Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams – Review, Part 2
If you have not read the first part of this review, please follow this link.
In the first part of the review of Mine Boy, by Peter Abrahams, we followed the first few months of Xuma in the city. Xuma cultivated three relationships in those first months. The first one was a mother-son relationship between Xuma and Leah. The second relationship was an on and off love affair with Eliza. Lastly, Xuma became friends with Maisy, who loved him and believed Eliza’s relationship with Xuma would end in tears. Xuma, heartbroken by Eliza’s unwillingness to be all in, left Malay camp for three months.
One day, Xuma went on a walk and ran into his boss, Paddy (nicknamed “the red one”), and his “woman”, Di who was also white. They persuaded Xuma to come home and eat with them. Finally, he saw the things that white people had: electricity, radio, wine (without fear of arrest), etc. Xuma believed it was foolish for Eliza to think black people could have those things. Di noticed Xuma wanted to talk about something but he was reluctant to open up. When Di started smoking, a habit that Eliza also had, Xuma poured out his heart and said of Eliza:
She’s a teacher and wants to be like white people. She wants a place like this, place and clothes like yours and she wants to do the things you do. It is all foolishness for she is not white. But she cannot help herself and it makes her unhappy sometimes… It makes me unhappy too, for she wants me and she does not want me. But it is foolishness
This passage highlights the cruelty of apartheid or any system of discrimination: Eliza suffered depressive bout just for wanting the things that the group oppressing her wanted; good things that any right-thinking human should desire; she was laden with guilt because of this and could not give her heart to the man she loved. On the other hand, Xuma could not understand why black people should desire amenities and household goods that made life more enjoyable. Apartheid had messed up the thinking of both Eliza and Xuma.
Di then proceeded to educate Xuma (whom she calls Zuma) about human nature:
Listen Zuma. I am white and your girl is black, but inside we are the same. She wants the things I want and I want the things she wants. Eliza and I are the same inside, Truly Zuma… It is so Zuma, we are the same inside. A black girl and a white girl, but the same inside.
Xuma could not see it. Paddy turned up and the discussion ended. I have no doubt the voice that Di represented was that of Peter Abrahams, the author, at some point in his life. Abrahams, a mixed-race young man, became a Christian while being mentored and tutored by white tutors. At the time, he said
I was a full member now of the fellowship of the Christ who offered life, who taught: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. Read more here
“Love thy neighbour as thyself” does not specify race, colour or creed. If radio and electricity are good for the whites, they should also be good for the blacks and mixed-race people. As time went by, Abrahams struggled to reconcile the violent racism he experienced with Christianity:
“What made it so very difficult for us was the fact that the equation did work out with the fathers but we had proof that the rest of the white Christians of our land were not like the fathers and the sisters. The equation did not work out. And in the harshness of our young idealism, we demanded that it work out as logically as a problem of mathematics. And it did not. Where was the error: in man or God?” Read more here
Like Abrahams, Xuma struggled to see the brotherhood of humanity, the fact that a white girl and a black girl can want the same time when the apartheid system that benefited the white people, oppressed black people violently. Xuma thought black and white must be inherently different.
Di and Paddy debated Xuma after he departed. Di thought Xuma was not human yet, simply because he did not think it right for his black girlfriend to want the same thing as a white girl. Eating, drinking and a sense of dignity and pride was not enough to be human because animals also have these. Di went on to accuse “progressives” of trying to create black people in their own image. Di felt that progressives are not progressive enough until they are ready to accept that not only can black people lead themselves but they can also lead white people. In other words, racism and progressive values are not compatible. We have this problem in multi-cultural societies today. Often, the “good immigrant” is the one who is happy to forget his culture and adopt the culture of his newly adopted country and immigrants are expected to be grateful for what they have and know their place.
Di said Eliza’s capacity to like the things that white people want and to resent her liking these things provides hope for her. Paddy on the other hand believed that Eliza was already a disaster. While I won’t go as far as agreeing with Paddy, to have such an unresolved tension is not psychologically healthy; it is something that guarantees a regular cycle of depression.
