Quote by Peter Abrahams: “The heart has no colour.”

Love, grief, longing, courage — these experiences do not belong to any racial group. They are part of being human. In the context of apartheid-era South Africa, saying this was radical: it was a refusal to accept that race was the deepest truth about a person. Our inner lives cross every boundary others try to draw around us.

Abrahams was writing in 1948, the year the National Party came to power in South Africa and formally institutionalised apartheid. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was also adopted that year, asserting a universal human dignity that apartheid directly contradicted. Abrahams spent much of his life in exile, writing against racial division from the outside.

South African novelist of mixed heritage who became one of the earliest Black South African writers to gain international recognition. His 1946 novel Mine Boy depicted the lives of Black workers in Johannesburg's gold mines, and his 1954 memoir Tell Freedom documented his childhood under apartheid. He lived much of his life in exile in Jamaica.