Full Study Guide of Mine Boy
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MINE BOY by Peter Abraham
Summary characters
Xuma
Xuma is the novel's protagonist. Xuma leaves his family
farm in the economically depressed north to work in a Johannesburg gold mine,
where he encounters the social problems and harsh living conditions that arise
from racial and economic oppression. Xuma is characterized as naïve and good-natured,
and he is often confused by the behaviors and attitudes of the city people he
meets. Xuma is strong and good-looking, attracting the attention of multiple
women.
Leah
Leah is a middle-aged beer seller who takes Xuma in at the
beginning of the novel. Leah is also Eliza's aunt. She is depicted as strong
and street-smart but ultimately kind. Though Leah is adept at avoiding police
raids, she is eventually caught and imprisoned toward the end of the novel.
Eliza
Leah's niece Eliza is a schoolteacher and the object of
Xuma's affection. Eliza is described as beautiful and smart, but she is also
often cold and conflicted in her thinking. Though Eliza is attracted to Xuma,
she admits she wishes to live as white people do. She says she feels as though
she is white inside, despite being black.
Maisy
Maisy is an outgoing young woman who occasionally works for
Leah. She is in love with Xuma, who goes to Maisy when Eliza rejects him. Maisy
is a patient person who accepts herself and treats other people with respect.
Dladla
Dladla is a violent, alcoholic man who Leah keeps around as
a "plaything." After their relationship sours and Leah assaults him,
it is suspected that Dladla is informing on Leah to the police. Dladla is found
dead from stab wounds, and his death is never explained.
Ma Plank
Ma Plank is an elderly woman who lives at Leah's and works
for her selling beer. Ma Plank is generous and helpful, and occasionally makes
rude jokes.
Daddy
Daddy is an elderly alcoholic man who Xuma only ever sees
drunk or asleep. Though Daddy has become a clownish figure, Ma Plank reveals
that Daddy, when sober, was once respected for his wisdom and class. After
being hit by a car, Daddy dies from internal injuries.
Johannes
Johannes is a mine worker who Xuma meets at Leah's.
Johannes's personality changes when he drinks, turning him boastful and
pugnacious. Johannes dies in a mine collapse at the end of the novel.
Paddy O'Shea
Paddy is Xuma's direct boss at the gold mine, where he is
nicknamed "The Red One" for his red hair. While Paddy is initially
portrayed as an unsympathetic character, Xuma eventually learns of Paddy's
progressive politics and opposition to the poor treatment of black South
Africans.
Joseph
Joseph is the brother of Leah's imprisoned partner. Joseph
himself is imprisoned early in the novel.
Di
Di is Paddy's girlfriend. Though she is apparently
sympathetic to Xuma, she argues against Paddy's progressive politics, revealing
that she believes Xuma and black people generally are less intelligent and
capable than white people.
Lena
Lena is a woman who works for Leah and is romantically
involved with Johannes. She is described as thin and colored—i.e. mixed-race.
Mine Boy Glossary
kaffir
an offensive, chiefly South African term of insult for a
black African
colored people
South African people who are descendants of individuals
from two distinct ethnicities, including Khoisan, Bantu, Afrikaner, Whites,
Austronesian, East Asian or South Asian
scale
a measurement of beer; a glass
brandish
wave or flourish (something, especially a weapon) as a
threat or in anger or excitement
henchman
a faithful follower or political supporter, especially one
prepared to engage in crime or dishonest practices by way of service
brood
think deeply about something that makes one unhappy
plodding
slow-moving and unexciting; (of a person) thorough and
hard-working but lacking in imagination or intelligence
tinge
to color slightly; a slight trace of a feeling or quality
commonplace
a usual or ordinary thing
faraway
distant in space or time; seeming remote from the immediate
surroundings; dreamy
macadamized road
a road covered in macadam, a broken stone of even size used
in successively compacted layers for surfacing roads and paths, and typically
bound with tar or bitumen
induna
a policeman employed by the mine, whose duty it is to keep
order among mine workers
knobkerry
a short stick with a knobbed head, traditionally used as a
weapon by the indigenous peoples of South Africa
assagais
a slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spear used chiefly by
southern African peoples
akimbo
with hands on the hips and elbows turned outward
verandah
a roofed platform along the outside of a house, level with
the ground floor
paraffin
a flammable, whitish, translucent, waxy solid consisting of
a mixture of saturated hydrocarbons, obtained by distillation from petroleum or
shale and used in candles, cosmetics, polishes, and sealing and waterproofing
compounds
nonplussed
(of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are
unsure how to react
comeliness
(typically of a woman) pleasant to look at; attractive
Skokiaan Queens
women who deal in illicit liquor
Bantu
a member of an indigenous people of central and southern
Africa that speaks a Bantu language. The term became offensive during under the
apartheid regime.
SUMMARY
Mine Boy opens with Xuma arriving in the
impoverished and mostly black Johannesburg slum of Malay Camp. Xuma is a farm
boy who has come from the economically depressed north in search of work in a
gold mine. With no money and nowhere to stay, Xuma is taken in by Leah, an illicit beer
seller. At Leah's, Xuma meets Daddy, Ma Plank, Joseph, and Dladla, all of whom confuse
him with their drunkenness, violence, and apparent lack of beliefs. In exchange
for a room and food, Leah expects Xuma to use his considerable size and
strength to assist her. Xuma is confused by her kindness, but appreciates that
she takes a shine to him.
Xuma wakes up to discover that two women are fighting out
in front of Leah's while a crowd watches eagerly. Leah breaks up the fight and
takes the injured women to her house to rest. An employee of Leah's named
Joseph takes Xuma out walking; it is Saturday—a holiday for black people in
Johannesburg, who have received their wages and so are spending money on
shopping, drinking, and gambling. A police van suddenly arrives and people
scatter. Xuma refuses to move, saying that he has done nothing wrong. However,
a white police officer strikes Xuma with his stick, causing Xuma to knock the
officer out with a punch. Xuma runs away and is led to safety by a colored man
(a mixed-race South African) who hides him in his house until the police give
up their search.
Xuma returns to Malay Camp later that day; Joseph and Leah
are relieved, but they caution him to run in the future. Leah takes Xuma for a
walk and he witnesses her give a black policeman a bribe to keep her updated
about planned raids of beer sellers. That evening Xuma meets Eliza, Leah's niece. He is
immediately drawn to her beauty. They go out on a walk together up a hill
outside of town. In the distance Xuma sees a hill and Eliza explains that it is
a mine dump—white sand dug out of the gold mines. Xuma attempts to kiss her, but
she runs away, leaving Xuma confused and angry.
The next day Xuma and Johannes walk to the mine, where
Johannes can get him a job. A white man at the mine commands Xuma to push a
truck full of sand that usually requires the work of two men. Xuma manages to
move the truck, but injures his leg on the axle. Xuma's boss, a white Irishman
with red hair named Paddy, brings him to the mine site doctor for bandaging.
Paddy tells Xuma that he will be his righthand man and will lead a group of
miners, whom he must threaten with violence if they do not cooperate.
Back at Malay Camp, Xuma finds
Eliza has brought another man home—a fellow teacher who dresses and speaks like
a white man. Xuma meets Maisy, who takes a liking for him. He
goes out dancing with Maisy but his mind is preoccupied with thoughts of Eliza.
That night, Eliza goes to Xuma's room and they kiss. However, Eliza becomes
conflicted and admits that she has assimilationist aspirations: though she is
black, she does not feel black inside. She wants to be like white people, and
wants a man who shares her aspiration.
Months pass. Xuma has his own
room in Malay Camp, having needed to get away from Leah's and his obsessive
thoughts about Eliza. One night he meets his boss Paddy and his
girlfriend Di on the street. They invite him
to dinner, but he is reluctant to be friends with a white man. Reluctantly Xuma
goes up, and he feels uncomfortable to be in such a nice apartment full of
white men's modern conveniences, such as electric lights and central heating.
While Paddy is out of the room, Xuma confides in Di about Eliza. After Xuma's
departure Paddy tells Di that Xuma will grow into a strong leader who will
fight back against racial oppression, but Di feels differently: she speaks of
Xuma as though he is not fully human.
One night Xuma returns to Leah's place, where he and Eliza
confess their love for one another before having sex. Xuma falls asleep happy,
but in the morning Eliza is cold and tells him that the night before was a
mistake. Feeling blank and confused, Xuma turns to Maisy for comfort. They
travel to Hoopvlei, a town outside Johannesburg. During the pleasant Sunday
outing, Xuma contrasts Maisy's embrace of life with Eliza's cold, reserved
nature. After taking a taxi back to Malay Camp, Maisy puts Xuma to bed in her
room at her employer's house, where she works as a maid.
Maisy wakes Xuma very early in the morning and he leaves for
work. Johannes tells him that Dladla is informing on Leah to the police and
Paddy informs Xuma that their crew will be on shift for a month. Xuma and Paddy
notice a trickle of water compromising the tunnel's structure, but an engineer
inspects it and says the mine shaft is safe to work in. Xuma notices a worker
is coughing up blood. The man explains that he needs to keep working because he
is in debt to a white man and is afraid of losing his family's property. To
Xuma's surprise, Paddy steps in and has the man assessed by the mine doctor.
Having been diagnosed with lung sickness, the man is entitled to a severance
payout that covers his debts and a train ticket back to his family. The man
rejoices but immediately begins coughing up more blood.
After work Xuma and Maisy go to inform Leah about Dladla. At
Malay Camp, he runs into Eliza, who confesses her love for him. Xuma is
delighted and agrees to take her in as his woman. Leah throws a party that
night to celebrate the couple and give them her blessing. Thereafter, Eliza
moves into Xuma's room and they establish a comfortable domestic life. But the
period of happiness does not last long: soon Daddy, another one of Leah's
boarders, dies from internal injuries after being struck by a car. Eliza does
nothing to comfort Leah in her grief, and after one more night of lovemaking
with Xuma, she leaves him in the night to take a train ride away from Malay
Camp, asking Ma Plank to deliver the news to Xuma in the morning. Soon after,
Leah is arrested for beer selling after a successful sting operation by local
police.
The tragic and confusing events lead Xuma into a depression.
After Leah's trial, Paddy notices Xuma's anger and attempts to sympathize.
However, Xuma does not believe a white man could possibly understand the
oppression and injustice he has dealt with. Paddy tries to explain that he
cares despite his race, and discusses the idea of thinking of himself as a man
first and a black or white man second. After some resistance, Xuma begins to
imagine what it would be like to live in a society without color, where people
were people, and not divided into a hierarchy by color. Xuma falls asleep
inspired by the images and ideas passing through his mind.
The next morning, Xuma returns to work at the mine, only to
discover that the shaft has collapsed. Chris and Johannes had held the roof
while the workers escaped, and had become trapped in the process. Xuma and
Paddy go underground, returning soon after with Chris and Johannes dead in
their arms. The manager and the engineer try to attribute the losses to
unnecessary panics and order the remaining miners to go underground and work
again. Xuma grows furious and demands that repairs be made first; the workers
side with Xuma and so does Paddy. In response to the workers' strike, the mine
management calls in the police, who swarm in to attack the striking miners. In
his panic, Xuma escapes, running all the way to Maisy's employer's house to
tell Maisy what has happened and how he imagines becoming a man without color.
