Fancies idle (iii) – Peter Abraham

Following my blog post on Lonmin and the horror story of the miners in South Africa, here’s a poem by Peter Abrahams from 1938 from ‘You Better Believe It: Black Verse in English’, published by Penguin. Abrahams, says the editor, “served as publicity secretary to the Fifth Pan-African Congress” in 1945 – led by the likes of George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. Born in South Africa to Ethiopian father and ‘Cape-coloured mother’, he lived in England after the war, where he had “An astonishingly creative decade”. After that he moved to Jamaica. Here is the poem: