Words matter. These are the best Peter Abrahams Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.
My mother went to work in the homes of white folk, usually living in and looking after their children. The money was small.
The only places where I have found that simple human dignity, that respect for the other man, and the gracious feel of tolerance and humanity have not been either among the heroes of the class-struggle or the ‘thinking men’ but among my simple ‘backward’ people.
Positive social awareness among the South African educated half-caste is zero. Teaching is a mechanical job. The best way of earning a living.
You can’t walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.
There is a qualitative difference between being a minority and being a majority. Majorities are stronger under psychological pressure because numbers count. But only if they are aware of it.
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. ‘Coloured’ is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness.
We do not ask the right questions when we are young, so we miss the important answers. Now it is too late to ask, too late for the illuminating answers, and the unanswered questions haunt us for a lifetime.
To get where you want to go you can’t only do what you like.
All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: ‘Reserved for Europeans Only.’
Many have changed so much that they have lost the magic of the dream that carried them on their own bootstraps.
Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.
