Mine Boy

Xuma comes from the north to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg and lodges in the crowded slum of Malay Camp, where he slowly wakes to the injustice of the colour bar that rules every hour of his life. Abrahams maps the real segregated city: the multiracial shebeen world of Malay Camp and Vrededorp, the deep gold mines and their white dumps south of town, the white city centre where black men are only ever labour, and the streets where the police raid and the new consciousness stirs.

Leah

Malay Camp (Leah's shebeen)

Chapter 1

Newly arrived and knowing no one, Xuma is taken in by Leah, the shrewd, generous queen of an illicit shebeen selling home-brewed beer under the noses of the police. Her rowdy household in Malay Camp is his first family in the city, and his window on the whole vivid, precarious life of the black slum.

Chapter 1

inferred Xuma lodges in Malay Camp, the real crowded, multiracial slum of old Johannesburg, at the illegal drinking house of Leah; the specific shebeen is invented and sited in that district near Vrededorp.

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