Abstract
This article examines the nexus between political commitment and literariness in Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night (published 1962), situating the novella within postcolonial debates on aesthetics, resistance, and socially engaged writing. While La Guma’s fiction has frequently been read primarily as anti-apartheid protest literature, this study argues that such readings often underestimate the complex artistic strategies through which political consciousness is mediated. Drawing on postcolonial theory the paper reconsiders the tension between ideological commitment and aesthetic value by analysing characterisation, aesthetic values, narrative structure, spatial representation, and realism in the novella. It demonstrates that the representation of District Six functions not just as documentary realism, but as a literary reconstruction of colonial violence, social alienation, and of psychological dispossession under apartheid. Rather than reducing literature to only political propaganda, La Guma deploys literariness – symbolism, narrative focalisation, and critical realism – to expose structural injustices, while also foregrounding human agency and moral ambiguity. This article thus repositions A Walk in the Night as a novella in which ‘artistic form’ and ‘political commitment’ operate dialectically. It concludes that, La Guma’s work exemplifies a distinctly postcolonial aesthetics in which literary imagination is in itself a mode of resistance, historical witnessing, and decolonial critique.
Keywords: Alex La Guma, apartheid, commitment,
literariness, postcolonialism, African literature.
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.018
author/Dr Shamsuddeen Bello
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
