(1919- ) novelist, short-story writer, journalist
When Peter Abrahams was five years old, his father, an Ethiopian, died. Abrahams was sent to live with relatives in Johannesburg, South Africa, far from his mixed-race mother. Although he returned three years later, the family’s desperate financial situation forced young Abrahams to go to work for a metal worker. This nine-year-old boy was to grow up to become one of South Africa’s best-known writers.
When Abrahams was still a young man, an office worker took him under her wing and read Shakespeare to him, awakening a lifelong love of learning. Throughout many years of menial employment, Abrahams held fast to his educational dreams, going to school when he could. At one point, Abrahams even tried to start a school for poor, black and colored South Africans, one where native languages could be spoken.
When Abrahams was 20, he took a job as a stoker on a freighter bound for England. Abrahams wrote regularly, publishing his first books during World War II: a collection of short stories, Dark Testament (1942), and a novel, Song of the City (1945), which begins to examine the costs of urbanization for black South Africans, a theme he took up again more successfully two years later in Mine Boy. His growing professional reputation made it possible for him to return to South Africa in 1952, when he took a job as a reporter for The London Observer.
His work as a journalist, including employment as a scriptwriter for the BBC, provided the opportunity to write creatively. Of Abrahams’s eight novels, the two that have most solidified his reputation are Mine Boy (1946) and Wild Conquest (1951). Both novels deal with the great movements of peoples within South Africa during its several centuries of settlement and development. Wild Conquest focuses on the Great Trek of the Boers in the 19th century. These descendants of Dutch settlers spread north from Cape Province in search of a religious and secular paradise. They inevitably encountered indigenous peoples, including the Matabeles, who challenged the Boers’ sense of mission. Because the descendants of the Boers were to set the foundation for the next century’s apartheid laws, Abrahams’s focus on these interactions combines historical perspective with contemporary focus. This type of novelistic approach made him something of a literary spokesperson for the developing antiapartheid movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Mine
Boy follows a migration of a different sort: the economic movement of people in search of jobs in mines and in urban areas. Such economic migrations led to the dissolution of families and the creation of company and industry-controlled living areas. Although this novel calls for a multiracial coexistence as the only possible future for South Africa, the story ends with the deaths of many characters who embraced this noble goal.
Critical reception of Abrahams’s many essays, novels, and autobiographical writings has been mixed, in part because of the contradictory messages of novels such as Mine Boy. However, his fusion of a European narrative style with a focus on African themes and tendencies made Abrahams one of the first voices from South Africa to question the divisiveness of apartheid from the perspective of a person of color.
Other Works by Peter Abrahams
The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
A Night of Their Own. New York: Knopf, 1965. The View from Coyaba. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.
A Wreath for Udomo. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.
Works about Peter Abrahams
Lindfors, Bernth. “Exile and Aesthetic Distance: Geographical Influences on Political Commitment in the Works of Peter Abrahams.” International Fiction Review 13 (Summer 1986). Wade, Michael. Peter Abrahams. London: Evans Bros., 1972.
“Peter Abrahams at 70.” Southern African Review of Books (June/July 1989). Available online at http://www.uni-ulm.de/~rturrell/antho4html/Wade.html.
