Published two years before Cry the beloved country, this explores similar themes, but in a subtly different way. The viewpoint is that of Xuma, the young black man from the country who comes to the big city to work in the mines, and it's the noisy, lively, disorderly world of the townships — and of Leah's shebeen, in particular — where he finds solidarity and companionship, whilst the values of "civilised" white society are often made to seem strange, arbitrary, and threatening. Where Paton's African rhythms are slow, disciplined and stately, the rumble of old men's conversations, this is written to a much rougher, wilder beat. And it can't help pulling us in.

And Abrahams wrote this whilst he was mixing with the future leaders of post-colonial Africa and the Caribbean in London: Paton's young man is doomed to his tragic fate, but we leave Xuma at a point where he has seen that black people cannot rely on white liberals and have to take leadership themselves to defend their rights. Maybe he will be crushed by the system all the same, but Abrahams doesn't see that as inevitable, and the ending of the book allows us to imagine that he will be able to do something to work towards change. Although perhaps not so much if we're reading it 75 years on and know how South Africa's history progressed...

The AWS edition comes with attractive, if slightly Sunday-schoolish, illustrations by Ruth Yudelowitz. All I could find out about her on the internet is that she was an artist working for the East Africa Literature Bureau in Nairobi in the 1950s, and illustrated a lot of African school-books. ( )

Mine Boy is an unsung gem, amazing and much more potent than Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country. In fact, the two do not necessarily warrant comparison except for the fact that Paton's book is one of the few classic South African novels taught in U.S. schools. Some readers have complained of the simplicity of Abraham's language or "cardboard" characters. For me, it's that very simplicity that makes the story such a dramatic tale; it's language that anyone can understand. It's primitive, if you will, or embryonic. As for the characters being underdeveloped, again, I think this adds to the effectiveness of this particular story. Caste systems, apartheid, and other types of sanctioned discrimination force people to come across as stereotypes. When we view our neighbors as "other," we're not seeing them as fully human. This is effectively dramatized in Mine Boy. It put me in a time and place that I would not have experienced otherwise, despite the universality of feeling that comes with the hardships of life. This is the knife's edge of thinking only in terms of black and white. ( )

High Upper-Intermediate