The Portrayal Of White Leaders In La Guma

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La Guma’s portrayal of the white group of people and the white leader are as inexorable and repressive characters throughout the short story, the author depicts the group of white men as a group of racist tormentors, who commits actions that highlights and presents a microcosm of the inhumanity of the apartheid. Their actions and attitudes towards the coloured man makes their character so intolerable yet compelling. In the beginning of the story, it is expressed by the author that the white group of men holds more power against the black man. The white leader is presented to be wearing “an old shooting jacket” (conjuring up an image of a hunter) and has his shotgun loaded -implying that he is prepared to kill-. The portrayal of the white …show more content…

A dramatic irony is displayed when La Guma further demonstartes how the coloured man is being treated inhumanly when the white leader offers the pricey sum of five pounds to Meneer Maris for the watchdog Jagter. He then says that he “would take great care of such a dog”. This is dramatically irony and indicates that the lantern-bearer probably treats a dog better than the coloured man, a human being. This further illustrates the values and attitudes of the white group of people (they think that it is perfectly acceptable to brutally treat people of colour). More crucially, when describing the white group of people, the author writes “they could not be seen in the dark” (signifying anonymity) this evokes a sense of horror and menace, as we cannot identify the perpetrators behind the beating and threatening, also because this suggests that the leader can easily be somebody else administering the beating, thereby indicating that racism is wide spread amongst the society and that large swathes of the white population hold racist view- the white leader is just a representative character of the white population-. The white leader is later described as having eyes which are “hard and blue like 2 frozen lakes” the use of the diction “frozen” suggests that he is

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