Abrahams: The unsung hero of African letters

Having celebrated his 95th birthday last March, Peter Abrahams is easily Africa’s oldest writer of international repute.

As early as the 1950s and 60s, Abrahams had earned international recognition as the first major African writer to be published in the mainstream British and American circuits.

Unknown to many today, his novel The Path of Thunder (1948) was in the New York Times bestseller list for a week before it was superseded by fellow South African Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country.

Reportedly still hale and healthy, Abrahams today lives with Daphne, his  English wife of more than half a century, in a home christened Coyaba in the hills outside Kingston, Jamaica, where they have lived since the 1950s. The couple enjoys its retirement with its two dogs and passes the days “messing around the computer”.

Surprisingly, in his grand old age Abrahams still has his wits around him, and gives the occasional interview, albeit reluctantly, arguing that he has said most of what he has to say in his books.

Mostly, though, Abrahams’ life is that of a recluse,  particularly given that his three children live in Europe. As for his advanced age, it does not worry him much.

PROLIFIC WRITER

“As long as the mind is alive,” he told an interviewer in 2009, reportedly in a laboured South African accent, “how old I am is an interesting experience.”

Abrahams and his wife have lived at Coyaba since the mid-1950s when he first went to Jamaica at the behest of Norman Manley, the country’s then premier.

Since then, the pioneering African writer has become one of Jamaica’s best-known figures, and on March 11 2009, the University of the West Indies staged a major symposium to mark his 90th birthday.

Back in motherland Africa, though, the famed South African writer is hardly talked about, although a few of his books are studied in universities here and there and a few, like Mine Boy and A Wreath for Udomo, have been set books in numerous countries over the years.

Numerous editions of his 1954 book, Tell Freedom, have been published all over the world. On the whole, though, critics have been unkind to Abrahams, and few honours have gone his way as rewards for an astonishingly long life of literary production.

Instead, kudos have been going to writers who were not even born when Abrahams published his first books.

Mostly unsung these days, he has outlived many other writers who became known decades after Abrahams published his first book, Dark Testament, in 1942.

It was followed by his novels Song of the City (1945) and Mine Boy (1946). According to Nigerian scholar Kolawole Ogungbesan, the latter book became “the first African novel written in English to attract international attention.”

That seminal novel also earned Abrahams recognition as the first author to bring the horrific reality of South Africa’s apartheid system of racial discrimination to international attention.  It was followed by The Path of Thunder (1948) and Wild Conquest (1950), both of which were published in Britain and the United States.

Coming soon afterwards were Return to Goli (1953), a journalistic account of a return journey to Africa, and Tell Freedom (1954), a memoir. Other titles in Abrahams’ impressive corpus include A Night of Their Own (1965) and the Jamaica-set This Island Now (1966).

The latter is the only one of his novels not set in Africa, and speaks to the ways power and money can change most people’s perspectives.

Later titles include A Night of Their Own (1965), The View from Coyaba (1985) and The Black Experience in the 20th Century, which was styled an autobiography and meditation, and was published in 2000.

Born in Johannesburg to an Ethiopian father and South African mother of mixed race, Abrahams fled South Africa, his homeland, in 1939 after the government charged him with treason.

After two years working on a ship, he had settled in England, where his passion for black liberation saw him associating with like-minded black figures.

PAN AFRICAN MOVEMENT

Abrahams also came to closely know famous Black American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Wright reportedly became Abrahams’ mentor, giving him feedback on his work and even introducing the South African fledgling writer to his own publisher.

Apart from being a pioneering African writer, Abrahams earned well-deserved renown for being a part of the black intelligentsia that emerged in England during the 1940s, forming a formidable colony of pioneer Pan-Africanists that was based in London.

Among the members of the Pan-Africanist movement Abrahams became close to were well-known African diaspora figures like the West Indians George Padmore, a Trinidadian, and Dudley Thompson, who would later become Jamaica’s security minister.

Fellow Africans and future leaders of their countries Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana— then known as the Gold Coast— also fraternised with Abrahams when they were based in Britain. Those two leaders are said to have been the models for a rather unflattering character in A Wreath for Udomo.

Other famous Africans Abrahams became acquainted with were Tanzania’s Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi. And though few people know it, Abrahams was an important member of the Pan-Africanist fraternity and served as the publicist for the Manchester Conference of Pan-African leaders in 1945.

“We were not necessarily communist, but radical,” he was to say later, explaining the ideologies espoused by the members of the group. “The black man had to be revolutionary in order to have self-respect.”

Abrahams was already a well known writer before he went to live in Jamaica.

He had also made a name as a renowned journalist who had written for liberal publications like the Daily Worker and The Observer in England and the New York Herald Tribune in the United States.

It was in the late 1950s that he moved his family to Jamaica. After settling there, he became editor of the West Indian Economist and took charge of the daily radio news network, West Indian News.

INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION

“It had a little over 600,000 people, was dirt poor and few black people had shoes,” he was to recall later regarding Jamaica.  “It reminded me of South Africa except for one thing; the racism was not law.”

At heart a committed writer, Abrahams eventually gave up most of his duties so that he could devote himself full-time to writing.

With time, he became one of South Africa’s most prominent writers, and was in later years lauded by the late Nobel Literature laureate Nadine Gordimer for having paved the way for other South African writers who came after him.

As a statement of his international recognition, many of Abrahams’ works are still in print, and  in the 1960s and early ’70s were reissued or translated into other languages as his reading public steadily widened.