Xuma says he will turn himself in, because it will be good for a black man to
tell the white people how he feels. He then promises Maisy that he loves her
and asks her to wait for him to be released from prison. Together, they walk
toward the police station. The novel ends with an ominous image of Malay Camp
and Johannesburg going dark at night, leaving the question of Xuma's fate
unanswered.
Mine Boy Themes
Violence
From Xuma's first interaction
with the alcoholics at Leah's to the police attacks
on the striking mine workers, violence erupts repeatedly throughout Mine Boy. Drunken fights are a common
sight in Malay Camp—fights which the locals view as entertainment. Drunk men
also fight each other as a public spectacle on Saturdays in town, only to be
disrupted by the arrival of police vans full of policemen who start striking
people indiscriminately. Johannes, when drunk, has a
tendency to grab men by the throat and lift them. Paddy also instructs Xuma to
use violence against workers if they question his authority. The casual
violence confuses Xuma: though not naturally violent himself, Xuma will strike
back if struck. The overt displays of violence speak to the lack of more humane
forms of conflict resolution: when there is no authority to trust to help solve
conflicts, individuals lash out against each other in order to survive.
Precarious Work
To survive in the city, most of the characters in Mine Boy undertake precarious work—jobs that are
either illegal or dangerous, and often both. The theme of precarious work is
evident in Leah's illegal beer selling, which involves secrecy, police bribery,
threat of jail time, and the need for violence to solve disputes that would
otherwise be resolved by police. While the work Xuma undertakes in the mine is
legal, the drive for profits and lack of worker rights allow for conditions
that lead to lung sickness and unsafe working conditions.
Poverty
The theme of poverty undergirds much of the conflict
in Mine Boy. The lack of economic possibilities up north
sends Xuma to the city, where he encounters desperately poor and depressed
people, whose need for money keeps them in dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
Though Xuma comes to the city to make an honest living, the white supremacist
policies of the South African government will bar him from ascending the social
and economic ladder, no matter how hard he works.
Assimilationist Ideals
Eliza's inability to acknowledge her love for Xuma stems
from the fact that she has absorbed assimilationist ideals from living in a
colonial society that sees white people as superior. Rather than accepting and
appreciating herself for who she is, Eliza seeks to be and act like a white
person, whose way of speaking, dressing, and behaving she deems preferable.
Even though Eliza likens her
assimilationist ideals to "a devil" inside her, she is helpless to
rid herself of the possession; ultimately, she rejects her culture and leaves
Leah and Xuma, intending to pursue her dreams of assimilating into white
society.
Colonialism
Nearly all of the conflict in Mine Boy can be attributed to the settler
colonialism that has created such desperate conditions for the novel's
characters. As a colonial nation, invaded and taken over by white Dutch and
British people whose descendants became the country's minority rulers, South
Africa is rife with injustice and exploitation. The theme of colonialism
pervades the novel: from the government's attempts to build camps outside the
city for black people to live in to Xuma's belief that he and Paddy can never
be friends, the colonial project puts barriers between people, both physical
and invisible.
Kindness
In the darkness that surrounds the novel's oppressed
characters, the theme of kindness emerges as a beacon of hope. Leah, though
tough, is consistently generous and respectful when dealing with the people she
keeps close. Ma Plank too is a figure of
kindness, as she never seems to mind helping others, and asks nothing for
herself. At the novel's most trying moments, kindness exists as an inverse to
the discord that conflict would otherwise sow: whether between Paddy and Xuma,
or between Xuma and Johannes, or Maisy and Xuma, kindness
illuminates the characters' humanity in the midst of dehumanizing conditions.
Racial Segregation (Apartheid)
Though Mine Boy was
published two years before the first official apartheid law was enacted, the
novel depicts the racial separation that would be increased during the
apartheid era. The illegal beer selling Leah engages in results from a law that
made it legal for white people to sell alcohol but prohibited black people from
the business. The areas the characters live in and walk through are also
divided by income, which, as far as Xuma can see, corresponds to race. Xuma
also reflects on how white people have clean, open restaurants while black
people are packed into filthy, confined eating halls. The socially enforced
separation of society into black and white public spheres was legally
entrenched in 1948 when the minority white ruling party adopted apartheid as an
official policy.
Mine Boy Quotes and Analysis
A strange group of people, these, he thought. Nothing tied
them down. They seem to believe in nothing. But well, they had given him a bed.
She had given it to him. She who was the strangest of them all.
Narrator, p.6
In this passage, Xuma reflects on the people he has just
met at Leah's after arriving in Malay Camp from the north. Though he is
slightly alarmed by the bizarre. drunken and violent behavior of the people he
has met, he nonetheless appreciates Leah's kindness. This passage is
significant because it captures Xuma adjusting to life in the city, and meeting
for the first time the people who will become increasingly significant in his
new life.
An unbelievable thing happened. The second colored man
knocked the first one down and ran down the street waving to Xuma.
Narrator, p.16
In this quotation, Xuma is running after having struck a
policeman in retaliation. Though he believes he will have to knock two colored
men down in order to pass, and hates the colored men for siding with the white
police, Xuma is shocked to see one of the colored men is on his side. The
colored man leads Xuma to safety, where Xuma is surprised to learn that the
man's wife is black. This passage is significant because it shows how Xuma will
go on to question the ideas he carries about presumed allegiances among people
of the same ethnicity.
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.
Narrator, p.29
After Dlada becomes violent and starts slashing at people
at Leah's, Leah shows her impressive strength by apprehending him and breaking
his arm. In this passage, she stomps on his face as a final blow, prompting
Xuma to cry out "No!" This passage is significant because it reveals
how Leah, despite her kindness, can be ruthless toward people who cross her.
Leah's toughness has arisen as necessary for her survival in a milieu in which
the police cannot be depended upon to protect her, and she must protect herself.
Johannes drunk and Johannes sober were two different
people.
Narrator, p.32
The fourth chapter opens with Xuma meeting a new and
different version of Johannes. The night before he had been drunk, and was
therefore violent and boastful. But in the morning, Johannes is gentle as a
lamb and seems frightened to get in anyone's way. This passage is significant
because it exposes Xuma's naivety when it comes to Johannes and his apparently
strange behavior: it seems that Johannes is likely the first alcoholic Xuma has
ever met.
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.
Narrator, p.57
In this passage, Xuma despairs at the idea that Eliza would
choose a weak man over him. He is also puzzled by the way the man dresses like
a white man, thereby denying his blackness. This passage is significant because
it reveals how little Xuma understands the assimilationist ideals Eliza
maintains. He cannot imagine how such a man would be more attractive to her
than Xuma.
He did not want to go there for fear he should meet Eliza.
And she was like a devil in his blood. He could not forget her.
Narrator, p.61
After staying away from Leah's for three months, Xuma sits
alone in his room and reflects on how he cannot rid himself of thoughts of
Eliza. He is possessed by the memory of her, which, despite his efforts to stay
away, will lead him inexorably back to her.
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.
Eliza, p.60
In this passage, Eliza admits to Xuma her conflicted
feelings. Though she is attracted to him, his blackness goes against her
assimilationist ideals and desire to live as white people do. The passage is
significant because while it explains Eliza's hot-and-cold attitude toward
Xuma, it simultaneously precipitates more questions than it answers.
No! I don't want you to touch me.
Eliza, p.89
The morning after Eliza and Xuma consummate their love,
Xuma is full of happiness. However, Eliza has turned suddenly cold and refuses
his affection. The moment is significant because it shows the extent to which
Eliza, as an assimilationist, has little control over the sharp changes of her
attitude toward Xuma and her own blackness.
Hoopvlei was another of the white man's ventures to get the
natives and coloreds out of the towns. The natives did not like the 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. Many other places had been killed thus.
Narrator, p.95
In this passage, the narrator digresses to explain how
Hoopvlei was created by the ruling white minority to segregate people of color
in scattered townships, leaving the city centers for affluent white people. The
shantytown of Malay Camp would have been unsightly to people who did not
participate in the vibrant culture of the place. This passage is significant
because it speaks to the oppressive land laws that limited the rights of
colored people in South Africa.
Out of your feeling and out of your pain it must come.
Others have found it. You can too. But first you must think and not be afraid
of your thoughts. And if you have questions and you look around you will find
those who will answer them. But first you must know what you are going to fight
and why and what you want.
Paddy, p.171
In this passage, Paddy is encouraging Xuma to take the
despair he feels and transmute it into political will to fight against
government and police oppression of the black and colored majority in South
Africa. While Xuma is initially confused by Paddy's decision to speak this way
to him, Xuma eventually develops a vision of becoming a man without color, who
is no longer divided from his fellow people by skin color. This passage is
significant because Paddy's words precipitate Xuma's epiphany, and the two men
are able to stand united at the end of the novel, fighting nonviolently for
workers' rights.
Mine Boy Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1 – 3
Summary
Narrated from a third-person omniscient perspective, Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy opens in the protagonist Xuma’s point of view. Tired
and carrying a small bundle, Xuma walks through Malay Camp, Johannesburg, in
the dark, listening to a distant clock strike three times to indicate that it
is three in the morning. In the impoverished area of mostly black and mixed-race
residents, Xuma meets Leah and asks where he
can have a drink, admitting he has no money. Leah says he is strange and asks
where he comes from. He says up north. Leah shines a flashlight over his large
body before saying he can come in for a drink and a rest.
Three men and an old woman sit inside Leah’s place,
drinking beer. Ma Plank goes to bring some
food for Xuma. Dladla and Daddy are hostile toward
Xuma before starting a knife fight with each other. Ma Plank returns to break
up the fight before it really begins, and Daddy goes back to sleep, snoring
loudly. Leah explains that “her man” is serving a three-year sentence for killing
a man who tried to kiss her; she keeps Dladla around because she
gets lonely and needs a “plaything.”
Xuma says he came to the area intending to work in the
mines. Leah warns him against it, saying he’s strong now but he’ll wind up
coughing blood, growing thin, and dying. She says he should work for her. The
others work for her burying beer: there’s good money in it. She could use Xuma
as a strong man. She offers him a bed, saying he can repay his debt later. Leah
warns him that if he tries to cheat her, she’ll cut him up. Xuma is amused and
says he doesn’t understand her; all he understands is her kindness. She says
the city is a strange place. Xuma tries to sleep but dwells on the odd people
he has just met. Nothing ties them down, and they seem to believe in nothing.
In the second chapter, Xuma wakes with the sun, realizing
he is still in the strange house. A bee enters the room and Xuma runs out to
escape it. In the street, Daddy is in the center of a group of people, dancing
a war dance and shouting ancient battle cries. The commotion at the center is a
fight between two women, Lena and Fat Liz. The
fight ends when Lena hits Liz in the head with her shoe, causing blood to flow.
Leah breaks the fight up, brings the women in the yard to recover, and then
prepares food for Xuma.
