Mine Boy is a 1946 novel by South African novelist Peter Abrahams. Set in racist South Africa during the lead-up to apartheid, the novel explores the stereotypes and institutions that discriminate against working-class black Africans. According to Nigerian scholar Kolawole Ogungbesan, Mine Boy became "the first African novel written in English to attract international attention." [1]
The plot follows a black miner, Xuma, as he goes through a number of struggles, including introduced disease from Europeans as well as political and social trauma. [2] Xuma moves from his town to Malay camp, a black area of Johannesburg, in search of work at the gold mines. Leah, an illegal beer brewer, gives him a place to live. Xuma is against the racist treatment of black Africans and fights it. Xuma falls in love with Leah’s niece, Eliza, who is assimilationist, and then with Maisy. Xuma becomes a successful miner, working for the supervisor Paddy. One of Leah's tenants, Johannes, and others, die in a mine accident and Xuma and Paddy lead a strike. Gaddemn
Critic Sally-Anne Jackson focuses on the novel's thematic interest in the disease and trauma introduced by colonial rule. [2] Rodney Nesbitt wrote about the structure, style, tone, and themes of the novel. [3] Claude J. Summers notes that the book does not mention "same sex pairings among migrant laborers" in the mines, although the practice of young men and boys becoming "wives of the mine" with older men is well known, and documented back to the 1930s. [4] Megan Jones writes about space in the novel, and the movement of the characters through the urban space of Johannesburg and what this reveals about the "organisation of urban life by racist capitalism." [5] Erasmus Aikley Msuya writes a linguistic analysis of Xuma and Leah's speech in the novel and what it reveals about them. [6]
In Abdulrazak Gurnah's first novel, Memory of Departure, the main character meets a young man on the train to Nairobi who is reading Mine Boy.
Johannesburg is the most populous city in South Africa with 4,803,262 people, and is classified as a megacity; it is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. It is the provincial capital of Gauteng, the wealthiest province in South Africa. Johannesburg is the seat of the Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa. Most of the major South African companies and banks have their head offices in Johannesburg. The city is located within the mineral-rich Witwatersrand hills, the epicentre of the international-scale mineral, gold and (specifically) diamond trade.
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
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Peter Henry Abrahams Deras, commonly known as Peter Abrahams, was a South African-born novelist, journalist and political commentator who in 1956 settled in Jamaica, where he lived for the rest of his life. His death at the age of 97 is considered to have been murder.
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Kaffir, also spelled Cafri, is an exonym and an ethnic slur – the use of it in reference to black people being particularly common in South Africa. In Arabic, the word kāfir ("unbeliever") was originally applied to non-Muslims before becoming predominantly focused on pagan zanj who were increasingly used as slaves. During the Age of Exploration in early modern Europe, variants of the Latin term cafer were adopted in reference to non-Muslim Bantu peoples even when they were monotheistic. It was eventually used, particularly in Afrikaans, for any black person during the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid eras, closely associated with South African racism. While originally not pejorative, it became a pejorative by the mid-20th century and is now considered extremely offensive hate speech. Punishing continuing use of the term was one of the concerns of the Promotion of Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted by the South African parliament in the year 2000 and it is now euphemistically addressed as the K-word in South African English.
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The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) is the youth wing of the African National Congress (ANC). As set out in its constitution, the ANC Youth League is led by a National Executive Committee (NEC) and a National Working Committee (NWC).
Anti-Black racism, also called anti-Black sentiment, anti-Blackness, colourphobia or Negrophobia, is characterised by prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination or extreme aversion towards people who are racialised as Black people, especially those people from sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas, as well as a loathing of Black culture worldwide. Such sentiment includes, but is not limited to: the attribution of negative characteristics to Black people; the fear, strong dislike or dehumanization of Black men; and the objectification of Black women.
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Mining in South Africa was once the main driving force behind the history and development of Africa's most advanced and richest economy. Large-scale and profitable mining started with the discovery of a diamond on the banks of the Orange River in 1867 by Erasmus Jacobs and the subsequent discovery of the Kimberley pipes a few years later. Gold rushes to Pilgrim's Rest and Barberton were precursors to the biggest discovery of all, the Main Reef/Main Reef Leader on Gerhardus Oosthuizen's farm Langlaagte, Portion C, in 1886, which kicked off the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and the subsequent rapid development of the gold field there.
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