Alex La Guma - A Walk in the Night

By Baba G. Jallow

Violence is a double-edged sword. It affects both victim and perpetrator. People who inflict
violence on others must inevitably be victims of that very same violence. And victims of
violence invariably direct some form of violence against their punishers; this could be physical
violence or simply a massive cloud of emotional violence - hatred, anger, a desire for revenge
directed against the person of the perpetrator. The problem Alex La Guma addresses in A Walk
in the Night and most of his novels, is, to quote Richard Priebe (2005) "the problem of multiple
communities defined in exclusive terms but living in the same space on the same land." It is the
problem of Apartheid and its violence.
Violence dehumanizes both victim and victimizer. In inflicting a certain kind of violence
like the racial oppression inherent in Apartheid, the victimizers deny the humanity of their
victims. In refusing to see that the objects of their violence feel pain, that they scream and cry
out, that when they are shot or cut with a knife, the blood that flows from their bodies is just as
red as one’s own blood, the perpetrators of such denial close their eyes to their own humanity.
Such denial has severe psychological effects on the perpetrators of violence, a phenomenon
graphically described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. French soldiers who spent
hours inflicting torture on Algerian peasants suffered from extreme neurosis that in some cases,
led to their committing suicide or running mad.
Fanon and other major writers on colonialism such as Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and
the Colonized) and Aime Cesaire (Discourse on Colonialism) deal extensively with the
dehumanizing effects of violence on perpetrator and victim alike. More recent writers on the
subject have reiterated this fact. Priebe writes that “observer, perpetrator, and victim are all
reduced to objects by the face of violence” (2005: 48). Priebe illustrates the domino effect of
violence by citing the story of Tantalus in Greek mythology, whose crime of killing his son and
serving his flesh to the gods lead, centuries later, to the tragic chain of events dramatized in
Aeschylus’s Oresteia Trilogy: Helen’s abduction by Paris of Troy, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his
daughter Ipheginia; Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon in revenge of her daughter’s death;
and Orestes’ killing of his mother to avenge his father according to the dictates of Apollo. “The
equation is simple: violence yields violence” (ibid. 53). “Violence is an inseparable part of our
shared humanity; its force is dangerous to the individual and community alike; no one person or
group can own or control it; no one person or group can use it with impunity” (ibid. 53).
Alex La Guma subscribes to the Fanonian thesis that violence can only breed violence
and that victims of violence are left with no choice but to react with violence. By all accounts,
Apartheid was one of the most violent assaults on humanity in recent times. It was as racist and
Fascist as Nazism. From 1910 when Britain formally vested political power in the hands of the
white minority in South Africa, the infliction of emotional and physical violence on black, Asian
and colored South Africans was carried out with mechanical precision. As La Guma writes in the
introduction to his edited collection Apartheid, “The country’s constitution institutionalized
racism and prepared the grounds for the various aspects of national oppression, exploitation,
humiliation and brutalization of the non-white people” (1978: 13). Even though Apartheid
became state policy only after the National Party election victory of 1948, its roots go as far back
as the early days of Dutch and British settlement at the Cape and on the frontier of British
Kaffraria (mid-17th to early 19th centuries).
 It is impossible to list all the various types of emotional and physical violence that the
policy of separate development inflicted upon non-white South Africans between 1948 and 1994.
Keeping South Africa white was the basic aim of Apartheid. In an article titled Vulture Culture
in La Guma’s collection, Breyten Breytenbach describes Apartheid as “the space of the white
man’s being . . . the distance needed to convince himself of his denial of the other’s humanity. It
ends up denying all humanity of any kind to the other and to himself. Apartheid is the white
man’s night, the darkness which blurs his consciousness and his conscience. What one doesn’t
see doesn’t exist” (Apartheid, 138). It is this night that Apartheid imposed on South African
society that Alex La Guma symbolically references in A Walk in the Night.
Alex La Guma was a writer of resistance who rejected both the individualism of Western
society and the illusion that the White minority of South African society was immune to the
violence it inflicted upon the non-white majority. His graphic description of the oppressive heat
and desert conditions in Time of the Butcherbird and the environment of decadence in A Walk in
the Night is symbolic of a common fate that afflicted whites and non-whites alike. In both works,
Apartheid is portrayed as a giant monster that fed upon the flesh of society. And like a monster,
it did not distinguish white from black flesh. The whole atmosphere of District Six is one of
palpable hostility, of rage, of extreme poverty, of the decadence, depravation and beastliness that
are the logical consequences of a system that feeds and thrives on man’s inhumanity to man.