Xuma considers how strange Leah is, because she is tough
with everyone but kind to him. Leah can tell he thinks she wants to sleep with
him. She tries to explain that she likes him because they come from the same
place, even though he is from the north and she from the south: their people
have the same tribal laws and customs. She says he doesn’t understand, but
maybe he will. Daddy enters and Leah asks him to explain the custom and the
city. Daddy drunkenly speaks of a relationship between the custom and the city,
where the custom gave the city beer and beautiful women. But the city didn’t
say thank you, and then the beer was taken away, and now people go to jail for
drinking beer. Daddy goes to sleep on a sack laid next to the women who were
fighting. Leah kisses his forehead and Xuma observes aloud that she likes him.
Angrily, she asks what it is to him.
Leah’s boyfriend’s brother Joseph arrives and Leah
gives him instructions about a job, asking Joseph to take Xuma along. It is
Saturday, a half-day holiday for black citizens of Johannesburg, so the streets
are full of people with money to spend. There are also strong men who come to
the social center of town to fight each other until only one is left standing.
Men often die in the fights. Colorfully dressed women watch and by the end of
the day men and women pair off to drink and sleep together. People watch the
fighting and gambling from their verandas.
Two “swankies” come down the street: the identically
dressed men wear purple suits and carry canes and red handkerchiefs. People
laugh and make comments as the fashionable men pass. When a police van appears,
people scatter in all directions; only the colored people—i.e. mixed-race
people—don’t run. Xuma stands still as a policeman approaches, believing
himself safe since he has done nothing wrong.
The policeman strikes Xuma with his stick on the left
shoulder. Xuma punches the cop in the face and he falls unconscious to the
ground. Two police run after Xuma. Xuma runs and a colored man stands in his
way to block; Xuma hates colored people, whom he refers to in his head as
“half-castes.” Xuma is relieved when a second colored man knocks the first to
the ground and waves at Xuma. Xuma follows the man down a passage and through
yards until they arrived in the man’s house. The man’s wife comes in. Xuma is
surprised when he sees she is black. Xuma says he should go, but the man
suggests they lie low until the police stop looking for him.
The third chapter opens with Xuma trying to find Leah’s
place at twilight. He runs into Daddy, who is drunk and tries to fight him
before quickly falling on his head. Daddy offers to lead Xuma there if Xuma
buys him a drink. Joseph and Leah are pleased to see that Xuma escaped the
police.
Leah would like to talk with Xuma but all the rooms in her
place are full of people drinking. They take a walk and a black policeman on a
bicycle stops to tell Leah that police will raid her place in the morning to
dig up her beer. Leah pays the policeman a bribe—five one-pound notes. Back
home Leah introduces Xuma to Eliza, a beautiful young
teacher. Eliza prepares food for Xuma and he can’t stop admiring her beauty.
Xuma strains himself lifting a sewing machine for Eliza; she rubs ointment into
the purple bruise where the policeman’s club struck his shoulder. Xuma tells her
about his family up north, where he has a father and a brother and sister.
There are few cattle and the land is not very fertile. There is no school. He
says he plans to go back after working in the mines. Eliza says Leah talks
about Xuma a lot. Eliza is Leah’s niece. Leah raised Eliza after her mother
died, and sent Eliza to school.
Eliza takes Xuma out of Malay Camp to where the noise of
the city diminishes and there is grass underfoot. Eliza says she likes to come
here, because it is peaceful. They lie on the grass and watch the twinkling
city lights in the distance. Xuma says she is beautiful; Eliza laughs and says
he is simply lonely. But Xuma feels there is something between them that cannot
be ignored. They discuss the mine dumps in the distance—large piles of white
sand extracted from the mines. As they walk back to town, Xuma pulls her to him
and asks why she doesn’t like him. She smiles but says nothing. He takes her
chin in his hand and leans down to kiss her. She stiffens and cries out for him
to stop. She apologizes and then they walk separately for some time. Eventually
she falls in step with Xuma and apologizes again. He says he isn’t angry. She
has a sad look on her face and tells him he doesn’t understand.
Back at Leah’s, the place is full of people drinking. Ma
Plank and Lena, the thin colored woman, who had been fighting that morning, are
ladling beer out of vats. Xuma notices that there are many colored women with
their arms around black men, but there are only one or two colored men. A
colored woman puts her arms around Xuma’s neck and says if he buys her a drink
they can go to bed together. Ma Plank hands Xuma some of the money she has
collected and asks him to bring it to Leah.
As he is going out to Leah, Xuma is confronted by Dladla,
who brandishes a knife and cuts Xuma’s face, accusing him of taking his woman.
Lena hands Xuma a club. Leah joins the fight with Dladla and his two henchmen.
Xuma knocks one of the men out without a sound. A tall man named Johannes P. Williamson
enters and crushes the other man’s throat. Leah warns him not to kill the man,
lest he go to jail. Johannes drops the man, who falls silent and still to the
ground. Dladla swipes at Leah but misses; she grabs his arm like a vice and head-butts
him. She chokes him out and stomps on his face, drawing a cry of protest from
Xuma. Leah smiles and tells the others to take the dirt away.
Leah takes Xuma to find a doctor who can stitch up his cut.
When they return, everyone has been cleared out except Johannes, who works in
the mines, and Lena, Leah, Ma Plank, and Daddy. Leah tells Xuma that Eliza
likes him but that’s she’s a fool because she wants someone who reads books and
wears a tie and can speak like a white person. Leah suggests that Xuma will
have to take her by force. Xuma asks Eliza if what Leah says is true. Eliza
says that his bed is made, then leaves without answering his question.
Analysis
The opening chapters of Mine Boy establish
the protagonist Xuma’s naivety and confusion as he encounters the strange
environment and people of Malay Camp, a slum of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Xuma has come from an economically depressed region up north intending to work
in the gold mines, but his lack of money means he immediately becomes indebted
to Leah, an illicit beer seller.
Xuma is confused by Leah’s kindness, not fully
understanding that she sees value in Xuma’s size and strength. By the end of
the first chapter, the author has introduced the thematic preoccupations with
work, poverty, and the divided roles of men and women.
In the second and third chapters, Abrahams continues to
explore these themes, as well as the theme of violence. Xuma wakes to a public
fight on the street between two women, who are cheered on by the crowd. The
motif of drinking arises: it is clear the women and many others watching have
been drinking all night.
Leah asks Daddy to explain to Xuma how such alcoholism has
come to be in the slums, but his drunken explanation goes over Xuma’s head.
Daddy is trying to explain that these conditions have been created in part by a
South African apartheid liquor law introduced in 1927 that made it illegal for
black South Africans to sell alcohol. Black South Africans were only allowed to
drink in government-owned beer halls likened by many to drinking in a cage.
Meanwhile, white people were considered responsible enough to drink and sell
liquor freely.
Xuma is exposed to more racial oppression when out walking
with Joseph. Xuma has done nothing, and so thinks himself safe from police
intimidation. His lack of fear in the face of the white policeman’s authority
is taken as a challenge and the police officer strikes him. Xuma encounters
more sudden eruptions of violence when he returns to Leah’s that night and
Dladla swipes his face with a knife.
The third chapter ends with Xuma learning from Leah that
Eliza, while she may like him, is prevented from following her feelings due to
the assimilationist ideals she has absorbed, meaning that Eliza rejects the
culture of her people in favor of adopting the mannerisms and culture of the
white Dutch colonizers.
Mine Boy Summary and Analysis of Chapters 4 – 6
Summary
Chapter four opens with Johannes and Xuma walking to the
mines. Xuma reflects that Johannes is now a completely different person: when
not drunk, he is taciturn. Unlike Saturday, the streets are empty. The point of
view shifts between Xuma and Johannes’s contrasting thoughts: Xuma enjoys the
peace, while Johannes hates the dead, empty streets, wishing there were people
around.
The mine-dumps appear ahead. A group of mine workers march
together toward the mine. They are led by indunas—mine policemen, whose duty it
is to keep the men in order. Johannes explains that the mine men live in
compounds, as the mine does not like to hire men from the city. Johannes says
that white men fetch the mine workers from farms and rural areas and from
Portugal and Rhodesia. Johannes is an exception: he is from the city, but he is
the boss boy for a white man, so he doesn’t stay in the compounds. The indunas
carry knobkerries and assagais—short sticks with a knob at the top,
traditionally used as a weapon by the indigenous peoples of South Africa, and
slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spears also used chiefly by southern African
peoples. Johannes says they carry the weapons by law. Johannes and Xuma fall in
line with the marching men.
Johannes’s boss, a white man named Chris, arrives on his
bicycle. The two chat in a friendly way before Johannes introduces Xuma. Chris
smiles then suddenly punches Xuma in the chest. Xuma raises his arms to fight
instinctively. Chris reassures him that he was only testing to see if Xuma is a
man. They shake hands and Chris gives Xuma and Johannes a cigarette to share.
Chris says he will speak to the Red One about letting Xuma work.
An induna searches Xuma and a guard reluctantly gives him a
stiff blue card that says: Pass Native Xuma, Gang Leader for Mr. Paddy O’Shea.
Johannes puts on a hat with a lamp and disappears down an elevator cage,
leaving Xuma to work with a group of fifty men led by an angry, unfriendly
white man and two indunas. The white man commands Xuma to push a heavy truck
that normally two men would push. Xuma does not know how to push it and must
correct where he applies pressure to stop it from tipping over. Xuma shows his
great strength, but receives a gash on his leg where the axle cut it. Chris
tells Xuma to stop pushing and says an induna will take him to get his leg
bandaged.
The Red One tells the white man that Xuma is his boy, and
not to tell him to do things like push the needlessly heavy truck. Xuma doesn’t
like the look of the Red One: compared to Chris’s smiling face, his face is
hard and brooding. He has blue eyes and a mass of red hair, from which he
receives his nickname.
The day is a strange one for Xuma. Explosions and rumblings
and shouts of indunas are constant, but what frightens him most is the look in
the men’s eyes, which reminds him of sheep who do not know where to run when a
sheepdog is barking and herding them into a cluster. All day they load wet
white sand into trucks and push them up an incline, yet it appears to Xuma that
they are accomplishing nothing. When the lunch whistle blows, a man named Nana
befriends Xuma and shares half of his lunch—mealy porridge, a hunk of meat, and
coarse compound bread. Nana says the fear of the first day subsides once you
stop looking to see results from your work. Xuma mentions how the men’s eyes
are like those of sheep, and Nana says they are all sheep.
After eating, the men lie down to rest, humming softly in
unison. The humming takes some of the tension from Xuma’s body and subdues the
chaotic sounds of the mine. After the break, Xuma is put on truck loading duty,
shoveling the wet white sand. He asks Nana about what it is like underground.
Johannes comes to take Xuma to the doctor’s office, where Paddy (the Red One)
and Chris are waiting. The doctor examines Xuma and the men discuss whether he
is ready to go underground the next day. Xuma is eager to go underground.
