Peter Abrahams, a South African writer whose journalism and novels explored, with sensitivity and passion, the injustices of apartheid and the complexities of racial politics, died on Wednesday at his home in Kingston, Jamaica. He was 97.
The death was reported in the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner.
Mr. Abrahams spent most of his adult life in Britain, France and Jamaica, but his moral center of gravity was located in the country he left at the age of 20.
“I am emotionally involved in South Africa,” he told the trade magazine Wilson Library Bulletin in 1957. “Africa is my beat.”
He added: “If I am ever liberated from this bondage of racialism, there are some things much more exciting to me, objectively, to write about. But this world has such a social orientation, and I am involved in this world and I can’t cut myself off.”
He first attracted notice in 1946 with “Mine Boy,” a powerful, sparely written novel about the trials of a naïve young black South African who leaves his home in the north to work in the gold mines near Johannesburg and falls in love with a mixed-race woman. It is often cited as the first African novel in English to draw international attention.
Two years later, Mr. Abrahams published “The Path of Thunder,” about a black South African who returns to his native village to open a school. It established him as an important literary voice.
“Beside Richard Wright’s name as a Negro novelist, set that of Peter Abrahams,” the critic Lewis Gannett wrote in a review of the book for The New York Herald Tribune. “Or beside that of Alan Paton as a South African novelist, set Peter Abrahams.”
Over the decades, in his reporting and in his fiction, Mr. Abrahams addressed the promises and the perils of black rule after colonialism, the possibilities of a postracial society and questions of personal identity. Those he felt acutely as a mixed-race South African — “colored,” under the country’s apartheid system — married to a white woman, and as an exile for most of his life. Above all, the spectacle of racial injustice in his homeland spurred him to write.
The novelist Nadine Gordimer, in an introduction to his memoir “The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation” (2001), wrote, “Abrahams is an African writer, a writer of the world, who opened up in his natal country, South Africa, a path of exploration for us, the writers who have followed the trail he bravely blazed.”
Peter Henry Abrahams Deras was born on March 3, 1919, in Vrededorp, a colored and Asian slum near Johannesburg. His father, James Henry Abrahams Deras (sometimes spelled De Ras), was an Ethiopian who settled in Johannesburg to work in the gold mines. His mother, the former Angelina DuPlessis, was colored, the daughter of a black father and a white French mother.
His father died when Peter was quite young, and the family struggled. Before entering school at 11, he sold firewood and worked for a tinsmith. After a white woman in the tinsmith’s office read the story of Othello to him from Charles Lamb’s book “Tales From Shakespeare,” he became determined to attend school.
He completed a three-year course at a colored school in Vrededorp in one year and won a scholarship to the Diocesan Training College in Grace Dieu, near Pietersburg, where he began contributing poems to the magazine Bantu World. While working at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, he encountered the works of black American writers.
“I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro literature,” he wrote in “Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa” (1954). “I became a nationalist, a color nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. To them I owe a great debt for crystallizing my vague yearnings to write and for showing me the long dream was attainable.”
He later studied at St. Peter’s, an elite school for blacks in Rosettenville, outside Johannesburg, and became a Marxist.
In 1939, while working as an editor at a socialist magazine in Durban, he found work as a stoker aboard a freighter and made his way to London. There he was hired as a dispatch clerk at a socialist bookstore and did editing for The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the British Communist Party.
He soon became involved in London’s African political community, befriending the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore and two future postcolonial leaders, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. This milieu provided the material for his 1956 novel, “A Wreath for Udomo,” about an English-educated African who returns to rule his native country with tragic results.
The literary scholar Harvey Curtis Webster, in Saturday Review, called “A Wreath for Udomo” “the most perceptive novel that has been written about the complex interplay between British imperialism and African nationalism and tribalism.”
Several stories Mr. Abrahams wrote when he was still in South Africa were collected in “Dark Testament” (1942), and a small press run by Dorothy Crisp, a right-wing political figure, brought out his first novel, “Song of the City,” in 1945.
