“The cages shot down. Down. Down. Down. The men were silent. It was always so. Going into the bowels of the earth forced silence on them. And their hearts pounded. Many had gone in day after day for months. But they did not get used to it. Always there was the furious pounding of the hearts. The tightness in the throat. And the warm feeling in the belly.”
Right in time for readers looking for alternative book gifts for Christmas, Faber is reissuing Peter Abrahams’ 1946 novel Mine Boy, which sought to expose South Africa’s fledgling racial apartheid system and townships to the world.
Prescient and powerful, the book tells the story of Xuma, a black man from the north of the country, who moves to Johannesburg to work in the gold mines. It is at once a coming-of-age tale, a window into the riotous life of Malay Camp in Vrededorp, an allegory of injustice, and an exploration of what it means to be human in a country on the cusp of legislating to segregate and dehumanise the vast majority of its citizens over the next four decades.
Abrahams was a trailblazer in documenting the experiences of black people in South Africa. Born in Vrededorp in 1919 to a mixed-race mother and an Ethiopian father who worked in the mines, the author had an impoverished childhood but won a scholarship to school. In 1939, he left South Africa for Europe, going on to settle in Jamaica in the 1950s. His first book was published in 1942, followed by 10 volumes of fiction and autobiography focused on racial injustice. Mine Boy, written a decade before Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, was deemed by the New York Times to be the first African novel in English to garner international attention.
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Achebe’s classic has superior literary merit to Mine Boy, which is written in a plain prose that is, at its best, reminiscent of Hemingway. There are also shades of Hemingway in the underdeveloped female love interests – beautiful Eliza who yearns for the trappings and advantages of a white person’s life; loyal Maisie who will wait for Xuma no matter how long it takes for him to choose her – but for the most part the characters are vividly drawn through slick dialogue and a series of swift, vibrant scenes that capture the world of Malay Camp.
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The Johannesburg slums pulse with life. Back-alley shebeens, vicious police raids, fights, friendships, dancing, drinking, romance: “Of hearts pounding. Of silence and of sound. Of movement and of lack of movement. A warm, thick, dark blanket of life. That was Malay Camp. Something nameless and living. A stream of dark life.” The focus is on one particular drinking den, owned by Leah, a Skokiaan Queen, whose strength of character impresses both Xuma and the reader: “She shook the leather money bag that was tied round her waist. It sounded full. ‘This is power,’ she said.” Elsewhere, there is the sage-like Old Ma Plank, youthful menace Dlada, and the lovable drunk Daddy.
While these figures are archetypes, they emerge as distinctive, as seen through the eyes of Xuma, a narrator who is easy to root for, courageous and curious, with a stoic refrain, “It is nothing.” Through his work, the brutality of the mines becomes clear, from the indunas, policemen who herd the men like livestock, to the deadly conditions the workers are forced to endure. In this book, like all good fables, the stakes are known from the outset: “‘The mines are no good, Xuma, later on you cough and then you spit blood and you become weak and die.’”
Many lessons are imparted in this matter-of-fact, almost childlike tone. Interactions with Xuma’s Irish boss, Paddy the Red One, allow for another view on apartheid and injustice. Paddy’s rallying cry towards the end of the book borrows heavily from Shakespeare – “Is not the blood of a black man red like that of a white man? Does not a black man feel too? Does not a black man love life too?” – and also recalls the rediscovered novels of the American writer William Melvin Kelley, whose ingenuity was to depict a black man rejecting the leftovers bequeathed to him by his white countrymen.
There is that same impulse in Mine Boy, to call out racism in all its overt and covert forms, in a way that seems hugely ahead of its time: “They all have one thing in common. They want to decide who the good native is and they want to do good things for him.” Holding all these discernments and lessons together is the character of noble, fallible Xuma and the question he wants the world at large to answer: “Must a man run who has done nothing?”