After washing up, Johannes and Xuma fetch their white
bosses’ bicycles for them and discuss the next day. Paddy tells Xuma that if he
is to be a boss boy down in the mine, he will have to be physically aggressive
with the fifty or so men he is in charge of. They will test him to see if he is
soft, and he must lead them strongly, crushing them with his fist if necessary.
Xuma agrees.
Chapter five begins back at Leah’s, where a group of
beer-selling women are just leaving. Leah explains that if anyone gets
arrested, the rest of the group comes together and collects money to bail the
woman out. After eating with the others, Xuma goes out to the verandah and
reflects unhappily on the strangeness of the city and the people he is with. He
knows he loves Eliza and also that he
cannot take her by force: he must wait for her to come to him by her own
volition. A woman named Maisy comes out of
Leah’s and tells Xuma that Eliza will never go for a guy like him. She
convinces him to go out walking. They encounter a group of men and women
dancing in the street. They join in and Xuma doesn’t want to leave, but Maisy
forces him, holding his arm.
Back at Leah’s, Eliza has returned with a thin, ill-looking
man, a fellow teacher named Ndola. Maisy leans on Xuma and says she is happy
because they’ve been dancing. Eliza says she had a nice time out with Ndola. In
his room, Xuma reflects on Eliza going out with a man who dresses like a white
man and has soft hands. Xuma thinks that Maisy is good and warm, she made him
happy, yet he still longs for Eliza, who is cold and doesn’t want him.
Eliza knocks on Xuma’s door and asks to come in. They smoke
cigarettes together and ask each other about their dates. Xuma is curious why
she has come to him, and she says she doesn’t know: she wanted to come to him
and now that she has, she is not happy. She wraps her arms and around his neck
and asks if he loves her. He says maybe. She says he is so strong, so big, it
warms her blood. She kisses him passionately. Xuma’s heart sings—she loves him!
But Eliza’s body soon stiffens and she shouts no. She throws herself on the bed
and cries for a moment, then leaves the room. Xuma lies in bed and looks at the
moon, unable to sleep. Eliza returns and lies beside him. Speaking softly, she
explains that she has something wrong inside of her: she wants to be like the
white people. Even though she is black, she is not black inside. Inside, she
wants to do as white people do. She says she cannot help it, and asks if Xuma
understands. He asks how he could understand. Eliza sighs and leaves again.
Chapter six opens in winter; Xuma has been in the city for
three months. Two months earlier he left Leah’s and moved into a room in Malay
Camp. He wants to see Leah, but he has to avoid seeing Eliza, who is like a
devil in his blood. He cannot forget her.
Xuma leaves his cold room and wanders the streets of
Johannesburg. His feet are cold in his thin shoes, but he is grateful for the
clothes the white man has given him, particularly when Xuma passes so many
people without shoes. Everywhere he sees couples kissing under street lamps. A
policeman asks him for his pass and the two have a pleasant exchange: Xuma
assumes he must be new to the job. Xuma sees white people eating and drinking
and smoking in restaurants. He smiles bitterly at the cars that shoot past him
and reflects that the only place he is free is in the mines, where he is the
boss. Underground he is not afraid of Paddy, because Paddy depends on him. He
reflects that he feels fine about working for Paddy, but he does not want to be
friends with or be the same as white men. With pain he thinks of Eliza, whom he
longs for more every day. She wants the things of the white man, and therefore
Xuma resents the white man.
Paddy and Di, his girlfriend, run into Xuma. They make him
come up to Paddy’s place, which is warm despite there being no evidence of a
fire. Di serves Xuma wine; she is
nice to look at, but he doesn’t want to look. Inside Paddy’s apartment, Xuma
understands why Eliza wants what white people have, but Xuma tells himself that
these things are for white people. While Paddy gets food from the kitchen, Di
tells Xuma that the Red One wants to be his friend. Xuma disappoints her when
he says that it can’t happen because he is white.
Xuma forgets some of his unease as they eat; he forgets
sometimes that he is with white people. When Paddy is out of the room, Xuma
tells Di about Eliza and her foolish desire to be white. Di says she and Eliza,
though they may be white and black, are the same inside. Xuma can’t believe
her, but she insists. When Xuma leaves, the narrative point of view stays in
the apartment with Di and Paddy. Paddy says Xuma is grand, and asks her what
she thinks. She says Xuma is grand, but just a mine boy, not fully human yet.
His girl is human and wants the same things Di wants, but Xuma is not there
yet. Paddy insists that Xuma is as human as he is himself, but Di says Xuma
isn’t, because he accepts things others wouldn’t. Di says Paddy wants to
believe Xuma is a good native who can lead other black men and even white men,
but he is docile like an animal, lacking assertion and resentment. Paddy
defends him.
The point of view returns to Xuma as he walks back to Malay
Camp, relieved to be away from the white people. He reflects on how Di was
trustworthy and easy to talk to. In Malay Camp, Xuma and others stop to watch a
man climbing a slanted roof to evade police. The man falls and the crowd rushes
in. Doctor Mini assesses his injuries, saying he has only broken his arm. The
police catch up and tell everyone to stand aside. The doctor identifies himself
but a policeman smacks him in the face. The doctor threatens to file a
complaint. The other policemen tell the first to stop harassing him. The doctor
insists on taking the injured man to attend to his arm. He gives the police his
card and says they can pick him up in an hour.
Xuma carries the man to the doctor’s car and together they
drive to the doctor’s house. Xuma reflects that the men he is with are both his
people, but they are so different. There is something about the doctor that
commanded respect: even the police recognized it. The doctor’s house has all
the nice things Paddy’s did but even more. Xuma is impressed by the electric
lights, but he feels the same discomfort he felt at Paddy’s. He tells the
doctor it is a white person’s place, and the doctor laughs and tells him it
isn’t, it is simply a comfortable place. He says it is not copying the white
man to live in a place like this. He says the white people’s places the ones
the white people make you live in. While they are inside the house, the man
with the broken arm escapes the surgery room through the window. The doctor,
angry, tells Xuma he can go. Xuma is confused, because he has done nothing
wrong.
Analysis
The fourth chapter begins with the motif of alcoholism when
Xuma reflects on how Johannes is a completely different person when sober.
Xuma’s naivety is on display: it is clear that the drinking culture of the city
is a new and foreign concept to him. To underscore the difference between the
two men—one an innocent farm boy from up north, the other a hardened and
hungover man of the city—the author shifts the narrative point of view between
Xuma and Johannes. Xuma is more comfortable with fewer people around, while
Johannes hates the dead streets.
The themes of work and racial oppression arise again as
Xuma witnesses the organizational structure of the gold mine. Police employed
by the mine owners march the impoverished and racialized workers into and out
of the mine entrance, imposing order with shouts and threats of physical
violence, treating the men as more like forced laborers than employees.
In Xuma’s first experience of the mine’s hierarchy, a white
man orders Xuma to push a truck without telling him how and where to apply
pressure to balance the load. Even once Paddy gives Xuma regular work to do,
Xuma is confused by how they seem to accomplish nothing as they add to the
massive heap of white sand. The men around him resemble sheep. To Xuma, the
work conditions the men are subject to have led them to lose their human
dignity: the mine’s higher-ups keep the men frightened and beaten down, like
animals.
Later that day Xuma meets Ndola, a man who is courting
Eliza. In stark contrast to Xuma, Ndola is weak and thin, and dresses like a
white man. As with the other strange behaviors of city people that Xuma
encounters, Eliza’s and this man’s assimilationist ideals are foreign to Xuma.
Eliza exacerbates Xuma’s confusion when she comes to his room that night:
momentarily he believes she loves him, but she seems suddenly to change her
mind and leave. When she returns, she speaks of her assimilationist ideals as
though it something deeply wrong with her. But Xuma cannot understand why she
would want to be white.
Xuma develops some understanding of Eliza’s aspirations
when he sees the inside of Paddy’s apartment. Though Xuma still believes the
luxurious and comfortable space is for white people, he understands why Eliza
might want to live in such a place. At the end of the scene, the narrative
point of view stays with Di and Paddy to reveal how Di—though she had convinced
Xuma to trust her enough to share his opinions—had been deceiving him with her
kindness. It is revealed that she thinks of Xuma as a lesser being, lacking the
assertion and resentment she believes is necessary to qualify him as a true
human being. Paddy defends Xuma, and the reader gets the first hint of Paddy’s
belief that white people and black people are no different.
The sixth chapter ends with Xuma reassessing his ideas of
what a white man’s home is when he visits the well-appointed home of Doctor
Mini, who is black. The doctor tells him it isn’t a white man’s place to live,
it is simply a comfortable place: the doctor says that the oppressive and
impoverished places most black and colored people live is the true white man’s
place, implying that racism and settler colonialism have created the conditions
that Xuma has come to see as normal.
Mine Boy Summary and
Analysis of Chapters 7 – 9
Summary
Chapter 7 opens with Xuma deciding to visit Leah’s, as he is reluctant
to return to his cold and lonely room. Leah’s is dark and empty, but Ma Plank is there. They
catch up, and Xuma asks after Eliza. Ma Plank reassures him
that she does not have a steady man in her life, only occasional dates with
other teachers. Daddy urinates on the
floor, rolling in the puddle he creates. At the look of scorn in Xuma’s face,
Ma Plank tells him that when Daddy first came to the city he was well-respected
and admired and sought after for his wisdom. Xuma has difficulty picturing
Daddy sober.
Leah, Eliza and Maisy come home. Ma
Plank makes tea and everyone sits together by the fire. Leah says Maisy has
missed Xuma, and Xuma appreciates the smile and warmth in Maisy’s face. Eliza
sees the light in Xuma’s eyes and leaves the room. Leah gives Xuma a stern look
and he volunteers to leave. Once he does, however, Leah follows him to the
street and sobs into his chest. They take a walk and Leah says she is worried
that someone is betraying her, because the police arrested Joseph and put him away
for six months. Xuma is pleased to walk with Leah, who rebukes him the way his
mother did.
Back at Leah’s, Eliza reads to Xuma while the others go to
bed. The story is about the Zulu wars, where the Zulu warriors fought for but
lost their land to the white man. Xuma reflects that it is a good story, but
sad they lost. He bids her goodnight and goes to the room beyond the yard,
where he undresses and gets into bed. Eliza comes in with chattering teeth.
Xuma tells her to go away but she gets in next to him. Her skin is cold. Xuma
feels desire rising strongly inside him. Eliza admits that she loves him. He
rolls onto her, crushing her with his body, and says he loves her too. After
they have sex, she asks why he stayed away. He says she did not want him. She
says she did want him, and he didn’t understand that she wanted him to take her
when she returned to him that night. She says she is no good for him, there is
a devil in her that wants things she cannot have. He says she is beautiful and
that he loves her. They fall asleep snuggling.
Chapter eight begins with Xuma waking alone. Though he had
tracked Eliza’s mutterings and movements through the night with pleasure, he
did not notice her leave the bed. In the kitchen Ma Plank and Maisy comment on
how happy he looks. When he goes to Eliza in her room, he tries to take her in
his arms but she tells him not to touch her. He asks about the night before and
she says she was a fool.
