The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation

The Black Experience in the 20th Century
An Autobiography andMeditation

Peter Abrahams

A brave and powerfulmemoir by a well-known Third World writer on the problem of the color line in thelast century.

The Black Experience in the 20th Century is both apersonal memoir and a powerful meditation on what W. E. B. Dubois defined at thebeginning of the century as "the problem of the

The Black Experience in the 20th Century
An Autobiography andMeditation

Peter Abrahams

A brave and powerfulmemoir by a well-known Third World writer on the problem of the color line in thelast century.

The Black Experience in the 20th Century is both apersonal memoir and a powerful meditation on what W. E. B. Dubois defined at thebeginning of the century as "the problem of the color line; of the relationsbetween the lighter and darker races of man...." Using Dubois as a point ofdeparture, Abrahams writes passionately about the inherent "wrongness" ofracial hatred and contemplates such timeless questions as: "Why was color themost crucial issue of our century?" and "When will we get over the deeppsychic and emotional damage done by the racial experience?" One of the majorthemes of the memoir -- the quest for an integrated identity -- depicts thechallenge that faces people of color in both First- and Third-Worldcountries.

The Black Experience in the 20th Century is also thepersonal odyssey of Peter Abrahams, a young South African who worked as a seaman, leaving his homeland for wartime Britain and postwar France in order to become awriter. He recalls his personal relationships with the black literati of the day andhis involvement in the pan-Africanist movement of the 1950s, giving intriguingglimpses of other prominent writers like George Padmore, W. E. B. Dubois, JuliusNyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. Abrahams's journeytakes him to the Caribbean island of Jamaica, where he, his wife, Daphne, and theirthree children find sanctuary from racial divisiveness at "Coyaba." It isin his lifelong companionship with Daphne and their multiracial union that Abrahamsperceives symbolic "one bloodedness," mirroring his own admirablesensibilities.

Peter Abrahams, South African novelist andessayist, was born in Vrededorp, Johannesburg in 1919. Among his best-known worksare Mine Boy, The Path to Thunder, Tell Freedom, A Wreath for Udomo, and The Viewfrom Coyaba. He has been credited for the example he set as one of the first blackAfrican writers of the 1950s and '60s, and for the encouragement he offered tofellow writers Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, among others. Since 1951Abrahams has lived and worked in Jamaica.

Sales territory islimited to North America
March 2001
420 pages, 5 5/8 x8 5/8
cloth 0-253-33890-5 $29.95 t