Thus, even Constable Raalt, the supposedly most powerful character in A Walk in the
Night, comes across as one of the most, if not the most miserable soul in the book. Raalt is a
bundle of rage and bitterness. Constantly fuming at the presumed disloyalty of his wife, he is
“fed-up with riding around looking at these effing hotnot bastards” and wishing that he could lay
his hands “on one of those bushman bastards and wring his bloody neck” (Walk, 29 & 36). The
absurdity of Raalt’s boiling rage becomes evident when one realizes that the only reason he is so
hostile to these “hotnot bastards” is that they are of a different skin color than his. It is clear that
Raalt’s humanity has been dealt an extremely devastating blow by his practice of dehumanizing
his fellow beings. He has been reduced to a raw savagery that approximates the savagery of a
wild animal that pounces upon lesser animals and tears them apart for the simple reason that they
are weaker than itself. La Guma uses a metaphor of Raalt as animal as the racist cop pursues
Willieboy on the dark rooftop: "He had his quarry trapped and he was quite sure that he would
conclude the hunt successfully. He crouched there in the dark and smiled with satisfaction"
(Walk, 81).
In the character of Raalt as a representation of the white establishment, La Guma portrays
the dehumanization of the supposedly all-powerful oppressor. Raalt is little more than a senseless
beast of prey as he moves around District Six. He raids the Jolly Boys Social Club, bullies Chips
and extorts money from him, eventually leaving him with a bloodied mouth. At the scene of
Doughty's murder, Raalt treats the residents with his characteristic contempt for "hotnot
bastards." After shooting Willieboy and having him flung into the back of his van, Raalt takes
his time to stop, walk leisurely into a shop and extort a packet of cigarettes from the Portuguese
shopkeeper, showing absolutely no concern for the life of the boy he had just shot. In Raalt, La
Guma succeeds brilliantly in bringing out all the violence, savagery and dehumanizing effects of
Apartheid.
In an unpublished interview with Cecil Abrahams in London, March 1978, La Guma says
that he first thought of writing A Walk in the Night when he read a short paragraph in a Cape
Town newspaper "that a so-called hooligan had died in the police van after having been shot in
District Six" (Abrahams, 1985). La Guma was troubled by the superficiality of that story. Was
this victim of police brutality really a hooligan? Or was he an innocent victim, like Willieboy?
Even if he had actually been a hooligan, how did he become one? Was he a Michael Adonis or
one of the three "skollies" - law abiding and hardworking citizens who are forced into a life of
crime by the violent excesses of Apartheid? What were the circumstances that led to that so-
called hooligan's encounter with the police and his death in the back of a police van? A Walk in
the Night attempts to answer these and many other questions.
A Walk in the Night begins with the infliction of absurd violence on Michael Adonis. He
is sacked for merely using the toilet. From that moment, the narrative is pregnant with anger and
a dark foreboding. As he walks away from his former job, Michael Adonis, already fuming with
rage at the monstrous injustice he suffers, is accosted by the police and asked where he stole the
money in his pockets. He was also asked where he kept his drugs. His encounter with the police
represents yet another step in the eventual criminalization of Adonis. Through Michael, La
Guma leads us down spooky streets and into drunken pubs where "insignificant lives" gather to
drown their grief in streams of liquor, forcing us to peer into the tortured souls of the residents of
District Six. He does not let us imagine that these tortured souls are all black and colored. He
directs our gaze onto the broken figure of Uncle Doughty, the old white soul who now lives "in
shit street" and is like all the other creatures that walked, crawled or slept in the long dreary night
of Apartheid. As a metaphor for South Africa, District Six has two aspects to it. Its chaotic and
dilapidated exterior portrays the physical anguish of all South Africans. The decadence within its
walls portrays the inner confusion and anguish of its residents.
In District Six, and by extension Apartheid South Africa, La Guma shows us "the brutal
circumstances of slum living: the arrogance of the bosses, the sadism of corrupt policemen, and
the dehumanizing quality of poverty-induced despair" (Povey 1993: 95). Yet, La Guma's plot in
A Walk in the Night proves "a far deeper and in some ways a more painful truth than the obvious
injustice of oppression: that the human capacity for violence when stirred by misery can take
directions that serve no purpose or reveal only iconoclastic ferocity" (ibid.). The two best
illustrations of this phenomenon of absurd violence are Michael's killing of poor old Mr.
Doughty "in a moment of drunken resentment" and Raalt's killing of the innocent Willieboy.