Maisy finds Xuma in the yard and takes his hand. She says
she tried to tell him. He says it is nothing. Back in the kitchen, Leah reports
that she still doesn’t know who the person betraying her is. But she plans to
set a trap for whoever it is. Maisy convinces Xuma to go with her to meet some
friends on the outskirts of town, where it is like the countryside. On the bus,
they laugh for no reason and Xuma puts his arm around her. Xuma feels
lighthearted, the same way he felt the night she took him to dance in the
street.
After two hours they get off the bus in a rural area. Along
a river, they run and play together. Maisy knows she is making him happy, and
that he will remember that. In his mind, Xuma compares Maisy to Eliza, and
reasons that Maisy knows what is good for him, and that she would not hurt him.
When Xuma goes to kiss her, she leans back and the laughter leaves her face.
She says he is thinking of Eliza, not her.
They neared the township of Hoopvlei. The narrator comments
that the white man built townships like this to get colored people and natives
out of Vrededorp and Malay Camp. Such endeavors had been successful before, and
in five years’ time maybe Malay Camp would no longer be the heart of the
dark-skinned community.
Xuma enjoys the day he spends with Maisy and her friends on
the farm. They drink beer, which is unlike the beer served in the city—beer
that makes people happy, not sad. They stay so long that they miss the last
bus. They push into the back of a taxi with six other people. Xuma is pleased
when Maisy sits on his lap and puts an arm around him. Xuma says he is drunk
and Maisy agrees to put him to bed and look after him, which she does.
Chapter nine opens with Maisy waking Xuma while it is still
dark out, reminding him that he must go to work. She gives him food and coffee.
Xuma is confused when he sees the bed she made for herself on the floor. He
asks her why she slept there but she doesn’t answer or meet his eyes. She gives
him directions and sends him away in the cold air. Xuma is confused but goes to
change in his room. He meets Johannes at the gates of
the mine. Johannes is drunk and pugnacious. He says the police took Lena away for seven
days of hard labor. Xuma suggests Leah could lend the money to bail her out,
but Johannes says the work will be good for her.
Paddy leaves the shack where the white men rest and drink
tea and tells Xuma that for the next month the mine crew will work night
shifts, starting at midnight. Xuma tells Johannes about the shift change and
sends him to his room to rest, eat bread and sardines. Johannes is touched by
Xuma’s generosity and ashamed of himself for being irresponsible by comparison.
Before parting, Johannes tells Xuma that he saw Dladla, who had money and was
boastful and threatening. Xuma resolves to warn Leah that perhaps Dladla had
betrayed her.
Xuma and Paddy descend into the mine cages with their men.
They assess the structure and decide to bolster the tunnel with poles and cross
pieces. Paddy and four white men work drills to search for seams of gold while
Xuma commands and instructs black men to shovel and pick, and move rock onto
the conveyor belt. Xuma picks up a drill next to Paddy and reflects on how they
are two strong men working side by side, one white and one black. An engineer
comes down to assess a trickle of water leaking through the rock, and insists
the structure is sound. A bony old man coughs blood and Xuma takes him aside
and asks why he hasn’t seen a doctor to address the lung sickness. The man says
he worked it out and needs to work another three months to pay off his eight-pound
debt to a white man who would otherwise take the farm where his wife and
children live. He pleads with Xuma not to tell the white people that he is
sick.
Paddy comes up and informs the man that he need not worry
because he will receive sick pay. Together Xuma, Paddy and the sick man go to
the doctor, who confirms the man’s illness. A cashier gives the man thirteen
pounds and a train ticket home. The man is relieved and grateful; he puffs his
chest out triumphantly, then coughs more blood. Xuma tells Paddy he did a good
thing, and Paddy repeats the phrase with bitterness.
Xuma goes back to the tree-lined neighborhood to find Maisy
at the white people’s house where she works. A boy named Johnny addresses Xuma
on the lawn and Maisy comes out with her white employer, who is kind and
invites Xuma to have tea and cookies with Maisy. Xuma tells Maisy about the man
coughing blood, which depressed him. Xuma says that Dladla is the one betraying
Leah, and they decide to go tell her.
Analysis
Chapter 7 begins with the motif of alcoholism: having gone
to Leah’s for the first time in months, Xuma is disgusted by the sight of Daddy
rolling on the floor in his own urine. Ma Plank realizes that Xuma can only see
Daddy for who he is today, and so explains that Daddy was once wise and
respected. The deleterious effects of alcoholism have given rise to the
spectacle Daddy has become—a concept that is difficult for Xuma to fathom. But
Ma Plank and Leah understand that Daddy’s alcoholism is not his fault, and so
they treat him with kindness.
That night Eliza and Xuma sleep together, and it seems as
if she has overcome her aversion to Xuma and is willing to love him for who he
is. However, in the morning her mood shifts completely and she says the last
night was a mistake: in the light of day, her assimilationist ideals makes her
reject Xuma once again, much to his confusion.
In contrast to Eliza’s coldness, Maisy is warm and makes
Xuma happy. Unlike Eliza, she does not aspire to be white, but behaves in a way
that Xuma finds familiar. However, she rejects his kiss when they are out in
the countryside because she can sense he is comparing her to Eliza.
Nonetheless, Xuma enjoys the day out on the farm, where he is removed from the
confusing and dark atmosphere of the city.
At the mine, there are two moments of foreshadowing: first,
Johannes tells Xuma that Dladla is threatening to go after Leah; and second, a
trickle of water leaks through the wall of the mine, hinting at eventual
collapse. The theme of kindness arises again when Xuma gives Johannes the keys
to his place to have a nap and something to eat. It is clear that Johannes is
unused to such kindness, and feels ashamed to be an irresponsible alcoholic in
comparison to Xuma.
Kindness in another form also comes up in relation to the
elderly miner with lung sickness: the worker and Xuma are both surprised to
learn that the mine will grant the man a generous sick pay package and a train
ticket home to his family. What first seems an unbelievable moment of
benevolence from the mine owners is quickly undercut by the man coughing up
more blood. Paddy’s embittered repetition of the phrase “did a good thing” is
ambiguous in the text: read one way, it would seem that he is resentful of the
sick man. However, Paddy’s sympathies for the workers in the mine would suggest
that he is bitter about the mine’s unfair treatment of the man: Paddy
understands that the mine’s redundancy payment is nothing compared to the fact
this man will die from the mine’s unsafe and exploitative working conditions.
Mine Boy Summary and Analysis of Chapters 10 – 12
Summary
On the way to Leah’s to warn her about Dladla, Xuma wishes he
loved Maisy, because Maisy makes
him happy. But he loves Eliza. Maisy tells Xuma that Eliza must
love him, since she went to his room the other night. Xuma asks if Maisy loves
him too, and Maisy becomes upset and runs off down a side street. Xuma
continues to Leah’s alone.
Xuma is surprised to see Leah dressed up in fancy clothes
with new black leather shoes. Leah prances through the street, showing off her
elegance by imitating the fashionable white ladies of Johannesburg. Daddy comes down the
street and pretends to be a gentleman, miming that he is twirling a cane. The
two dance around each other, delighting Xuma and the others watching. Leah
announces there will be a party, and the neighbors go home to change.
Before Xuma can warn Leah, Eliza comes down the street and
waves to Xuma. He can’t believe she is waving to him, but he rushes to her. She
apologizes and says she is his woman; no matter what, she can’t deny it, she is
his. She says she loves him, but she is bad, and when her badness comes out he
will have to leave her alone and wait for her to be good again. Maisy comes out
and, in an instant, she sees everything that has happened between Xuma and
Eliza. She tells them food is ready.
After they eat Leah convinces Maisy to start the party by
singing a happy song. The happiness returns to her face and voice as she does
so. Ma Plank tells Leah she
thinks Xuma is a fool for choosing Eliza, and Leah says a man has no choice who
he loves. Leah is excited for the party, which is to celebrate her learning
that Dladla is the traitor. She plans to deal with him in a few days’ time.
Leah finds Xuma and Eliza looking happy by the fire. She
confirms with them that they are both in love with the other and offers to be a
peacemaker for them should they have any trouble. She offers to give Eliza and
Xuma everything in Eliza’s room for when they want to start their life
together. Leah tells Xuma to go dance with Maisy. Eliza puts her head on Leah’s
lap and holds her. Out back, Xuma finds Maisy shaking her head at all the men
who want to dance with her, but she accepts Xuma’s offer. He tells her that
Eliza loves him and that Maisy is a good friend. She says she is happy for him
and that he must remember to go to work at midnight.
After dancing, Eliza and Xuma sit down and talk about how
they will visit Xuma’s family up north one day. Eliza tells him about how she
lost her parents when young, and how she developed her madness, which involved
wanting to be white and hating herself for being black. She has difficulty
describing the violent feelings and says it is the madness of the city within
her. She checks the time and sees it is eleven, time for Xuma to go back to
work. Xuma insists on one more dance, which she reluctantly obliges. They leave
the party together and go to Xuma’s room, where Eliza touches every object and
Xuma changes. They walk to the mine dumps and Xuma reflects on how things have
changed since the night she took him there and she refused his kiss. She says
she fears him more now that she loves him. He heads for the mine and she turns
back to Malay Camp.
Chapter eleven opens with Xuma waking to the sound of birds
and humming. After his shift at the mine, he went home to sleep. He is confused
to discover that Eliza is cooking food and has lit a fire and tidied the room.
Eliza teases him for being surprised: she knows he did not expect Eliza was the
sort of woman who would work for him. She asks if he has ever been in love and
Xuma says she is not the first woman he has been with, but she is the first he
has loved. Eliza asks Xuma why he hasn’t asked her yet to move in. He does and
she agrees that they will make the small single room a home, and eventually
save up for two rooms.
While they have coffee and hold each other, Ma Plank
arrives to tell them that Leah wants Xuma to come to her. Police found Dladla
dead with a knife hole in his back under a bench by the colored school. At
Leah’s, she demands to know who killed Dladla so that she will know how to act.
No one in the room takes responsibility, and Leah says she does not think it
was Johannes because she spoke
to him that morning.
White police officers arrive in a car. After questioning
Leah, the police decide to take her in. Xuma offers to go with her, but Leah
tells him to stay and take care of the others. Eliza jumps at the policemen and
Xuma holds her back. The police take her away and Ma Plank, Daddy, Maisy, and
Eliza are grief-struck. However, she returns within a few hours and everyone
celebrates, including the neighbors. Leah and Xuma remark to each other that
they wonder who killed Dladla, and the narrator comments that the murderer was
never discovered.
Chapter twelve begins five days later, when Xuma and Eliza
are walking at dusk. In the past five days, life has been good for Xuma. He and
Eliza have a routine where they spent as much time together as they can before
his shift at the mine. Sometimes they go to Leah’s and eat food and help her
sell beer. While Xuma is happy, Eliza is unhappy with the night shifts and asks
when they will end. Xuma says after two more weeks.
