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

Charles Van Onselen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 085255740X ISBN 13: 9780852557402

Publisher: David Philip, Cape Town, 1997

Synopsis

Based on interviews with Kas Maine, this text recreates the life of a man who struggled to maintain his family in a world dedicated to enriching whites and impoverishing blacks, while South Africa was tearing both apart. North America: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; South Africa: Jonathan Ball

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 research professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. He is the recipient of The Sunday Times/Alan Paton Award and the Herkovitz Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: David Philip, Cape Town
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 085255740X
• ISBN 13: 9780852557402
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 668