Abrahams, Peter (1919-2017), a Black South African novelist, short story writer, and journalist, was one of the first fiction writers to stress the brutalizing effect that apartheid had on the majority population of South Africa. Apartheid was the policy of enforced racial segregation that the white minority government of South Africa imposed between the 1940’s and the 1990’s. Abrahams’s first novel, Mine Boy (1946), was the first work to detail the hardships that Black South Africans suffered under the apartheid regime.
Peter Henry Abrahams was born on March 19, 1919, in the township of Vrededorp (now part of Johannesburg). He spent his childhood in great poverty, as he described in his partly autobiographical work Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (1954; new edition 1970). Abrahams left South Africa in 1939 and settled in the United Kingdom. His short-story collection Dark Testament appeared in 1942. Wild Conquest, a novel about the confrontation between native Africans and the Boers who took part in the Great Trek, was published in 1950. A Path of Thunder (1948) is the story of love between young people of different races torn apart by the cruelties of apartheid.
In 1955, Abrahams moved to Jamaica. After the move, Abrahams’s African homeland continued to dominate his writing. His African background emerged in such works as A Night of Their Own (1965), dealing with the lives of Indians in South Africa, and A Wreath for Udomo (1956; revised 1971), describing the effects of the murder of a Black African leader in west Africa. In Jamaica, Abrahams became editor of the West Indian Economist and was in charge of a daily radio news network called West Indian News until 1964, when he became a full-time writer. His travel book about the West Indies, This Island Now, appeared in 1966 and was revised in 1971. His 1985 novel, the family saga The View from Coyaba, is also set in the Caribbean. Abrahams wrote an autobiography, The Black Experience in the 20th Century (2001). He died on Jan. 18, 2017.