Xuma and Eliza’s neighbor tells them that Ma Plank came by
asking that they go straight to Leah’s. At Leah’s they learn Daddy has been hit
by a car. He is lying in Leah’s bed. Doctor Mini is there; he announces that
Daddy has internal injuries that will kill him. Everyone gathers and consoles
each other as Daddy dies before them in Leah’s bed.
Xuma leaves for work and returns in the morning to find
Leah in the same state of grief, holding the empty shell that Daddy’s body has
become. Everyone on the street has come out to help with the funeral, which
they conduct that day, burying Daddy at the native cemetery on the hill beyond
Vrededorp. That night Leah gets drunker than Xuma has ever seen her. In time
she grows tired of the mourners’ sadness and insists on dancing. Shortly after
Xuma carries Leah to her bed and Maisy bathes her head with a wet cloth.
Xuma goes walking, full of anger at Eliza for having left,
and confused over Daddy’s death and all the strangeness that accompanied his
life. Eliza catches up with him, and in her presence, his anger melts. She says
they must be happy tonight. Eliza leads him out of Malay Camp to the dark hills
of the outskirts. On top of a hill she shows him a view that shows how small
and lacking in lights Malay Camp is compared to Johannesburg. Xuma reflects on
how big Malay camp had seemed when he arrived, and how he’d been lost. Now it
seemed so small. Eliza asks him not to go to work tonight, but Xuma insists he
must. She concedes, but asks that they make love there on the hill first. Xuma
obliges.
Analysis
In the tenth chapter, Eliza surprises Xuma by admitting
that she belongs with him, and it seems as if Eliza has overcome her
assimilationist aversion to Xuma and accepted her overwhelming desire. That she
speaks of her assimilationist ideals and self-loathing of her own blackness as
her “badness” stands as a testament to how deeply ingrained racist and colonial
ideas of good and bad have infiltrated her mind. Eliza speaks of her
assimilationist ideals as an evil of which she cannot rid herself.
The theme of kindness arises when Leah gives Eliza and Xuma
her blessing for their union. Leah also understands the importance of Xuma
reconciling with Maisy, who has been good to Xuma despite his clear interest in
Eliza.
Xuma’s surprise at his good fortune and Eliza’s turnaround
continues into the eleventh chapter when he wakes to find her cooking for him
and asking to move in. The change in Eliza’s attitude is stark and the
situation almost dreamlike in terms of how satisfied her requited love makes
Xuma. The buoyant mood is deflated with Leah’s arrest—a reminder of the danger
and drama in which Eliza and Xuma are still entangled.
However, Leah is released the same night and the couple
enter another period of happiness, undercut only by the occasion of Daddy’s
death by a hit and run. It is likely the car was driven by a rich white person,
given the economic barriers of car ownership in South Africa at the time.
Daddy’s death throws Leah into a depressive episode, and Xuma is shocked by how
Eliza abandons her in her grief.
The entire incident turns Xuma introspective: he cannot
make sense of the layers of economic and racial injustice that precipitated
Daddy’s alcoholism and decline and death, and so he thinks of it all as
strangeness. Compounding his confusion is Eliza’s lack of care for a woman who
had shown her so much kindness. The situation foreshadows Eliza’s coming
abandonment of Xuma.
Mine Boy Summary and Analysis of Chapters 13 – 16
Summary
Chapter 13 begins with Xuma waking to
find Ma Plank in his room. She
is cooking and Eliza is gone. Ma Plank
informs him that Eliza took a long train journey and will not return: she
tried, but she couldn’t stay with Xuma. The world seems strange and blank to
Xuma. Ma Plank gives him food and he eats mechanically. He orders Ma Plank to leave
the room. She does, and Maisy soon enters. She
asks if he’ll go to work but he says he doesn’t have to work until Sunday
night, and it is Saturday.
Maisy tells him to dress; she wants him to go dancing with
her friends in Hoopvlei again, and says Leah will come too.
Xuma says he has no interest and asks her to leave, which she does, in tears.
Twenty minutes later Leah bursts in and reprimands Xuma for his weakness over
Eliza’s departure. She makes him get up and go for a walk, joking that when he
comes back maybe she’ll take him to bed. The point of view stays with Leah
after Xuma goes out. Her mood shifts abruptly and she cries as she laments how
Eliza has left. She goes out for a walk as well.
Chapter 14 returns to Xuma’s point of view as he walks the
streets and thinks about Eliza’s absence, his mind slowly filtering all the
things they’ve done together and will never do again. He goes to his room, but
it is too painful to be there, so he returns to Leah’s, where beer-selling is
underway. Leah suggests he get drunk, but Xuma says he doesn’t want to. Johannes and Lena come into the
room. Johannes lifts a man by his throat and threatens to kill him. Leah slaps
his face and Johannes drops the man and begins to cry along with Lena. Leah
laughs at the absurdity of such a strong man brought so easily to tears.
Leah asks Xuma to accompany her while she finds out the
police’s plans. On the walk, she notes his brooding and says she misses and
loves Eliza too. The black police officer Leah knows informs her that the raid
will happen the next day in the afternoon. She pays him five pounds and he
cycles off. Back at Leah’s, Maisy takes Xuma on a walk and Leah reminds him to
come back and help move the tins of beer. They walk to the colored school’s
grass field and lie down. Xuma reflects on the fireflies back home and realizes
that he will never go back, because everything is different now that Eliza has
left him.
Maisy confesses that for months now she has lived with the
pain of loving Xuma despite him loving someone else. She does not know whose
pain is worse, but it has been awful for her. She says she knew Eliza would do
something like this, and now that it has happened Maisy is not happy. She
collapses on her arms and cries. Xuma thinks there is nothing he can do.
At Leah’s, they help dig in the yard to bury the tins of
beer. But as they do so, suddenly police descend on them with flashlights. A
white police officer nicknamed the Fox calls Leah’s name and they go inside to
discuss what has happened. The Fox says no one was informing; they simply knew
Leah had someone to tip her off, so they set a trap by making false plans. They
had been waiting on the roof two hours; now they have enough evidence to put
Leah away for six months.
Leah requests that the Fox leave her friends alone and take
her only. He agrees. Leah instructs Ma Plank to sell everything and save the
money for a new place for when she is out; she tells her not to waste money on
lawyers. Leah says goodbye to everyone individually, telling Xuma he is a son
to her. As she leaves, the Fox apologizes and she laughs defiantly, calling him
a fool. When she is gone Xuma reflects that Eliza is gone, and now so is Leah.
Chapter 15 begins with Xuma smoking a cigarette at dawn,
having just left the mines. He reflects on Leah’s trial, for which he was
present. The judge sentenced her to nine months and her photo was published in
the white newspaper. Outside the courthouse, a young person asked aloud why
white men are allowed to sell beer without going to prison. He suggested that
there should be bars for black people too. All Xuma knows is the tiredness that
has filled his body ever since the night Leah was taken by the police.
Paddy joins Xuma for a cigarette and discusses the sickness
he has observed in Xuma’s mind. He says that Xuma must not be afraid of his
thoughts, and that he should fight for what he wants. Xuma says how can Paddy
understand when he is white. He does not know what it is like to be asked for
your pass by police, to be thrown out of white-only establishments, to have
known Leah and her kindness. Paddy understands with his head, but Xuma
understands with his pain, which he says is true understanding. He asks how he
can be Paddy’s friend when Paddy and his people do these things to Xuma’s
people.
Paddy says Xuma is right, but insists that Xuma must start
thinking of himself as a man first and a black man second. Paddy says the
people of the country harm black people because they think of themselves as
white people first.
Xuma does not understand, but tells Paddy he is a good and
kind man. Slightly angered, Paddy leaves and says he is not trying to be kind.
Once he goes, Xuma heads to Malay Camp and thinks over Paddy’s words. He
reflects that to think as a man first would mean people are without color. He
doesn’t understand how to think of people without color because people are
black, white or brown. All people have color. But he thinks it is a nice
thought—no black, no white, only people. If it were so, he could go anywhere
without being stopped for his identification pass, and Leah wouldn’t be in
jail, and Eliza would have stayed with him.
Xuma is filled with lightness and gaiety as he imagines a
world without color. He sees happiness and cooperation, people working side by
side, and drinking and laughing and eating together. He goes to bed thinking if
only it were so—a good world full of happiness.
The novel’s final chapter begins with Xuma waking in
darkness. He remembers his talk with Paddy and the dream he had afterward, but
Xuma knows now it is a mere fantasy because the white man would not let it
happen. Xuma reacts with a feeling of hatred for white people and for the Red
One for putting such an idea in his head. Xuma is starving, so he goes to a
miserable eating house and pays a shilling to a filthy man for a hunk of hot
meat. The place is full of fat flies. He reflects on how white people have
pleasant eating houses in every street and aren’t crammed in like this.
Feeling lonely, Xuma walks to Maisy’s place of work. He
would like to talk with her about this idea of being a man without color. But
he knows it is wrong to run to her, and the anxiety gets the better of him when
he arrives. He turns and runs back to Malay Camp to lie in his room and think
before work.
At the mines, there is chaos and confusion. Xuma learns
there has been an accident and that Chris and Johannes are underground. Xuma
and Paddy decide not to wait for the engineers and head down in a cage elevator
together. Minutes later the two emerge carrying Chris’s and Johannes’s dead
bodies. A mine boy cries that they kept the structure from caving so the others
could escape.
Paddy and Xuma smoke while the engineers assess the
collapse. They come up to the surface saying it was only a minor collapse where
water softened the structure, and that the men died from panicking. They say
the mine is safe for the next shift, it just needs some clearing up. Paddy
knocks the engineer out with a single punch. Xuma refuses to let more men go
down until engineers secure the passage. The manager says this is a strike and
that he has called the police to jail Xuma. The men shout encouragement to
Xuma, and he feels strong and free, like a man—strong enough to be a man
without color.
The manager says that everyone striking should go on one
side, and everyone who isn’t should go to the other. The indunas and white men
go to the manager’s side while the black and colored men go with Xuma. Paddy is
the only white man who stands with Xuma, having reflected that Di was wrong about Xuma,
that he has shown leadership and is a man.
Police arrive in vans and begin beating the striking
workers with their batons. Xuma is struck in the head and suddenly his brain
clears and he understands that he must run away. He hears Paddy call out to him
not to run but Xuma can’t stop moving. He runs all the way to Maisy’s. She
takes him into her room, where Ma Plank has also been living. She attends to
the wound on his head and he says that he must go back. Paddy is going to jail
for standing up for Xuma’s people, and so, if Xuma is to be a man, he must go
too. He says he must tell the white people how he and other black people feel.
Then he will feel like a man.
Maisy says she understands. Xuma tells her that she has
always been good to him, and that he has forgotten Eliza and it is her he
loves. He asks her to wait for him until he returns from jail. She says she
loves him too and will wait however long it takes. Together they leave and walk
to the police station.
The novel ends with the point of view leaving that of any
character. The narrator describes the lights switching off one by one in Malay
Camp, Vrededorp, and other dark places of Johannesburg and of South Africa. The
streets are empty and the houses are quiet. Only shadows move and the quiet hum
of the night hangs over the city and the towns.