When Willieboy is mistakenly implicated in Doughty's murder, he knows that truth telling will
be futile in the circumstances. He is left with no option but to become a fugitive for a crime he
does not commit. As La Guma writes, "years of treacherous experience and victimization
through suspicion had rusted the armour of confidence, reduced him to the nondescript entity
which made him easy prey to a lie which specialized in finding scapegoats for anything that
steered it from its dreary course" (Walk, 46) All his life, Willieboy dreams of becoming
something, "a big shot", but he never succeeds in becoming anything. He continues “to remain
something less than nondescript, part of the blurred face of the crowd, inconspicuous as a
smudge on a grimy wall" (ibid. 69). To convince himself that he is somebody, Willieboy
savagely beats up the old drunk Greene, shortly before he is finally neutralized by the savage
system. "Willieboy’s life is a tragic path from an unloving home into a loveless society that
finally brutalizes him to death" (Abrahams 1985: 60).
Michael's killing of Mr. Doughty suggests more than an expression of drunken
resentment. Doughty is no Constable Raalt, nor even Raalt's petrified driver whose great fear is
that his senior colleague could do something to tarnish the superior image of the white man.
Indeed, as a person, Mr. Doughty does not seem to be at all racist. He is simply a broken and
destitute old white drunk living in "shit street", the victim of an evil system, just like all the non-
white folks in District Six. But he is still white. He is still a symbol of all that is hateful, evil,
oppressive, and destructive in the life of Michael Adonis. When Michael looks at Mr. Doughty,
he sees a White man first. And when Michael strikes Mr. Doughty, he is striking a White man,
not the amiable and harmless Uncle Doughty with whom just moments before, he had been
enjoying a bottle of liquor. La Guma seems to be making a statement that in striking Mr.
Doughty, Michael Adonis, representing a young black nation, is striking at the decadent system
of Apartheid; that someday soon, a black hand would strike and kill the decaying monster of
Apartheid. This certainly seems like a plausible explanation for the seemingly motiveless killing
by Michael of old Mr. Doughty.
La Guma makes another statement in his portrayal of violence in A Walk in the Night:
that all the violence inflicted by Apartheid is needless, senseless even. The Group Areas Act, the
Pass Laws, a skewed judicial system, a brutal security apparatus, among many other institutions
of Apartheid are naked in their absurdity. Michael's killing of Mr. Doughty is a statement on the
culture of absurd violence in Apartheid South Africa. So is Raalt's killing of Willieboy. So are
the beatings Willieboy suffered at the hands of his tortured mother as a young boy. As Povey
writes in the above referenced essay, "La Guma's sequence of harsh and ultimately irrational
injustices is no more absurd and improbable than those continuing, persistent injustices that are
the very substance of his society. La Guma says nothing more than that in a depraved world, mad
things happen" (1993: 96). Witness for instance, the trial and condemnation, in an Apartheid
court of law, of Shilling Murile in Time of the Butcherbird. The type of absurd violence inflicted
on Shilling Murile and Michael Adonis can only lead to a thirst for vengeance. The difference
between the violence inflicted by Apartheid on its victims and the violence inflicted on
Apartheid by its victims is that the latter violence is not absurd: It has a source, it has a purpose.
It is, in a sense, a necessary violence. It is the only language that Apartheid and its perpetrators
could understand. It is in this sense that violence is manifested as a necessary evil in Time of the
Butcherbird. In A Walk in the Night, Michael Adonis joins the "skollies", decides to show his
back to honest labor and becomes part of the dark underworld of robbery and possible murder as
a way of getting back at the system, the people who deny him a good, or at least, an honest and
peaceful life. As Cecil Abrahams writes of Adonis, "the stultifying social and political
environment leads him inevitably to the world of crime and perpetual darkness . . . he becomes a
full-fledged member of the underground with the prospect of walking the night until he is
arrested or he dies" (1985: 56).
Finally, Alex La Guma seems to be saying that like Hamlet's father's ghost, South Africa
was condemned to walk the night until such a time that it rid itself of the great evil of Apartheid.
Until such a time, victim and victimizer alike would be hostages to a senseless cycle of violence
that grows more brutal and bloody by the day. Uncle Doughty tells Michael shortly before his
death, "That's us, us, Michael. Just ghosts, doomed to walk the night" (Walk, p. 26). As a dark
night, Apartheid represented a collective fate, collective destiny, and collective violence that
engulfed and adversely affected all South Africans, regardless of skin color.