Peter Abrahams. The Coyaba Chronicles. Very good condition

Peter Abrahams, The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers; Cape Town: David Philip, 2000.

Also known as The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation.

409 pages. First edition.

Condition: A book that does not look new and has been read but is in excellent condition. No obvious damage to the cover. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, and no underlining/highlighting of text or writing in the margins. Light wear to cover edges and corners.

The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the Twentieth Century is both personal memoir and a powerful meditation on what W.E.B. Dubois defined at the beginning of the century as "the problem of the colour line; of the relations between the lighter and darker races of man".

Using Dubois as a point of departure, Abrahams writes passionately, about the inherent "wrongness" of racial hatred and contemplates such timeless questions as: "Why was colour the most crucial issue of our century?" and "When will we get over the deep psychic and emotional damage done by the racial experience?" This is one of the major themes of the memoir - the quest for an intellectual identity - a challenge that faces people of colour in first and third-world countries.

"The Coyaba Chronicles" is also the personal journey of Peter Abrahams. It is the odyssey of a young South African who works for a time as a seaman, leaving his homeland for wartime Britain and post-war France to become a writer; it is the story of his personal relationships with the Black literati of the day and his involvement in the pan-Africanist movement of the 1950's - allowing for his fascinating personal pen-portraits of George Padmore, W.E.B. Dubois, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. It is how the journey takes him to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where he and his wife Daphne and their three children find sanctuary from racial divisiveness at "Coyaba" in the hills of St Andrew.

Peter Abrahams (born 3 March 1919) is a South African and Jamaican novelist, journalist and political commentator. His novel Mine Boy (1946) 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).