This was La Guma's second major work of fiction, written while he was under house-arrest in South Africa, but published abroad (in East Germany) because any reproduction or distribution of his writings within South Africa was banned.

While A walk in the night was set in the urban jungle of District Six, this time we move to a shanty town on the outer fringes of Cape Town, where people with no legal right to be there but with no chance of getting work anywhere else are surviving on the absolute minimum in houses they have built themselves out of whatever materials they could scrounge or salvage. Hassled by the police, fighting a losing battle against poverty and the Cape Town rainy season, they are on the very limit of survival — seen by white motorists from the main road the settlement hardly seems to exist at all — but they still manage to have a sense of community and to help each other occasionally. It's immaterial whether that's because they know Ecclesiastes Chapter 4 better than we do (as the title implies), or because they've heard a trade union activist talking on a job they were on, or just because they are human beings in a tight spot. La Guma wants us to see that people do ultimately have great collective strength, even in weakness, and even when they aren't in a position to use that strength just now.

As Lola said in her review, this is exceptionally fine writing, but it's not fine writing that's jumping up and down shouting "look at me", it's there to do a serious job of work and make us look at all the details of the way the people in the shanty town live and show us what those details should be telling us about the world we live in. It's about South Africa in the 1960s, but it's just as much about poverty anywhere, in any time.

Why does hardly anyone seem to know about this book? It should be on every syllabus. Including Domestic Science and Metalwork. ( )