It is not the cinema in Mine Boy (1946), by South African Peter Abrahams, but the Bioscope. This suggests a specific place in Malay Camp, the Johannesburg suburb where much of the action plays out, although South African cinemas in general were also called bioscopes at the period.
This Bioscope first appears as Xuma, the central character, is introduced to Saturday night in Malay Camp after arriving from the country to work in the mines.
“They stopped on a corner and watched the milling crowd. Across the way was the Bioscope and people were streaming in. Outside the Bioscope a little ring of men were playing dice. The man who had the dice executed an intricate dance before he flung the dice down.”
The Bioscope is singled out as a destination for courting couples, and a little later Xuma is teased with the suggestion that he and Eliza, whom he has just met, might go there together. But it is also a place of more general diversion. Later, when Xuma returns to the house after several months’ absence, he is told that the women folk — Leah, Eliza and Maisy — have all gone to the Bioscope.
The cinema is just an incidental detail in Mine Boy. We never learn what people are watching and although Xuma’s love life occupies much of the narrative, he never goes to the Bioscope with Eliza or Maisy. Instead they walk together or dance, and in one striking scene Eliza reads to Xuma from a history of the Zulu wars.
In this edition Mine Boy is billed as the first modern novel of Black South Africa, a plausible claim even if it ignores the author’s earlier, less polished Song of the City (1945). Abrahams’ style here is sometimes straightforward and uninflected, sometimes lyrical. His descriptions of street life are the most vivid in the book, and it seems he saw a lot first hand. He was born in the neighbouring suburb of Vrededorp, and grew up with an aunt who, like Leah, was a Skokiaan Queen, illicitly brewing and selling beer.
Abrahams left Johannesburg for Cape Town in 1938, then moved to London in 1939, aged only 20. He worked as a journalist and published his first fiction. This explains, perhaps, the occasional nostalgic turn.
“Perhaps in five or ten years Malay Camp would only be a name. And perhaps even Vrededorp, the heart-throb of the dark people of the city, would be like a dream told to a child who was sleepy, and who, on waking, would remember only vague snatches of it.”
text © Ian Mundell 2015
mundellian 