Not White Enough, Not Black Enough by Adhikari Mohamed;

Author:Adhikari, Mohamed;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Race, Identity, and Realism in Alex La Guma’s

A Walk in the Night and Other Stories

A Walk in the Night opens with the protagonist, a young Coloured man named Michael Adonis, alighting from a trackless tram on the bustling streets of District Six late one afternoon. Adonis is nursing a “pustule of rage and humiliation deep down within him” because earlier that day, he had been fired from his menial factory job for talking back to the white foreman. He goes to a local diner, where he meets his friend, Willieboy, a man who survives by hustling on the streets of District Six. He also meets up with Foxy and his gang, who are looking for an accomplice for a burglary they have planned for that night. After his meal, Michael makes his way to a nearby pub. En route, he is cornered by two white policemen, who search his pockets for dagga (marijuana) and accuse him of having stolen the money he has on him. Although outwardly compliant, Michael is furious at this racially motivated harassment. At the pub, he gets drunk on cheap wine before returning to his tenement. In the passageway, he meets fellow tenant Uncle Doughty, an elderly, alcoholic Irishman, who invites him to his room for a drink. With the liquor further fueling his rage, Michael takes out his frustration at being humiliated by whites on Uncle Doughty. He lashes out at the decrepit old man with a wine bottle, killing him. Michael escapes from the scene of the crime undetected, but Willieboy, who comes looking for Michael to borrow money, stumbles across the corpse of Doughty. Panic-stricken, he flees but is spotted by tenement dwellers and is blamed for Doughty’s death. That night, Willieboy is hunted down by Constable Raalt, a sadistic white policeman, who shoots him in cold blood. Willieboy subsequently dies in the back of the police van. Later that night, Michael, after walking the streets of District Six, decides to join Foxy and his gang. His descent into crime has begun.

A Walk in the Night was first published in 1962 in Ibadan, Nigeria. La Guma started writing the novella during 1959 and had completed it by the time he was detained in April 1960 under the state of emergency declared following the Sharpeville shootings. He had little option but to publish overseas, for after being banned under the Suppression of Communism Act in July 1961, nothing he said or wrote could be published in South Africa. A Walk in the Night was La Guma’s first substantive piece of fiction, and it won him immediate recognition as an exciting new author. In 1967, the novella, or “long story,” as he preferred to call it,66 was republished together with a selection of six short stories as A Walk in the Night and Other Stories. These works have a common theme in that they all deal with aspects of Coloured working-class life. Four of the short stories, as well as A Walk in the Night, are set in District Six during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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