Abrahams, Peter (1919-...), a black South African novelist, short story writer, and journalist, was one of the first fiction writers to stress the brutalizing effect that apartheid had on the majority population of South Africa. Apartheid was the policy of enforced racial segregation that the white minority government of South Africa imposed between the 1940's and the 1990's. Abrahams's first novel, Mine Boy (1946), was the first work to detail the hardships that blacks suffered under the apartheid regime.