'One of my all-time favourite novels.' Tsitsi Dangarembga'The first African novel in English to draw international attention.' New York Times'The forerunner of an entire school of African literary art.' Sunday Times And the black man and the white were like two men alone in the world .. Xuma will never forget the day he arrived in the Johannesburg slums: the charismatic woman who takes him in, the brutal police raids, the fights, friendships, dancing, drinking and romances - yet it soon feels like home. But when he becomes a leader in the city's gold mines, he is shocked by the racist treatment of the labourers. And as he begins to question whether'man could be without colour', Xuma stages an act of defiance that changes his life forever . . . In 1946, Peter Abrahams' classic novel Mine Boy exposed South Africa's fledgling racial apartheid system and townships to the world - and its wisdom, vividness and political power endures to this day. What readers are saying:'Beautiful, memorable characters [I've] remembered since my childhood. These are the kind of stories that make the world better for having been written.''A seminal work of African fiction ... Prose as unadorned as Solzhenitsyn or Hemingway.''I can still recall Xuma almost 20 years later ... A beautiful book.''An unsung gem, amazing ... Its simplicity makes the story such a dramatic tale.'
Peter Abrahams was born in Vrededorp, near Johannesburg, in 1919. His Ethiopian father worked in the city's gold mines; his mother was the daughter of a black African father and white French mother, thus classifying him as'coloured'. After his father's death, Abrahams had an impoverished childhood, selling firewood and working for a tinsmith in the city's slums, but won a scholarship to school, where he read voraciously and then became a Marxist journalist. In 1939, he left South Africa for a life in European exile, working aboard ship and at the Communist Daily Worker newspaper. In London, he befriended political activists including pan-Africanist George Padmore and two future heads of state, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. He also organised the Fifth Pan-African Congress as part of the ANC and met James Baldwin and Richard Wright in Paris. Abrahams' trailblazing first book was published in 1942, followed by ten volumes of acclaimed fiction and autobiography dedicated to exposing racial injustice. He settled in Jamaica in 1956 where he lived until his death aged 97, writing and broadcasting radio commentaries; he was married twice, both to white Englishwomen, and had three children. |
