Peter Abrahams Quotes

The concerts and theatres, the libraries and the parks, the bookshops and the clean, fresh looking tearooms, the buses and departmental stores.

If a man loves a woman he loves her. That is all. There is no bad and there is no good. There is only love. The only thing that is bad is if a man loves a woman and she loves him not.

Who had given him the scholarship? The Bantu Welfare Trust? No one I asked seemed sure. I put out feelers. The Welfare Trust was only for pure-blooded Africans. And though the Africans might accept me as one of themselves, the whites who administered the trust would not. Those to whom I spoke thought it crazy, but there you are.

A man's a man to the extent that he asserts himself. There's no assertion in your mine boy. There is confusion and bewilderment and acceptance. Nothing more.

On a different mental and emotional level my friend Jonathan had gone through the same process. Christianity and the knowledge it brought had made the tribal past inadequate. So he had turned to the Christian present and future. These working men had found the tribal economy inadequate when the new taxes, the new offerings, and new prices of the white men came. So they had turned to city...

Found that the good things of this present are RESERVED FOR EUROPEANS ONLY

No! I don't want you to touch me.

Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the locations, and besides, they were all full, so the white man had started townships in the outlying district of Johannesburg in the hope of killing Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Many other places had been killed thus.

In the name of civilization, the dignity and worth of the African people has been grossly underrated, their progress retarded and aspirations frustrated, and the whole life undermined. They are compelled to live in appalling conditions of squalor, filth and isolation...

It is not enough to destroy, you must build as well. Build up a stock of faith in your breast in native Zuma, mine boy, who has no social conscience, who cannot read or write and cannot understand his wanting what you want. **Page 69.

It was difficult for the Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers

Oh––isn’t it lovely? That’s the one I want when we are rich!’ Her eyes were bright, her lips parted

So many people who consider themselves progressives have their own weird notions about the native, but they all have one thing in common. They want to decide who the good native is and they want to do good things for him. [...] They want to think for him and he must accept their thoughts. And they like him to depend on them.

The only place where he was completely free was underground in the mines. There he was a master and knew his way. There he did not even fear his white man, for his white man depended on him. He was the boss boy. He gave the orders to the other mine boys. They would do for him what they would not do for his white man or any other white man.

He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza. And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her.