Catherine Woeber
the coyaba chronicles: reflections on the black experience in the 20th century by Peter Abrahams (David Philip) Coyaba is the name the writer Peter Abrahams gave to his home in the hills above Kingston, Jamaica, in which he settled with his wife Daphne in 1956. It signifies a place of refuge and tranquillity, where, the 80-year-old says, “contemplating the nature of things came more easily than anywhere else on Earth I have been”.
The Coyaba Chronicles: Reflections on the Black Experience in the 20th Century, part memoir, part philosophical musings, is the culmination of half-a-century’s writing career spent thinking about and actively participating in the resolution of what WEB DuBois at the turn of the 19th century called “the problem of the colour line”, namely the relations between the lighter and darker “races” complicated by colonialism. Abrahams wrote about his South African childhood in Tell Freedom (1954) and the new book fills many gaps not chronicled in his life after that, particularly his years in England and France before the move to Jamaica. But it offers little more on his childhood, other than to foreground his family in line with the book’s thrust, namely the importance of community ties for the wholeness of humanity in the next century. Different sections of the book will appeal to different readers, the chronicles are so wide-ranging and engaging. My favourites are those describing his domestic circumstances in the French village of Paley and English council housing estate of Debden at the time of writing Tell Freedom, the sections relating the building of his sanctuary Coyaba in the undeveloped area of Red Hills and its near-destruction about 30 years later by Hurricane Gilbert. Always his personal circumstances lead to speculations on the black experience, or perhaps more accurately, on hegemonic relations. Indeed, it is relations of power that lie at the heart of this serious book, the “race” relations (colonialism) that dogged the 20th century and economic relations between north and south (the new colonialism) that will determine the course of the 21st. The changing political culture of Jamaica over four decades is used for much of the book as a springboard for his musings that, though Abrahams returned to South Africa only once in 1952, often make reference to this country. Marcus Garvey looms large in the book, as much as DuBois did in his last novel, The View from Coyaba (1985), but here it is the real DuBois, George Padmore, Norman Manley, Alexander Bustamante, Nelson Mandela and Frederick Douglass who people these pages.
Abrahams’s simple, strong style has always been his greatest asset as a writer and the transparency of his writing including direct speech for immediate effect allows for the complexity of his thought. Its moving regularly between personal and philosophical shows how the intensely private man all his life was yet the advisor and confidant of giants of the pan-African political scene, always defending the distance art requires to engage with the tragedy that “the leaders of our freedom struggles had become like those they had fought against”. In the final pages he comments on trends in the new century, including in his ambit of HIV/Aids, gender relations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, debt relief, the marginalisation of the written word and consequent loss of the sharing of human experience through reading, the complementary roles of arts and science, and exclusive specialisation that “can lead to an intelligent and all-knowing ignorance about who we are, where we came from and how we got to who we are”. Ignorance, he feels, will be the scourge of the 21st century and the relations between humanity and the natural environment the problem that will define it. One might not always agree with Abrahams and he tends to navigate a precarious course between celebrating those who swim against the tide and affirming those who live conservative lifestyles (often one and the same, as his own life testifies) but it is impossible to ignore him, or his deeply considered reflections. The bulk and raw honesty of the book render it not always digestible, but a necessary antidote to the refined superficial ingestion of the present day. The book is ill-served by the odd proof-reading error and inaccurate dates regarding his move to Jamaica and brief return to South Africa, but these are perhaps compromises demanded by its timely publication, given its questions about our future within the context of global capitalism, in the 21st century. The Coyaba Chronicles for the first time show us Abrahams the man in addition to the writer, journalist and respected representative for the black experience and leave us in no doubt as to his stature and humanity.