Peter Abrahams
Peter Abrahams
Peter Henry Abrahams Deras, commonly known as Peter Abrahams, is a South African novelist, journalist and political commentator...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 March 1919
destroy hard middle passed twentieth
To have the ability to destroy all and not to do it was one of the hard tests humanity passed - but only just - in the middle of the twentieth century.
ask haunt miss
We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.
among individual man number tribal western
Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.
calendar community events unlike
We have a comprehensive calendar of events unlike any other in the city.
crafted people product relate
We've crafted a product that people are really going to relate to.
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We like him to say we are his main competitor,
aware difference numbers
There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.
black brutal defence large men numbers threatened whatever women
The racism of the Nazis threatened to make whatever we had experienced look like child's play. If they could be so brutal to the Jews, what would they do to the blacks? So large numbers of black young men and women rallied to the defence of the empire.
among either found gracious heroes men places respect simple tolerance
The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the 'thinking men' but among my simple 'backward' people.
city colonial emerge empire england entered fighting great hard hold imperial london lose power subjects unchanged war
The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.
came lived lower near neither nor spoke women worked
Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.
answers automatic darker ideologies lighter problem races relations
Marxism, communism, socialism - the ideologies - did not have the automatic answers to the problem of the relations between the lighter and darker races of mankind. They did not even have an answer to anti-Semitism.
became books colour lived marked men shelf women writings
I read every one of the books on the shelf marked American Negro Literature. I became a nationalist, a colour nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me.
accepted access anywhere born conferred empire entitled finding social south speaking special trade union white
Being born white in South Africa or anywhere in the empire and Commonwealth automatically conferred this special status. You had no problem finding a place to live, a job, trade union membership, access to social services. Being white, speaking English, you were accepted as English, entitled to all the rights of citizenship.