Mine Boy

Mine Boy is an unsung gem, amazing and much more potent than Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. In fact, the two do not necessarily warrant comparison except for the fact that Paton's book is one of the few classic South African novels taught in U.S. schools. Some readers have complained of the simplicity of Abraham's language or "cardboard" characters. For me, it's that very simplicity that makes the story such a dramatic tale; it's language that anyone can understand. It's primitive, if you will, or embryonic. As for the characters being underdeveloped, again, I think this adds to the effectiveness of this particular story. Caste systems, apartheid, and other types of sanctioned discrimination force people to come across as show more stereotypes. When we view our neighbors as "other," we're not seeing them as fully human. This is effectively dramatized in Mine Boy. It put me in a time and place that I would not have experienced otherwise, despite the universality of feeling that comes with the hardships of life. This is the knife's edge of thinking only in terms of black and white. show less

Published two years before Cry the beloved country, this explores similar themes, but in a subtly different way. The viewpoint is that of Xuma, the young black man from the country who comes to the big city to work in the mines, and it's the noisy, lively, disorderly world of the townships — and of Leah's shebeen, in particular — where he finds solidarity and companionship, whilst the values of "civilised" white society are often made to seem strange, arbitrary, and threatening. Where Paton's African rhythms are slow, disciplined and stately, the rumble of old men's conversations, this is written to a much rougher, wilder beat. And it can't help pulling us in.

And Abrahams wrote this whilst he was mixing with the future leaders of show more post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean in London: Paton's young man is doomed to his tragic fate, but we leave Xuma at a point where he has seen that black people cannot rely on white liberals and have to take leadership themselves to defend their rights. Maybe he will be crushed by the system all the same, but Abrahams doesn't see that as inevitable, and the ending of the book allows us to imagine that he will be able to do something to work towards change. Although perhaps not so much if we're reading it 75 years on and know how South Africa's history progressed...

The AWS edition comes with attractive, if slightly Sunday-schoolish, illustrations by Ruth Yudelowitz. All I could find out about her on the internet is that she was an artist working for the East Africa Literature Bureau in Nairobi in the 1950s, and illustrated a lot of African school-books. show less

What a fantastic book...picked it up second hand at Chaham Booksellers...the black experience around Johannesberg in the first half of the 20th century...a small novel packed with thought and feeling...4.5 stars if I could...

Book Description
Xuma faces the complexities of urban life in Johannesburg.

The first REAL book about apartheid, January 12, 2002
Reviewer: Ken Searle "kenus_searlus"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A9T97G9GKGX1F/102-7146503-9352125
Peter Abrahams has certainly written an unsung novel here, which is devastatingly simple (in some places too simple), concentrating on the story of Xuma, a young man who has moved from the North of South Africa (Vrededorp) to the hate-filled apartheid world of Johannesburg. Filling it up with supporting characters which are rather cardboard (the black girl who dreams of being white, the drunken South Africans, the sympathetic white man) does not help, but nonetheless instead of spitefully showing us the huge show more hate Abrahams may hold for the apartheid system, we instead hear the story of Xuma coping in Jo'burg, with all the horrors being just there in the background. Abrahams does not emerge with a conclusion of black superiority and that whites should leave, but through Xuma, we very clearly see that both races should just get along. For anyone with a serious interest in apartheid, this book is a must! show less

High Upper-Intermediate