Peter Abrahams (1919 -2017) - Life, Writing and Politics in his Autobiographies - Postponed to 2020

This lecture will focus on the life and work of Peter Abrahams, a South African novelist, journalist and political commentator, who in 1956 settled in Jamaica where he died in 2017. His two memoirs, Tell Freedom (1954) and The Coyaba Chronicles (2000), written more than half a century apart, on different continents and in different hemispheres, combines the experiential in his formative early life as a black person in an oppressive, racist country with the humanist, Marxist and Pan-Africanist influences. His life experiences were formative in shaping his deep empathy for others so evident in his writing. A conscious non-racialism though is evident in both autobiographical works and was cent