A Walk in the Night by Alex La Guma

First published: 1962

Type of work: Social naturalism

Time of work: One night c. 1960

Locale: District Six, a slum in Cape Town, South Africa

Principal Characters:

• Michael Adonis, a young man, just fired from a factory job
• Willieboy, a young petty criminal, chronically unemployed
• Constable Raalt, a middle-aged white policeman
• Uncle Doughty, a once-famous Irish actor, an alcoholic
• Joe, a runaway boy, a friend of Michael
• Franky Lorenzo, a middle-aged tenement dweller, a stevedore
• John Abrahams, an older man in the tenement, a police informer

The Novel

As A Walk in the Night begins, Michael Adonis jumps down from a truck into the chaos of traffic occasioned by workers returning home at the end of the day. He nurses a growing anger, having been fired from his job at a sheet-metal factory for swearing at a white foreman who accused him of being lazy when he requested permission to go to the bathroom. Moving through a ghetto world of prostitutes, gangsters, and thugs, Michael stops at a Portuguese cafe, where he meets Willieboy, an acquaintance, and shares with him resentful anger at having lost his job. As Willieboy boasts of not even trying to find legitimate work, Foxy’s gang enters the cafe, looking for Sockies, a member of the gang, in order to do a burglary that night. Foxy teases Michael for being “a good boy,” and Michael leaves the cafe shortly after the gang does. He wanders the streets, noting foreign investments in businesses and giving Joe, a young boy who lives on the beach and in the streets, money for a meal. While trying to walk off his anger, Michael is stopped by the police and is searched for marijuana. Before going home, he stops in a pub where he swaps stories about tough-guy film heroes, compares American and South African racism, and discusses black crimes against blacks in the ghetto.

Throughout these early, brief chapters, Alex La Guma’s third-person omniscient narrator creates a harshly detailed world of nightmare existence. Life is marginal at best; Michael’s gesture of compassion toward Joe is the exception rather than the rule. When Michael reaches his gloomy tenement, which appears to be “left-overs of a bombed area,” he exchanges a few words with Hazel, a prostitute, and encounters Uncle Doughty, an alcoholic who also lives in the tenement. Doughty insists that Michael join him in his room for a drink; Michael, still seething with anger at the foreman Scofield and enraged by the police harassment, taunts Doughty by withholding his bottle of cheap wine from him. When Doughty begins to mumble lines from Hamlet, “I am thy father’s spirit, doomed . . . to walk the night . . . for the day confined to fast in fires,” and says to him, “That’s us, us, Michael.... Just ghosts, doomed to walk the night,” Michael becomes enraged at what he takes as an insult, drunkenly blurring Doughty’s quotation with the remarks of the foreman. Senselessly and blindly, Michael strikes out at Doughty’s skull, killing him. Immediately, Michael realizes what he has done and retreats to his own room in self-disgust but rationalizing that the old man had “no right living here with us Coloreds.”

Willieboy, meanwhile, decides to try to borrow money from Michael, but when Michael does not answer his door, Willieboy decides to try to borrow from Doughty. Opening the door to Doughty’s room, Willieboy sees the body, backs up, and slams the door; a woman across the hall sees him, and he flees down the stairs and past a man loitering near the building’s entrance. Seized with fear and broke, Willieboy goes to a neighborhood brothel, where he talks Gipsy, the madame, into letting him drink on credit. To mask his fear, however, Willieboy starts an argument with some American sailors; when it erupts into a knife fight, Gipsy cracks the drunken Willieboy over the head with a bottle and has him tossed out into the street. When he comes to his senses, Willieboy wanders around possessed by fantasies of power and wealth, until he meets an old man, Mr. Greene, whom he mugs. Discovering the man has no money, Willieboy kicks him brutally until Greene, terrified, manages to get to his feet and runs away.

At the tenement, a crowd has gathered, waiting for the police van to make its rounds. When Constable Raalt and his driver Andries arrive at the scene, they coerce John Abrahams, who has voluntarily identified Willieboy as the man who ran past him, into giving them a full description of him. Raalt is a racist who bitterly hates his wife, his job, and his patrol route in the ghetto, District Six. He demands bribes from small-time gamblers and humiliates them even when they pay him. Raalt is indifferent to the reported murder until he discovers that Doughty was a white man; then he takes a vehement interest in the case, pressing Abrahams for further details and learning only that Willieboy wears a yellow shirt. Franky Lorenzo, whose family lives in desperate poverty in the tenement, cautions Abrahams against cooperating, but he is threatened by Raalt for even the presumption that he has an equal right to speak.

Michael, as the crowd gathers, awakens from a dream of marriage and slips away from the building. He joins Joe in an Indian cafe and quietly revels in the new sense of power that his murder of Doughty has given him. Foxy shows up, still looking for Sockies, and offers Michael the job with the gang. Although Michael feels flattered, he refuses and Foxy leaves, keeping the offer open. Joe recounts the story of his family’s disintegration after his father abandoned them, and his own flight when his mother planned to take them to the country. He tries to discourage Michael from joining the gang, but Michael does anyway. As he proves himself worthy of gang membership by smoking marijuana, Michael and the gang hear pistol shots echoing in the night.

