REVIEW

TELL FREEDOM

I read this book because it inspired me and i didn't want to let a great opportunity of experience of life away. It actually based on a

autobiography of a South African poet, who rejected the horrors his country offered his people- the Coloreds- this has beauty and the marked poignance of a hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds. For at his thirty-seven years of age Peter Abrahams looks back on a life that ran the gamut of trials-physical, emotional and intellectual to the point that he could no longer recognize a real place for himself in Africa, even among the whites who were trying to further the causes of tolerance and freedom. His biography is conversational and grippingly sensitive in style. Beginning with early childhood, he takes us with him- into his own small poverty- stricken house in Johannesburg, into his friendship with a Zulu boy, into his first encounter with white youths who stoned him and whose father later blamed the Coloreds for the incident. With his teens came both a ray of hope and a sad romance- for when he is given the opportunity to go to a diocesan college, his girl's family moves away without leaving word. At college there is the hope of a new social order, but as it comes, in the form of Marxism, it is disillusioning to Abrahams who later feels, though he knows the communists are not the only forces at work against ""apartheid"", that he must escape to Europe in order to write and thus do his best for his country. A book that combines the emotional appeal of a Paton story with vivid, frank actuality, and sheds important light on Africa. To those who remember his Path of Thunder and Wild Conquest (both Harper books- 1948-50), with keen delight, this will have special significance. I really liked this book it taught me a lot of stuff i didn't have any idea.