South African - Novelist | March 3, 1919 - January 18, 2017
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
Peter Abrahams
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I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.
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The familiar mood that awaits the sensitive young who are poor and dispossessed is a mood of sharp and painful inferiority, of violently angry tensions, of desperate and overwhelming longings.
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For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.
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In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.
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I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
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The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.
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Must simplicity and humanity go under in the interest of progress? What is the most important component of civilization - is it human or mechanical? Must thought processes become involved and insincere? Must the class-struggle warp those who are involved in it?
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Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.
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Perhaps life had a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa.
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All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.'
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My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.
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