Oases in the Desert: Optimistic Vision in Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night and a Threefold Cord

Abstract

The metaphor of the desert best describes the poverty-stricken, miserable and marginal apartheid-induced life of the blacks as depicted by Alex La Guma in A Walk in the Night and And a Threefold Cord. The crime, prostitution, drunkenness and gangsterism which constitute the world of District Six and the Cape Flats, the settings of the two works, no doubt, justify this metaphor. But then, not even the driest of deserts is bereft of a few refreshing oases, pockets of hope which La Guma couches in symbols. This paper, therefore, explores this optimistic vision in the two works in focus, a recognition of the novelist’s faithfulness to realism which dictates that the artist should be able to capture imaginatively, the realities of his immediate environment. The overall artistic significance of this optimistic vision, the paper contends, does not only lie in helping to tone down the grimness of the narrative but in foreshadowing the ultimate victory of the struggle of the non-whites over the forces of oppression as represented by the hydra-headed apartheid system of government.