A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition

by Alex la Guma, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Foreword), Blanche la Guma (Preface)

In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex la Guma (1925 - 1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma's book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa.

For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism - a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey - the first since 1978 - restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development.

The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma's text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.

Genres: Nonfiction, African Literature

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

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

[Barry Gilder · Rating 4 out of 5]

No Time Like the Past

Alex la Guma’s physical and literary journey through the Soviet Union is a journey through the past and dreamed future for all of us who struggled against apartheid, against colonialism, against the greed and dehumanisation of capitalism and who still struggle today against the arrogance and destructiveness of imperialism.