Many of the major black writers of Africa, such as Cyprian Ekwensi of Nigeria and Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya, have testified to the seminal influence that the black South African author Peter Abrahams has had on their writing. Abrahams was the first black African writer whose works, published in England and the United States, were widely read by the aspirant writers from those African countries that were beginning, in the 1950s and 1960s, to throw off the shackles of colonialism. In his 1972 monograph, the scholar Michael Wade has contended that, without Abrahams's influence, "the initial development of literature in English in Nigeria and Kenya would have taken rather a different course." Abrahams's importance, however, declined in proportion to the increase in new, prolific, and perhaps more accomplished black writers from Africa, including South Africa, who are closer in touch with the challenges and vicissitudes of societies in...