the South African Communist Party, he lived in exile after being banned under apartheid law.