The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985 - Hardcover

Van Onselen, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080909603X ISBN 13: 9780809096039

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1996

Synopsis

A thoughtful portrait of Kas Maine, an African farmer, healer, and tribal patriarch, describes life for disenfranchised blacks under South African apartheid and the effects of tribal custom and tradition on his life.

About this title

Review:

History forgets the small and powerless. It is to South African historian and journalist Charles Van Onselen's credit that he has remembered one of them in a sprawling biography: an illiterate black South African tenant farmer who lived out his days under apartheid. The existence of Kas Maine (1894-1985) had hitherto been formally acknowledged only in official state records, and then only once, for having been arrested in 1931 for not having a license for his pet dog. From that sketchy base Van Onselen creates a powerful life study of a man who lived as best as he could under the most trying circumstances. But he does much more than that: he reinforces Maine's story with a long and fluent account of South African history in the last century.

About the Author:

Charles van Onselen is director of the institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of the Witwatersrand.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 080909603X
• ISBN 13: 9780809096039
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 649