The Stone Country

by Alex la Guma

The Stone Country is the story of people in a world without beauty, a lunar barrenness of stone, steel and locked doors. No tree grows here to offer men the peace of cooling shade. Shadow there is and walls rising like cliffs and scribbled on with protests - obscene, profane, belligerent, nostalgic, laced with grim, mocking humour. This is a prison where men are thrown together, regardless of the charges against them. For they are men who share a common crime in South Africa: they are coloured: Solly acting the clown in tattered rags, a scarecrow come to life; Josef the Turk, lean, sleek, dangerous as a knife blade; his sworn enemy, Butcherboy Williams, a collector of tribute; and the Casbah Kid who will hang for murder. Getting him to talk is like trying to pry open the jammed doors of a vault; yet George tries; George whose crime is illegal organizing in the fight against apartheid. This story is theirs, men who know violence and who express it in a prison break, in a fight to the death for power in the cells. It is also the story of a man who brings a touch of humanity into the dark corrosion of terror and brutality.

Genres: South Africa, Fiction, Africa, African Literature

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Alex la Guma was a South African novelist, leader of the South African Coloured People's Organisation (SACPO) and a defendant in the Treason Trial, whose works helped characterise the movement against the apartheid era in South Africa. La Guma's vivid style, distinctive dialogue, and realistic, sympathetic portrayal of oppressed groups have made him one of the most notable South African writers of the 20th century. La Guma was awarded the 1969 Lotus Prize for Literature.

Reviews

[Bren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read this book, or one of La Guma's, for ages, and wasn't particularly looking forward to it, because I've read a lot of critiques of his writing, indeed of 1960s South African "struggle" writing in general--its supposedly too obviously political, producing semi-sensationalist fables of good and evil in which there are no surprises. Turns out, I was totally gripped by this novel, and thought it was excellent. The plot involves a political activist in Cape Town, George, who is sent to jail briefly, and finds himself in the middle of a variety of prison dramas. A thuggish gang leader/schoolyard bully, called Butcherboy, who is in cahoots with the prison guards, confronts him, and another gangster, an intelligent dandy called Yusuf the Turk, protects him. Meanwhile, another prisoner is planning an elaborate escape, and a seemingly hardened teenager called The Casbah Kid is facing a death sentence. La Guma does occasionally make his points too heavily; there is a sequence in which the prisoners and guards are gathered watching a cat play with a mouse, and the struggle of the mouse to escape its tormentor is beautifully told, but then La Guma rather redundantly has George reflect on how the mouse stands for the "little men who get kicked in the backside all the time." Yup, we got that. But in general the mode is understatement, since its written in the style of an old-fashioned hard-boiled detective novel. I liked this passage, for example, in which the man trying to escape, a cat-burglar who has been losing his nerve, finds it again:
"The wind caught at him, tugging at the old red shirt, and he clung to the bar. A little way above was the parapet around the roof of the Isolation Block. He was all right now. He was back on the old job; a traveller returned home. He grinned in the windy darkness, and then, holding a bar with one hand, he reached up against the rough, peeling wall with the other, balanced carefully outside the cell. He raised a leg and placed a bare foot cautiously into the curve of the projecting bar. Then he heaved himself quickly upward, his weight on the bar."
The conclusion in particular was good; I thought everything was going to come together in some explosive confrontation, but instead, George is merely a witness to the other men's lives--their dramas are what matters. That's what I liked most about the book; a lot of South African male writing about prison makes the political prisoners into heroes and the criminal prisoners into villains (unless they join the politicals), but in this novel, George's commitment to the struggle comes from the same decency that compels him to feel sympathy for these totally un-saintly men, particularly for the emotionally wounded Casbah Kid, and to identify with them, sharing cigarettes and laughing with them at their shaggy dog stories. The "struggle" at hand is as much urban poverty as it is racial apartheid--which makes the novel's politics relevant to today's South Africa.

[Daniel Polansky]

An apartheid rebel in the early 60s undergoes a stay in a penitentiary, based (presumably) on the author's own experiences. The plot is brisk and engaging, the writing clear and strong. These sorts of overtly political novels tend to seem a little naive after the struggle is over but that doesn't take away from the skill of this work.