A trip to South Africa and Kenya in 1952 generated a book of reporting, “Return to Goli” (1953). A few years later, the British colonial office commissioned him to write a popular history of Jamaica, published in 1957 as “Jamaica: An Island Mosaic.”
He liked what he saw. “In Jamaica, and in the stumbling and fumbling reaching forward of its people, is dramatized, almost at laboratory level, the most hopeful image I know of the newly emerging underdeveloped world,” he wrote in Holiday magazine in 1963. That was several years after he had relocated to the island with his second wife, the former Daphne Miller, and their three children, Anne, Aron and Naomi. There was no immediate word on his survivors.
For four decades, Mr. Abrahams broadcast political commentaries on Radio Jamaica. He wrote one novel with a non-African setting: “This Island, Now” (1966), about a political radical who comes to power in an unnamed Caribbean country after the death of its first postcolonial leader.
South Africa remained his subject. It was the setting of his political thriller “A Night of Their Own” (1965). He worked backward to it in the transgenerational novel “The View From Coyaba” (1985), a tale of black struggle in the Caribbean, the American South and Africa. He relived it in his second volume of memoirs.
By then, history had brought relief. “I became a whole person when I finally put away the exile’s little packed suitcase,” Mr. Abrahams told Caribbean Beat in 2003. “When Mandela came out of jail and when apartheid ended, I ceased to have this burden of South Africa. I shed it.”
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Peter Henry Abrahams Deras (3 March 1919 – 18 January 2017[1][2]), commonly known as Peter Abrahams, was a South African-born Jamaican novelist, journalist and political commentator.
Abrahams was born in 1919 in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg; his father was from Ethiopia and his mother was Coloured. In 1939 Abrahams left South Africa, and worked first as a sailor, and then as a journalist in London.
Hoping to make his way as a writer, he faced considerable challenges as a South African, as Carol Polsgrove has shown in her history, Ending British Rule: Writers in a Common Cause (2009). Despite a manuscript reader's recommendation against publication, in 1942 Allen & Unwin brought out his Dark Testament, made up mostly of pieces he had carried with him from South Africa. Publisher Dorothy Crisp published his novels Song of the City (1945) and Mine Boy (1946). According to Nigerian scholar Kolawole Ogungbesan, Mine Boy became "the first African novel written in English to attract international attention." More books followed with publication in Britain and the United States: two novels —The Path of Thunder (1948) and Wild Conquest (1950); a journalistic account of a return journey to Africa, Return to Goli (1953); and a memoir, Tell Freedom (1954).[3]
While working in London, Abrahams lived with his wife Daphne in Loughton. He met several important black leaders and writers, including George Padmore, a leading figure in the Pan-African community there, Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, both later heads of state of their respective nations. In 1956, Abrahams published a roman à clef about the political community of which he had been a part in London: A Wreath for Udomo. His main character, Michael Udomo, who returns from London to his African country to preside over its transformation into an independent, industrial nation, appeared to be modelled chiefly on Nkrumah with a hint of Kenyatta. Other identifiable fictionalized figures included George Padmore. The novel concluded with Udomo's murder. Published the year before Nkrumah took the reins of independent Ghana, A Wreath for Udomo was not an optimistic forecast of Africa's future.[4]
Abrahams settled in Jamaica in 1956.[5] In 1994 he was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal for his writing and journalism by the Institute of Jamaica.[6]
One of South Africa's most prominent writers,[7] his work deals with political and social issues, especially with racism. His novel Mine Boy (1946), one of the first works to bring him to critical attention,[8] and his memoir Tell Freedom (1954)[9]deal in part with apartheid.[10] His other works include the story collection Dark Testament (1942) and the novels The Path of Thunder (1948), A Wreath for Udomo (1956), A Night of Their Own (1965), the Jamaica-set This Island Now (1966, the only one of his novels not set in Africa) and The View from Coyaba (1985).
Abrahams was found dead at his home in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, on 18 January 2017, aged 97.[11][12]
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Peter Abrahams, in full Peter Henry Abrahams (born March 3, 1919, Vrededorp, near Johannesburg, South Africa—died January 18, 2017, Kingston, Jamaica), most prolific of South Africa’s black prose writers, whose early novel Mine Boy (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks.
