Mine Boy Author:Peter Abrahams Young, strong, proud, and black, Xuma came from a Stone Age tribe to the Johannesburg ghetto, innocently seeking work in the gold mines and a new life in the big city. Too soon he discovered that the price of civilization was dehumanization and the cost of living, despair. He learned that running was a way of life; that justice was reserved for ... more »whites only, and that a man was no better than the color of his skin. Deep in brawling, bootlegging Malay Town he found a new kind of kinship and love -- and a new kind of fear and hatred called apartheid, with its passes, beatings, and the servile compromises that often meant the difference between life and death. And deep in the rich, cruel South African mines, he discovered red-haired, white-skinned Paddy who said that a man must be a man before he is a color, for this is his only hope.
First published in 1946, this book was republished as Volume 6 in the Heinemann "African Writers Series" and subsequently reprinted eitght times in that series from 1975 to 1986. The Collier edition is a 1970 reprint of this important work by Peter Abrahams.« less