Preface: The Passion of Peter Abrahams

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When Peter Abrahams was found dead at Coyaba, his home in Rock Hall, Jamaica, in January 2017, a national day of outrage and mourning and apology ought to have been declared. But it wasn’t. No surprise there, perhaps, cynicism and indifference having come to define our reasons of state. The autopsy strongly suggested murder. Indeed, there has been an arrest, though (as of this writing) no court trial has yet taken place.¹ But whatever transpires with the criminal investigation and the uncertain and slow-moving wheels of due process of the law, there will forever remain a moral debt that we Jamaicans owe to Abrahams. At the time of his terrible, unnecessary death, he was ninety-seven years old and one of the last Pan-Africanists of his great generation. He was, for a while, a close collaborator of George Padmore’s (there was a later parting of the ways) and was centrally involved, as chairman of the publicity committee, in the organization of the famous fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester in October 1945.²

Abrahams was born in Vrededorp, a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, in March 1919, a “colored” in the enforced racial classification of the era. But from the late 1950s onward, Jamaica became his adopted home. Why? What was it about Jamaica that so moved him, so captivated him, so provoked him? In his 1957 book, Jamaica: An Island Mosaic, he suggested that he sensed something in ordinary Jamaican people, a fierce dignity of black endurance that made Jamaica an “important symbol . . . in our race-ridden world.”³ He repeated this sentiment in 1963 when he said that “in the stumbling and fumbling reaching forward” of Jamaican people, one finds the “most hopeful image . . . of the resolution of the color problem in any of the so-called newly emerging underdeveloped world.”⁴ And he seemed not to have changed his mind throughout the more than half a century of active residence in Jamaica. For it’s much the same idea that catalyzes his last book, The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the Twentieth Century, in which Jamaica is imagined as the embodiment of burden but also of possibility.⁵ Jamaica, then, was a deeply special place for Abrahams. So, that this should have been his end, a victim of vulgar Jamaican violence, is, to my mind, a national shame, a national disgrace.⁶

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I never met Peter Abrahams. It is one of my many regrets. He was a household name, though, when I was growing up in Kingston. I can vividly remember his slow, rasping voice on Radio Jamaica every evening, giving his views on some matter or other of current affairs. I’ve no memory whatsoever of the content of those views—but that voice is unforgettable. It seemed to strain in a very physical way to speak, but that by itself lent it an earnest and strangely comforting authenticity. But, shockingly, in retrospect, I knew next to nothing about either his life or his work. How could that have happened? How could Abrahams’s global significance to the black world have simply escaped me? I’d of course read his 1946 novel, Mine Boy, when I was a student at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in the late 1970s. But like many others in that time of heightened consciousness of African liberation, I read it merely as an African “classic,” and specifically one that offered a profound meditation on the everyday lives of black mine workers in apartheid South Africa.⁷

I had no notion, however, of the place of Mine Boy in Abrahams’s overall oeuvre. In fact, I had no notion at all of Abrahams as a writer, his itinerary, the fundamental themes that preoccupied him, his seminal contribution to what we might now call a black transnational literature. Mine Boy, I would come to realize, was his third work of fiction. It came after the exploratory 1942 short story collection Dark Testament and the 1945 novel Song of the City. And it was followed by The Path of Thunder, published...