Things did not get better when Xuma found himself in the house of a black doctor and saw more of the white people’s things than what he saw in the house of Paddy and Di. Xuma was amazed and remarked: This is like the white people’s place! The doctor and his wife laughed and provided this reply:
Not like the white people’s place. Just a comfortable place. You are not copying the white man when you live like this. This is the sort of place a man should like because it is good for him. Whether he is white or black does not matter. A place like this is good for him. It is the other places that are the white people’s, the places that they make you live in.
In other words, when you reject and resent oppression, be very careful not to reject and resent with it those things that can improve your life.
Things began to unravel at Malay Camp. First, Daddy died, the chief mourners being Ma Plank, the woman who loved him, and Leah, the woman he brought up. Eliza’s on and off relationship with Xuma ended tragically when she ran away, leaving no address, still professing her love for Xuma but making it clear she would never return. Xuma entered a cycle of depression. The whole situation was very hard for Maisy, who was still in love with Xuma.
To make matter worse, the police finally cornered Leah and she was jailed for nine months on the charge of selling beers, the same beer that white people were free to have and keep in their homes. There is a link with Abrahams’ life here, who was forced to leave school when his aunt, Mattie, was arrested for selling homemade brew.
Those two events threw Xuma into a depressive cycle. He was showing up at work but he was no longer himself. It was another encounter with Paddy, his boss at the mines that woke him up. Paddy challenged him that first a man has to think like a man in order to understand both black and white men. Paddy said the reason blacks are oppressed in South Africa was because the whites were thinking as white people. This discussion changed Xuma’s outlook. Xuma came out of the cocoon into which racial injustice forced him. We can read about Xuma’s transformation in Abrahams’ words in Mine Boy:
Xuma got to his room and undressed without noticing it… And above all, this was man. Man, the individual, strong and free and happy, and without colour. Man alive. Pushing out his chest and being proud. Man in his grandeur
The passage above is very consistent with how Western Civilization perceives man. Man as an agent of change who is capable of exceptional acts (and may I add terrible ones too). This is not a universal viewpoint. Before colonization, Africa was community centred. Despite the ravages of colonization and neo-colonization, the importance of community/clan/extended family is still very visible in African culture. The same is true of China and several parts of Asia. India, with its arranged marriage system has a divorce rate of 1%, China has just 0.3% while the UK has 33.3%. The pandemic has also showed us the downsides of the focus on the individual and all his rights, but at times, at the expense of the community. People don’t want to be vaccinated because it is their human right to choose what goes into their bodies, but they don’t want to consider the impact of their choices on their neighbours that they should love as themselves.
Back to the transformed Xuma. The next day at the mine he heard that Johannes (JP Williamson) and Chris, his white boss sacrificed their lives to save other miners who were trapped in the mine. When the order was given for all the miners to go underground, Xuma led a revolt. Paddy sided with Xuma and the black miners. The police came, Paddy was arrested while Xuma ran away as Paddy implored him not to do so.
Xuma ran to Maisy and Ma Plank. When Ma Plank heard what happened, she beseeched Xuma to run away but he replied:
The Red One (Paddy) is in jail. I must go there too. It will be wrong if I do not go. I would not be a man then… The Red One is not a black man and he is going to jail for our people, how can I not go? And there are many things I want to say too. I want to tell them how I feel and how the black people feel...It is good that a black man should tell the white people how we feel. And also, a black man must tell the black people how they feel and what they want. These things I must do, then I will feel like a man
Despite Xuma’s impending stint in jail, the book ended on a very good note, with Xuma proposing his love to Maisy and Maisy promising she would wait for Xuma, however long it takes.
In the first page of Mine Boy, we were introduced to a young man who knew his place in life and was just focused on fighting for food, clothing and shelter in the oppressive environment created by apartheid. He saw the world in two separate boxes: black and white. He accepted the status quo: he had no rights and it was foolish for him as a black man to want the things of the white people. Through his experiences and pain, we parted from Xuma at the end of the book as a freedom fighter, who believed in something: the value of the life of a human being. By standing up to lead the strike of the miners, he put his own comfortable life on the line. Implicit in that confrontation was the acceptance that white and black people can aspire to have the same thing. He had the chance to run away but he didn’t because he felt that it was wrong for Paddy, the Red One to suffer for the cause of black people while he ran away.
The Mine Boy was thinking like a man, rather than a black person.
If you have not read the first part of this review, please follow this link.
