Mine Boy: The First Modern Novel of Black South Africa. Peter Abrahams

 Heinemann, 1963, African Writers Series #6. Ex Library Paperback in stuck down library plastic, with usual markings, taken out three times!, pleasantly mellowed, neat and tight. Edge browning. Some tape residue marks. 252 pp.

keywords: Literature South Africa Black.

FROM THE PUBLISHER - Must a man run who has done nothing? Young, strong, proud, and black, Xuma came from a Stone Age tribe o the Johannesburg ghetto, innocently seeking work in the gold mines and a new life in the big city. Too soon he discovered that the price of civilization was dehumanization and the cost of living, despair. He learned that running was a way of life; that justice was reserved for whites only, and that a man was no better than the color of his skin. Deep in brawling, boot-legging Malay Town he found a new kind of kinship and love and a new kind of fear and hatred called apartheid, with its passes, beatings, and the servile compromises that often meant the difference between life and death. And deep in the rich, cruel South African mines he discovered red-haired, white-skinned Paddy who said that a man must be a man before he is a color, for this is his only hope. MINE BOY is Peter Abrahams brilliant and moving story of a black mans struggle for life in South Africa. Told with compassion, insight, and rare understanding, it traces the violent coming-of-age of a simple up-country native in his strange and hostile land.