Novel Mine Boy By Peter Abraham

[Zulema Estabrooks]

Mine Boy is a 1946 novel by South African novelist Peter Abrahams. Set in racist South Africa during the lead-up to apartheid, the novel explores the stereotypes and institutions that discriminate against working-class black Africans. According to Nigerian scholar Kolawole Ogungbesan, Mine Boy became "the first African novel written in English to attract international attention."[1]

Critic Sally-Anne Jackson focuses on the novel's thematic interest in the disease and trauma introduced by colonial rule.[2] Rodney Nesbitt wrote about the structure, style, tone, and themes of the novel.[3] Claude J. Summers notes that the book does not mention "same sex pairings among migrant laborers" in the mines, although the practice of young men and boys becoming "wives of the mine" with older men is well known, and documented back to the 1930s.[4] Megan Jones writes about space in the novel, and the movement of the characters through the urban space of Johannesburg and what this reveals about the "organisation of urban life by racist capitalism."[5] Erasmus Aikley Msuya writes a linguistic analysis of Xuma and Leah's speech in the novel and what it reveals about them.[6]

Peter Abrahams's 1946 novel Mine Boy follows a young farm boy from the northern part of South Africa named Xuma as he moves to Johannesburg to work in a gold mine. As Xuma's heart is broken by a black woman who wishes to be white, and he is exposed to the alcoholism, violence, poverty, illness, and other social issues that arise from racial and economic oppression, Xuma experiences confusion and despair before he becomes hopeful that he can become a man without a color, and imagines a society free from racial discrimination.

Published two years before the white supremacist South African National Party passed its first official apartheid law, Mine Boy captured and exposed the inhumane conditions a white minority regime created for the black and colored majority of South Africans.

Though Mine Boy was published two years before the first official apartheid law was enacted, the novel depicts the racial separation that would be increased during the apartheid era. The illegal beer selling Leah engages in results from a law that...

Nearly all of the conflict in Mine Boy can be attributed to the settler colonialism that has created such desperate conditions for the novel's characters. As a colonial nation, invaded and taken over by white Dutch and British people whose...

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'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 TimesAnd 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.'

Abrahams was born in 1919 in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg. In 1939, he found work as a stoker aboard a cargo ship and finally settled in London. There he worked as a clerk at a socialist bookstore and as editor for the communist newspaper 'The Daily Worker'. He soon became involved in the Pan-African movement. Although he left South Africa at the age of 20, most of his novels and short stories are based on his early life in South Africa. His novel 'Mine Boy,' for example, describes the trials of a nave young black South African who leaves his home to work in the gold mines near Johannesburg and falls in love with a mixed-race woman.

In the mid-1950s Abrahams was commissioned to write a history of Jamaica (Jamaica: An Island Mosaic [1957]) . He eventually moved with his family to the island. There he became the editor of the 'West Indian Economist' and worked for Radio Jamaica.

Foundational African writers : Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es'kia Mphahlele / Bhekizizwe Peterson, Bhekizizwe; Khwezi Mkhize; Makhosazana Xaba. - Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2022

Peter Abrahams, one of South Africa's first acclaimed black writers whose novel "Mine Boy" focused on the country's institutionalized system of racial oppression, died Jan. 18 at his home in St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica. He was 97.

Before such white South African writers as Alan Paton and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer became well known, Abrahams led the way as one of the earliest and most impassioned critics of South Africa's racial inequity.

He published his first collection of stories, "Dark Testament," in 1942 and secured his literary reputation with "Mine Boy," which described the struggle of Xuma, a black worker in South Africa's diamond mines and his growing political awareness.

"Mine Boy" appeared in Britain in 1946, shortly before South Africa began to adopt laws that resulted in the legally sanctioned system of racial discrimination known as apartheid. The book gained wider recognition in 1955, when it was published in the United States.

Peter Henry Abrahams was born March 19, 1919, in Vrededorp, near Johannesburg. His father was from Ethiopia and his mother was of mixed French and African parentage, making their three children "colored," according to South African racial classifications then in force.

Abrahams was about 6 when his father died, and his mother struggled to find work. As a result, the children were often shifted from one household to another in the Johannesburg slums. He sold firewood as a child and became an apprentice to a tinsmith.

A white woman in the tinsmith shop read him the story of Shakespeare's "Othello," and Abrahams began to read at age 9. He became enchanted by English literature. "With Shakespeare and poetry," he wrote in "Tell Freedom," a 1954 autobiography, "a new world was born."

In 1939, Abrahams found a job as a stoker on a merchant ship and spent nearly two years at sea before settling in England. He began to work as a journalist and published five books between 1942 and 1950.

He came to know several well-known figures of what was called the Pan-African movement, including future national leaders Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. In Paris, he became friends with expatriate black writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

In the mid-1950s, Abrahams received a contract to write a book about Jamaica and settled permanently there with his family. "It reminded me of South Africa except for one thing," he later said. "The racism was not law."

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