Tribute to Peter Abrahams: one of South Africa's most significant black writers

'There was a need to write, to tell freedom' - Abrahams' work focused on the urban experience of racism, writes Angelo Flick

"Vrededorp is made up of 24 streets, running parallel to each other. They are known by their numbers ... And from the streets and houses of Vrededorp, from the backyards and muddy alleys, a loud babel of shouting, laughing, cursing, voices rise, are swallowed by the limitless sky, and rise again in unending tumult." - Tell Freedom (1954), Peter Abrahams (1919-2017).

Such is the town, west of the Johannesburg CBD, where Peter Abrahams, one of the most significant black writers to emerge from South Africa in the 20th century, grew up. Conditions may have been inauspicious, but it was here that he found the material to chronicle his life and times, and for his excoriating analysis of the human condition in the period between the wars. 

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An encounter with an administrative clerk in one of his many jobs as an illiterate labourer awakened him to the power of writing. She introduced him to Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which spurred him to seek out formal schooling.

His early poems were published in The Bantu World, and he pursued his education through an Anglican college in Pietersburg (now Polokwane). Still, the burning ambition for full humanity could not be fulfilled by education alone, and this led him to political involvement with the communist and Marxist circles of the time, in Johannesburg, Cape Town and later Durban.

By 20 he signed on as a seaman and left for London, where he pursued a career as a journalist. Out of this exile from the foetid conditions of Union white supremacy came the prose he is best known for.

Dark Testament (1942), a collection of short stories, was followed by the canonical Mine Boy (1946), which examines the conflict between modernity and tradition, and the confrontation for the black African subject with the "lie" of industrialised modernity (progress, but not for the colonised and the oppressed).

In the 1950s he went to Jamaica, where he spent the rest of his long life as a writer and broadcaster. It was this life as a black subject displaced from his place of birth and happily settled in the Caribbean that he reflected on in The Coyaba Chronicles (2000).

His work departed from the style and concerns of earlier black South African writers like RRR and Herbert Dhlomo and Sol Plaatje. Abrahams focused on the urban experience of colonial racist subjugation. He was, as Richard Rive said, one of the first "protest writers" who recorded the dehumanising of entire groups of people in the service of white supremacy prior to the institution of formal apartheid. 

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With no local tradition readily available, he was drawn to African-American writers like Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen, and the English Romantics.

From the gulf between the world he lived in and the world he wanted to live in, in the chasm between his widely divergent literary influences, and between the ambition for something else elsewhere and the stifling dehumanisation and humiliation of being black in colonial South Africa, Abrahams forged an oeuvre.

And it is this body of work that some of us encountered later in the 20th century, in school and university libraries, which played as important a role in our own thinking and development as Abrahams's own encounter with the Harlem Renaissance writers did in his.

His role in South African writing is often underestimated, partly because of his long exile, and his self-immersion in Jamaican cultural life. But many of us in South Africa still pay homage to the writer who, in unveiling his own past, shone a light on our present, and does so still.

The closing of Tell Freedom captures Abrahams's diagnosis of the trouble he faced here: "Perhaps life has a meaning that transcended race and colour. If it had, I could not find it in South Africa. Also, there was the need to write, to tell freedom, and for this I needed to be personally free."

'Tell Freedom' by Peter Abrahams. Published by Faber & Faber (R654)

• The author of article, Angelo Fick, is a writer and broadcaster based in Johannesburg. Since 1994 he has taught in various universities in South Africa and Europe.