Abrahams left South Africa at the age of 20, settling first in Britain and then in Jamaica; nevertheless, most of his novels and short stories are based on his early life in South Africa. Mine Boy, for example, tells of a country youth thrown into the alien and oppressive culture of a large South African industrial city. Abrahams’s semiautobiographical Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (1954; new ed. 1970) deals with the related theme of his struggles as a youth in the slums of Johannesburg. The Path of Thunder (1948) depicts a young “mixed” couple who love under the menacing shadow of enforced segregation. Wild Conquest (1950) follows the great northern trek of the Boers, and A Night of Their Own (1965) sets forth the plight of the Indian in South Africa. The novel A Wreath for Udomo (1956; new ed. 1971) and the travel book This Island Now (1966; new ed. 1971) are set in western Africa and the Caribbean, respectively. Abrahams’s The View from Coyaba (1985) chronicles four generations of a Jamaican family and their experiences with racism. He also wrote the memoir The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century (2000).
In the late 1950s, inspired by a visit to Jamaica, Abrahams moved his family to the island. There he became editor of the West Indian Economist and took charge of the daily radio news network, West Indian News, until 1964, when he gave up most of his duties so that he could devote himself full-time to writing. Many of his earlier works were reissued or translated into other languages in the 1960s and early ’70s, as his reading public steadily widened.
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Peter Abrahams, in full Peter Henry Abrahams (b. March 3, 1919, Vrededorp, near Johannesburg, South Africa — d. January 18, 2017, Kingston, Jamaica), was one of the most prolific of South Africa’s black prose writers. His early novel Mine Boy (1946) was the first to depict the dehumanizing effect of racism upon South African blacks.
Abrahams was born in 1919 in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg, his father was from Ethiopia and his mother was Coloured. In 1939, Abrahams left South Africa, and worked first as a sailor, and then as a journalist in London.
While working in London, Abrahams lived with his wife Daphne in Loughton. He met several important black leaders and writers, including George Padmore, a leading figure in the Pan-African community there, Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, both later heads of state of their respective nations. In 1956, Abrahams published a roman a clef about the political community of which he had been a part in London: A Wreath for Udomo. His main character, Michael Udomo, who returns from London to his African country to preside over its transformation into an independent, industrial nation, appeared to be modelled chiefly on Nkrumah with a hint of Kenyatta. Other identifiable fictionalized figures included George Padmore, a Pan-Africanist author. The novel concluded with Udomo's murder. Published the year before Nkrumah took the reins of independent Ghana, A Wreath for Udomo was not an optimistic forecast of Africa's future.
Abrahams left South Africa at the age of 20, settling first in Britain and then in Jamaica; nevertheless, most of his novels and short stories are based on his early life in South Africa. Mine Boy, for example, tells of a country youth thrown into the alien and oppressive culture of a large South African industrial city. Abrahams’ semi-autobiographical Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (1954; new ed. 1970) deals with the related theme of his struggles as a youth in the slums of Johannesburg. The Path of Thunder (1948) depicts a young “mixed” couple who love under the menacing shadow of enforced segregation. Wild Conquest (1950) follows the great northern trek of the Boers, and A Night of Their Own (1965) sets forth the plight of the Indian in South Africa. The novel A Wreath for Udomo (1956; new ed. 1971) and the travel book This Island Now (1966; new ed. 1971) are set in western Africa and the Caribbean, respectively. Abrahams' The View from Coyaba (1985) chronicles four generations of a Jamaican family and their experiences with racism. He also wrote the memoir The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century (2000).
In the late 1950s, inspired by a visit to Jamaica, Abrahams moved his family to the island. There he became editor of the West Indian Economist and took charge of the daily radio news network, West Indian News, until 1964, when he gave up most of his duties so that he could devote himself full-time to writing. Many of his earlier works were reissued or translated into other languages in the 1960s and early ’70s, as his reading public steadily widened.
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