Analysis
Eliza’s odd behavior beginning at the end of chapter
twelve—first cold toward Leah and Xuma, briefly disappearing, then suddenly
warm to Xuma—is explained in chapter thirteen by the revelation that she has
abandoned Xuma. Despite Ma Plank’s kindness in breaking the news to Xuma and
offering to take care of him with food and consolation, Xuma rejects her help
and tells her to leave. Xuma rejects Maisy’s kindness too, sending her away in
tears. In this way, the effects of Eliza’s assimilationist rejection of Xuma
reverberate beyond him, sowing discord among the immediate community.
Although Leah acts tough with Xuma, the author’s decision
to leave the point of view with her after she sends him out for a walk gives
insight into her true feelings: Eliza’s decision to leave saddens her too;
Eliza’s rejection of Xuma is a rejection of her blackness, meaning she must
also separate herself from Leah, her only family.
The theme of work arises when Xuma returns to Leah’s after
his walk to find beer-selling underway again. Despite Daddy’s recent death and
Eliza’s departure, the need for money means Leah has no time to grieve, and
must return to her business of selling beer.
The motif of police corruption comes up when Leah bribes
the policeman five pounds for the information about the upcoming raid. The
theme of kindness is touched on when, after Leah’s gracious acceptance of her
arrest, Leah has kind words for everyone close to her.
In the fifteenth chapter, the theme of racial oppression
arises when Xuma overhears a young man asking aloud why white men can sell
alcohol and black people can’t. Leah’s case highlights the absurdity of how a
racist criminal justice system creates the conditions in which it penalizes
black people for actions that would not be considered crimes if white people
did them.
The theme of racial oppression continues as Xuma and Paddy
discuss the differences between white and black people. Though Xuma begins the
conversation convinced that there are fundamental and essential differences
between them, Paddy steadily convinces Xuma that it is possible to think of
people as equal, no matter their skin color. Xuma mulls the idea over and is
filled with hope and levity when he considers a world in which people wouldn't
be divided by race. He understands that, in such a world, he would not
encounter discrimination, Leah wouldn’t be in jail, and Eliza would have stayed
with him. In this epiphanic moment, Xuma understands that all of his problems
stem from a worldview which divides people into a hierarchy based on the
prejudice of white colonists.
Xuma’s fantasy of being a man without color is undercut by
the harsh realities of his life. The food available to him is far worse, and
the mine he works at considers the lives of its black and colored workers less
valuable than the gold they are extracting. Xuma is empowered when he and Paddy
stand together with the workers against the oppressors who run an unsafe mine,
but his resolve is quickly shaken by the sudden eruption of police violence.
The novel ends on an ambiguous note: though Xuma has run
from the police, he is empowered to believe that if he turns himself in he will
be able to express his ideas of a society not divided by racism and economic
disparity. Rather than showing the outcome of Xuma’s noble act, the author
zooms out from the narrow frame of Xuma’s perspective to show Johannesburg from
the sky. The final image of empty streets and quiet houses is ominous, and
suggests that despite Xuma’s desire to change an unjust society, the greater
forces of capitalism, colonialism, and racism have a far greater impact on
South African culture. Peter Abrahams’s ominous ending turned
out to be prescient: two years after the publication of Mine Boy, a period of
institutionalized white supremacy and racial segregation in South Africa known
as apartheid began.
Mine Boy Symbols, Allegory and Motifs
Drinking and Alcoholism (Motif)
Many of the characters Xuma encounters in Malay Camp drink
alcohol to excess. For Johannes, drinking changes his personality, turning him
violent and boastful when drunk, and rendering him fragile and subdued when
sober. Daddy is also an alcoholic, and Xuma only knows him to be intoxicated or
asleep. Xuma himself rarely drinks, but when he drinks with Maisy and her
friends in the countryside, he remarks that the quality of the beer is
different: it brings joy rather than sadness, as alcohol does in the city.
Police Corruption (Motif)
While the police are a constant presence in Mine Boy, it is clear that, for the black and
colored residents of Johannesburg, the police are a force to be feared and
bargained with rather than depended upon for safety. Xuma is at first confused
by the idea that he should run when he has done nothing wrong, and his naivety
leads him to receive a blow to the shoulder. Leah, as an illegal beer seller,
keeps a police officer on her side with bribery. At the end of the novel, the
police move in to attack the mine workers when they strike, proving their
allegiance to the powerful white owners of the mine.
Mine Dumps (Symbol)
In order to extract minute amounts of gold, the mine
workers must move out truckloads of sand, which stand in great piles that Xuma
sees on his first night out with Eliza. His first day at the mine involves
creating the piles, toiling all day only to find that the piles appear to
remain stagnant, not growing despite the constant backbreaking work of building
them. Xuma's coworker tells him that eventually he will simply stop thinking
about it. The mine dumps become symbolic of the futility that underprivileged
men must make peace with, a process that renders them sheeplike and docile.
The Countryside (Symbol)
For Xuma, the countryside represents the inverse of all the
sadness and desperation he encounters in the city. When Maisy takes him to the
countryside, Xuma feels as if he can engage in activities that are familiar to
the life he knows on the farm up north. Among the grass and open space of the
countryside, he is free to be himself, free from the threat of police, the
ravages of alcoholism, and the unsanitary, bleak conditions in which people in
Malay Camp live.
Electric Light Switches (Symbol)
At Doctor Mini's house and Maisy's maid's room, Xuma
encounters an electric light switch and doesn't know what to make of it; he is
surprised to see a white man's invention in a black person's home. Xuma's
unfamiliarity with the modern convenience of indoor electric lights is symbolic
of the racialized thinking he has absorbed. Xuma associates lighting not with
wealth but with white men, as white people are more economically privileged in
the society in which he lives.
Mine Boy Metaphors and Similes
Like a smooth brown fresh flower
When Xuma meets Eliza, he is awestruck by her beauty. The
narrator employs a simile to emphasize how Xuma perceives her, writing that she
is "like a smooth brown fresh flower."
Strong as an ox
The gold mine doctor uses the simile "strong as an
ox" to assess Xuma's capacity to continue working after he wounds his leg
on the axle of the truck he is made to push alone.
Held him like a vice
During an altercation with Dladla, in which he tries to
slash Leah with his knife, Leah manages to show her strength by holding his
arm. He struggles to break free, but her grip is so strong that he can't
wriggle free. The author uses a simile to underscore her strength, writing that
"Leah held him like a vice."
Take the dirt away
After rendering Dladla unconscious by stomping on his face,
Leah asks the people around her to "take the dirt away." She is
referring to removing Dladla from the premises, but is using a metaphor to
liken him to worthless filth that needs to be swept out.
Like a devil in his blood
After Xuma moves into his own room in Malay Camp so he can
forget about Eliza, he finds he can't get the memory of her out of his body and
mind. Using a simile to underscore the extent to which her memory possesses
Xuma, the author writes that Eliza was "like a devil in his blood."
Eliza Leaves Malay Camp
(Situational Irony)
Even though Eliza's attitude to Xuma oscillates several
times during Mine Boy, when she moves in with
him, it seems as though she has overcome her revulsion to him and accepted her
love and attraction. However, Xuma's and the reader's expectations are
subverted when Xuma wakes to find Ma Plank in his room and Eliza gone. In hindsight,
her decision to leave is consistent with past behavior, but in the moment,
Eliza's abandonment is wholly unexpected.
Police Sting Operation Against Leah
(Situational Irony)
Though the reader is led to believe that Leah has taken the
necessary precautions to avoid arrest, the Fox and his police force catch her
red-handed as she and the others are burying the barrels of beer in her yard.
Both Leah's and the reader's expectations are undermined in this example of
situational irony, where the opposite of what was anticipated happened.
Di's and Paddy's True Feelings About
Xuma (Dramatic Irony)
In an example of dramatic irony, the point of view stays
with Di and Paddy after Xuma leaves their apartment. Xuma goes away feeling an
affection for Di, and believes she sympathized with his difficulties in regards
to Eliza's assimilationist conflict. However, the reader knows more than Xuma
does about Di's true feelings toward Xuma: once Xuma is gone, she tells Paddy
he is not fully human, sharing an opinion that is condescending and racist.
Meanwhile, Xuma continues to distrust Paddy, even though Paddy sticks up for
Xuma's humanity.
Xuma's Kindness Toward Johannes
(Situational Irony)
After Johannes turns up for work at the mines with a
terrible hangover, Xuma offers Johannes the keys to his room, where he says
Johannes may have a nap and eat the bread and sardines there. Johannes finds
the situation ironic: only a few months earlier, Xuma had nothing and Johannes
had helped him get a job at the mine; this time, Xuma is the more responsible
man and Johannes is the friend in need.
Mine Boy Imagery
Beam of a powerful torch
In the opening chapter, Xuma meets Leah in the dark. Before
letting him into her home, she retrieves a powerful torch (i.e. flashlight) and
sweeps it over Xuma's body. The visual image shows Xuma from toe to head,
emphasizing his broken shoes and immense frame, establishing that he is poor
but well-built and intimidating.
Red shirts and green shirts and yellow
shirts and pink shirts
While walking the streets of Malay Camp with Joseph, Xuma
takes in the elaborate ways that people dress on Saturdays. The author captures
the flashes of colorful clothing using simple visual imagery that shows the
bright, contrasting colors.
Smiled from the side of her mouth
In an example of visual imagery, the author captures Leah's
ambivalence about handing money over to the policeman she bribes by describing
the expression on her face. She is happy to have the information but irritated
to be extorted, and so she smiles from the side of her mouth as she counts five
one-pound notes and hands them over.
Everywhere the stench of beer was
strong
After Xuma leaves to have his face stitched by a doctor, he
returns to Leah's, where everyone has cleared out. However, the strong smell of
the beer that had been served and spilled lingers. In this olfactory image, the
reader can imagine the sharp scent of beer filling the empty room.
Mine Boy Colonialism
and Apartheid in South Africa
South Africa, the southernmost country in the African
continent, has undergone centuries of political and social transformations
stemming from a history of colonial rule that led to both multiculturalism and
racial segregation.
From 1652 to 1822, Dutch slave traders brought forced
laborers to South Africa from Indonesia, Madagascar, and eastern Africa. Unions
formed between Dutch settlers, their slaves, and indigenous peoples of the
region led to the ethnic group known as the Cape Coloureds, who largely spoke
Dutch and practiced Christianity.
In the early 1800s, Britain colonized the Cape of Good
Hope, and many Dutch settlers, at the time known as the Boers, migrated to
other regions of what would become South Africa, where they established
different republics. The discovery of diamonds and gold in the mid-to-late
1800s increased economic growth and immigration to the region, while also
prompting the British to ramp up efforts to gain control over the indigenous
population and the Boers.
War between the Zulu Kingdom and Britain in 1879 resulted
in the Zulus losing independence. The next year the British lost the First Boer
War, but returned with greater firepower in 1899 to win the Second Boer War,
albeit with many casualties. During the war, nearly thirty-thousand Boer women
and children died in British concentration camps.
