Peter Abrahams Quotes

I am no good and I cannot help myself. It will be right if you hate me. You should beat me. But inside me there is something wrong. And it is because I want the things of the white people. I want to be like the white people and go where they go and do the things they do and I am black. I cannot help it. Inside I am not black and I do not want to be a black person.

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Africans most of whom had taken European education and embraced Christian religion, to revert to the rapidly dying, outdated traditions and customs of their forefathers

The natives did not like 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.

A woman finds a man and the whole world is a new place. And the fighting stiffness that was ever in her body, goes. And the hardness of her head stops and she does not think any more with her head but feels with her heart. Yes, it is ever so. And with a man it is so too. His shoulders square and a smile is not far from his lips and there is a new certainty in him. Yes. It has ever been so and it will ever be so when a man and a woman love. **Page 123

Dressed in an orange sack. Three holes in the sack allowed for his head and arms to come through. About his waist was a piece of rope that gathered the sack in and made it hang like some monkish garb. He was barefooted.

Leah left him and he collapsed in a heap. She looked down and spat. The she raised her heel and brought it down on his face.

His white man had even tried to make friends with him because the other mine boys respected him so much. But a white man and a black man cannot be friends. They work together. That's all.

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.

Light is white: dark is black.

All the years of his life had been spent walking through the land; from east to west, then back; from north to south, then back.

That was the heart of it there, where it was almost as light as day. I could see cars and trams clearly. And the outlines of people moving. White people. To the left, and a little towards me, was Malay Camp, an inky black spot in the sea of light. Couldn't see anything there. Dark folk move in darkness: white folk move in light. Well, Malay Camp wouldn’t be a slum if it were as light as the city. Slum is darkness. Dark folk live in darkness.

He sat on the bed and held his head in his hands. Eliza had gone out with that sickly monkey dressed in the clothes of a white man. Why, even his hands were soft.

An unbelievable thing happened. The second colored man knocked the first one down and ran down the street waving to Xuma.

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

Twenty-second Street, the street where we lived, was strange and alien. The noise was frightening after the quiet of Elsburg.