After allowing Greene to flee, Willieboy has turned down the street only to encounter the police van and Raalt, who recognizes him from Abrahams’ description. When the van stops, Willieboy runs and Raalt gives chase. As Willieboy hides on a rooftop, he recalls his childhood of poverty and hunger and the beatings from his mother, who in turn was beaten by his father. When Raalt discovers him, Willieboy flees the rooftop and drops into the street, where he is confronted by the crowd. In full view of the people, Raalt shoots Willieboy, who is unarmed, and loads him into the police van. As the crowd pelts the van with bricks, Raalt refuses to call for an ambulance and drives away from the crowd. On the way to the police station, Raalt stops at the Portuguese cafe for cigarettes and chats with the proprietor while Willieboy bleeds to death on the floor of the van.

As the “ordinary” night of violence and death edges toward dawn, Michael commits burglary with Foxy’s gang, a cockroach feasts on filth on the floor of Doughty’s room, Joe wanders along the beach, Abrahams regrets his betrayal (not knowing that he identified the wrong man), and Grace Lorenzo, Franky’s wife, lies awake feeling the child that they are expecting move inside her.

The Characters

Without exception, Alex La Guma’s characters in A Walk in the Night are human beings reduced by apartheid South Africa to mere vestiges of human dignity. Raalt’s anger at his own entrapped situation parallels that of Michael, who is a disfigured Adonis. While the police are differentiated from the nonwhite victims of apartheid, their coarse power does not alleviate their own dehumanization. Raalt wants to murder his wife just as Michael murders Doughty, but Raalt’s hatred is premeditated and Michael’s is impulsive, responding perhaps to the premonition of Doughty’s quotation from Hamlet. Each victim suffers separately and distinctly, yet each one is but a ghost of humanity. The victims are the scapegoats of apartheid; they tend to extremes of bravado and terror in their mentality. The only images of power and decent living are those found in the illusions of the cinema. In reality, the victims are caught in a double bind: In order to establish a sense of self-worth, they must betray one another or themselves. Abrahams, in an ironic betrayal alluding to the Old Testament patriarch, gains a sense of superiority over his neighbors by collaborating with the police, but he does so at the cost of his community’s respect. If Franky succeeds in getting Abrahams to keep quiet, he will be arrested himself for intimidating a witness; ironically, neither Abrahams nor Franky has much power in solving the crime or in protecting the criminal: The actual murderer goes free, because the real crime is apartheid itself.

Despite the brutal details of immense suffering, La Guma provides just enough tenderness to suggest that the human spirit has not been entirely crushed. Even as Michael slides toward murder and a criminal life, he recognizes Joe’s helplessness and responds with compassion and food. He understands that Joe did not run away to the country, because there is no place to which one can run from apartheid, just as Michael himself cannot run from Doughty’s murder. Franky’s frustration at his inability to provide for his family, despite steady employment, turns to tenderness toward Grace and his children. The novel ends with Grace, a name that is clearly symbolic, feeling the “knot of life” within her. While La Guma’s portraits are brutal, they are not cynical. Given the opportunity for dignity and democracy, the characters are capable of being compassionate people.

Critical Context

A Walk in the Night is La Guma’s first novel, and it remains one of the most widely read novels by a black South African. Its publication in Ibadan, Nigeria, was followed five years later by publication in London, which gave it a much wider audience in Europe and the United States. La Guma’s writing grew out of his political activism against apartheid; a journalist, he was arrested for his role in assisting in the writing of the freedom charter, in 1955, for the Congress of the People, dedicated to South African democracy. Jailed for five years, he was released only to be arrested again in 1961, for planning a strike against the government. With the passage of the Sabotage Act in 1962, La Guma was punished for his anti-apartheid activism by being sentenced to confinement in his own house, twenty-four hours a day for five years. In 1966, he escaped to London.

As a “banned” person, La Guma’s novels have all been published outside South Africa. Two subsequent novels, And a Threefold Cord (1964) and The Stone Country (1967), were first published in Berlin; In the Fog of the Season’s End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979 were first published in London. La Guma’s naturalism has precedents in Emile Zola and Richard Wright, but primarily in its style: His experience itself is his determining source. Nadine Gordimer, white fellow South African writer, has said of La Guma that he “presents men and women who don’t talk about apartheid; they bear its weals, so that its flesh-and-blood meaning becomes a shocking, sensuous impact.”

Bibliography

Gakwandi, S. A. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa, 1977.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. Alex La Guma: The Literary and Political Functions of Marginality in the Colonial Situation, 1982.

Rabkin, D. “La Guma and Reality in South Africa,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. VII, no. 1 (1973), pp. 54-62.

Wade, Michael. “Art and Mortality in Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night,” in The South African Novel in English: Essays in Criticism and Society, 1979. Edited by Kenneth Parker.

Wanjala, Chris L., ed. Standpoints on African Literature: A Critical Anthology, 1973.