Under Dutch and British colonial rule, segregation of white
South Africans from black and colored South Africans was mandated by laws that
restricted settlement and movement of native people. After the British
Parliament granted nominal independence and created the Union of South Africa
in 1910, more laws were passed to reduce the amount of land available to
indigenous peoples.
In 1948, seventeen years after Britain granted full
independence to the country, the National Party won the federal election under
the slogan "apartheid," an Afrikaans word meaning separateness. Once
in power, the party created laws that classified people into three races
(black, colored, and white), granting the white minority control over the black
and colored majority. The laws included banning marriage and sex between whites
and non-whites, laws that required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their
presence in restricted areas, separate public facilities for whites and
non-whites, and repression of non-white labor unions and participation in
government.
After decades of oppression and resistance, the apartheid
system came to an end in the early 1990s when the National Party lifted their
ban on anti-apartheid political organizations and released Nelson Mandela after
he served twenty-seven years as a political prisoner. In 1994, the introduction
of a new constitution that enfranchised non-whites and the election of Nelson
Mandela as president of South Africa saw the official end of the apartheid era.
Mine Boy Literary Elements
Genre
Realistic fiction
Setting and Context
The setting is in Johannesburg just before the official
start of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Narrator and Point of View
The novel is narrated from a third-person omniscient
perspective. While the point of view often stays with the protagonist Xuma, it
occasionally switches to secondary characters.
Tone and Mood
The tone is matter-of-fact; the mood is melancholic and hopeful.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is Xuma; the antagonist is a white
supremacist South African society that oppresses underprivileged black people.
Major Conflict
The major conflict is Xuma's struggle to find love, safety,
and prosperity in a society where racism restricts his ability to achieve these
goals.
Climax
The novel reaches its climax when Xuma and Paddy unite to
fight for the miners' rights after the mine collapses and kills Chris and
Johannes. Despite being of different races and social statuses, they come
together to demand better working conditions, only to be swiftly punished for
their act of defiance.
Foreshadowing
The water leaking into the mine early in the novel
foreshadows the mine shaft's tragic collapse at the end of the book.
Understatement
Allusions
Imagery
Paradox
Parallelism
Metonymy and Synecdoche
Personification
Mine Boy Essay Questions
1. 1
What is Leah's
significance in Mine Boy?
Leah functions as a
strong maternal figure to Xuma and the people of Malay Camp, who respect her
steadfast, often mocking attitude in the face of adversity. But while she is
respected, she is also feared: Leah has the authority to stop a street fight
between Lena and Fat Liz even while everyone else in the vicinity is cheering
them on. For Xuma, Leah acts as a surrogate mother figure. She practices tough
love, advising him on how to survive in the city while teasing him for his
ignorance. Later in the novel, Leah helps Xuma overcome his devastation at
having been abandoned by Eliza, despite the fact she herself is similarly
upset. In this instance and others, Leah sacrifices her own feelings in order
to keep the peace among the people around her, knowing that if she were to
succumb to her own despair, others would follow suit.
2. 2
Discuss the role of work
in Mine Boy. Why is the type of work people engage in
significant?
The need to survive and
make money drives Xuma and many other impoverished characters in Mine Boy to find work that is often precarious,
involving illegal activity, workplace danger, or both. Precarious work is a
dominant theme in the narrative. For Leah, her work as an illegal beer seller
involves secrecy, police bribery, the looming threat of imprisonment, and the
need for violence to solve disputes that she cannot take to the police. For
Xuma, work at the mines—though legal—involves unsafe working conditions that
lead to lung sickness and mine collapses, on top of the physical exhaustion and
spiritual emptiness Xuma feels as he toils all day. Ultimately, the precarious
work that these characters engage in results from a lack of safe employment
opportunities: for people of color in South Africa, they must take these jobs
because there is no better alternative in a society ruled by the affluent white
minority.
3. 3
Discuss the significance
of colonialism in relation to the conflicts that arise in Mine Boy.
Most of the conflict
in Mine Boy can be traced to conditions created by
settler colonialism in South Africa, which at the time the novel is set was
ruled by a white minority descended from white Dutch and British colonists.
Laws and de facto segregation efforts disenfranchised black and colored people
while concentrating land, wealth, and political power in the hands of whites.
The region's colonial legacy is reflected in the white policemen's undue
violence against people of color, in the beliefs that Xuma has about not being
able to be friends with Paddy, in Eliza's desire not to think of herself as
black, in Leah's need to hide her beer-selling business, and in the miserable
conditions in which the people of Malay Camp live. While the novel ends with Xuma
having had an epiphanic realization that a society without racial divisions
could exist, the decades that followed the novel's publication only saw the
South African government increase its efforts to segregate people of color from
the white minority, ushering in the apartheid—"separateness"—era.
4. 4
Why might Peter Abrahams
have chosen to depict so much violence in Mine Boy?
Violence erupts in Mine Boy without warning or, often, reason.
The night Xuma arrives at Malay Camp, he is exposed to the bizarrely casual
violence between Dlada and Daddy. The next day, he wakes to a bloody fight
between Lena and Fat Liz, which the people watching seem to find entertaining.
Later that same day, Xuma is nonplussed by the arrival of white policemen who
strike at him and other black men indiscriminately. His friend Johannes, when
drunk, likes to grab men by the throat and threaten to kill them. Paddy also
tells Xuma he must use violence against workers if they question his authority.
Even Leah, despite her kindness, reveals a violent side when she breaks Dlada's
arm and stomps on his face. The lurid displays of violence in Mine Boy show how people learn to protect
themselves when subject to racist and economically precarious conditions that
necessitate bloody conflict resolution: without police or legal authority to
trust, the black and colored residents of Johannesburg must rely on violence to
survive. In this way, the violence of the systemic inequality created by
colonialism begets smaller acts of violence on a widespread scale.
5. 5
What is "the
devil" inside Eliza? Why is it significant to the novel overall?
Early in the novel,
Eliza confesses to Xuma that she has a "badness" or "devil"
inside her: this devil is her desire to be like a white person in spite of her
blackness. Eliza says that she has always felt she is white on the inside; however,
she is not comfortable with this belief, as she has a competing desire to
embrace the black people around her, such as Leah and Xuma, whom she loves.
Eliza's desire to act and be seen as a white person means she has taken on
assimilationist ideals: she sees how the privileged white people in South
African society live, and she aspires to have the same lives they do, which
involves speaking and dressing similarly. Eliza describes her assimilationism
as a devil inside her to emphasize the feeling that her drive is like a
possession she has no control over. The conflict that results from this
devil—both for Xuma and for Eliza internally—speaks to the novel's overall
thematic preoccupation with the arbitrary divisions that have resulted from
colonialism in South Africa. When Eliza says she wants to be white, she is
really saying that she wishes to escape the underprivileged conditions to which
she was born. In a more just society, such as Xuma imagines at the end of the
novel, she would not have to associate a comfortable life with white people.
Mine Boy Quiz 1
1. 1Who narrates Mine Boy?
An unnamed first-person
narrator
A third-person
omniscient narrator
Xuma
Eliza
2. 2Who is the novel's
protagonist?
Xuma
Leah
Eliza
Johannes
3. 3What year was Mine Boy
published?
2006
1946
1918
1989
4. 4Who is the author of
Mine Boy?
Paddy O'Shea
Peter Abrahams
Xuma
Ruth Yudelowitz
5. 5Where is Mine Boy
primarily set?
Kenya
Malay Camp and
Johannesburg
Vredredorp
Hoopvlei
6. 6What does Bantu mean?
Colored
White
Black
None of these
7. 7What type of mine does
Xuma work at?
Diamond
Coal
Quartz
Gold
8. 8Who becomes an enemy of
Leah?
Xuma
Eliza
Dladla
Daddy
9. 9Who is Xuma's primary
love interest?
Di
Leah
Maisy
Eliza
10.
10Who is
the Red One?
A sunburned mine worker
Xuma's boss Paddy
The mine's owner
None of these
11.
11What
color is the sand extracted from the mines?
Silver
Beige
Black
White
12.
12Where
does Xuma come from?
The north
Johannesburg
Malay Camp
Hoopvlei
13.
13What
does Dladla brandish at the beginning of the novel?
A knife
A cane
A sword
A gun
14.
14Who
takes Xuma in on his first night in Malay Camp?
Eliza
Lena
Ma Plank
Leah
15.
15Which
characters fight each other on Xuma's first morning in the city?
Leah and Fat Liz
Maisy and Eliza
Lena and Fat Liz
Eliza and Leah
16.
16What
time of night does Xuma arrive in Malay Camp?
Midnight
One in the morning
Two in the morning
Three in the morning
17.
17What
does Leah do before letting Xuma into her home?
Kisses him
Looks him over with a
flashlight
Tests his strength
None of these
18.
18What
is Xuma's first impression of the people he meets at Leah's?
They are all drunks
They are strange people
who believe in nothing
They are strangely
friendly
They smell very good to
him
19.
19What
chases Xuma out of his room on the first morning at Leah's?
A wasp
Eliza
A bee
A horsefly
20.
20Who
takes Xuma into the city on his first day?
J.P. Williamson
Joseph
Johannes
Daddy
21.
21How
much does it cost for Leah to bribe the policeman?
Five pounds
Twenty dollars
Ten dollars
Ten pounds
22.
22Who
advises Xuma to stretch out and relax on his first day at the mines?
Johannes
Nana
Paddy
Joseph
23.
23What
does Xuma think Eliza looks like?
An actress
A smooth fresh brown
flower
A statue
A supermodel
24.
24What
technology does Xuma associate with white people?
Computers
Cars
Phones
Electric lights
25.
25Why
does Xuma come to Malay Camp?
He was told to leave his
village
To work in the mines
To escape his family
To drink
Mine Boy Quiz 2
1. 1What does Johannes call
himself when drunk?
The King of Malay Camp
J.P. Williamson
Dladla
Daddy
2. 2How often does Xuma
drink in the novel?
Every day
Rarely
Only during religious
ceremonies
Never
Mine Boy Quiz 3
1. 1How does Xuma feel in
Doctor Mini's home?
Like he wants to live
there himself
Like he is in any normal
home
Like he isn't supposed
to be there
Like he should take some
of the nice things
2. 2What happens to the man
with the broken arm at Doctor Mini's?
He escapes out the
window
He befriends Xuma
He never makes it to the
doctor's house
He dies on the surgery
table
Mine Boy Quiz 4
1. 1What happens to the men
as they descend into the mine?
They sweat profusely
They joke and chat
They roll their eyes
over how long it takes
They go silent and their
hearts pound
2. 2What structural concern
does a mine worker bring to Xuma?
Tunnel too narrow
Water leaking in
Lack of cross beams
Lack of joists
Jean Pierre Rutagengwa
at 2024-11-12 03:37:42
You are doing a great work dear friend of mine. Keep your chin up
Rusanganwa Joseph
at 2024-11-12 04:50:18
Rural urban immigration in search for green pasture...like parallelism in Rwandan post Genocide...abanyonzi n@bamotari... inflation to big towns and cities
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