Every oppressive system has witnessed a literature of protest that uses themes of violence, racism and conflict within the writers' ideological framework. It is the desire to change oppressive human history, to place man in a better position to understand his environment and subsequently harness his resources to boost his living condition that makes artists protest subtly or violently against factors that inhibit their quest. In South Africa, colonialism took the form of a settler colony, where land was forcibly confiscated and the owners reduced to the status of wage-earning labourers. The settlers, in order to perpetuate their authority over the Africans, devised several means of subjugating the indigenes. It is in response to this that writers like Alex la Guma, Peter Abrahams, Arthur Nortje, Dennis Brutus and others, have attacked the oppressors in their various works. This article explores the various ways in which Alex la Guma uses his short stories to expose the violence and injustice meted against the blacks in apartheid South Africa.

Leif Lorentzon in his 2007 article, ‘Jazz in Drums’, discusses how jazz music has integrated into African life and he also gives an idea of how short stories appeared in Drum from the early 1950s as ‘part of an urban black Atlantic and para-colonial/Apartheid popular culture in South Africa ….’ (218). Lorentzon continues the exploration by saying that,