Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood

Trevor Noah, “Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood,” Spiegel & Grau, 2016, 285 pp.

This book is my latest book-club assigned reading; an assignment that leads me to books I would otherwise never choose but, again, I am pleasantly surprised and did like this particular book.  The author, Trevor Noah (born 20 February 1984), is a South African comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central, a post he has held since 2015.  His path to a television personality was unlikely.  He was born into a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that existed in South Africa between 1948 and 1991.  His father was Swiss and his mother a black Xhosa.  A union that was, at the time, punishable by five years in prison: hence, the title “Born A Crime”.  Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme measures his mother took to hide him from the government. He had infrequent contact with his father.  I found his mother a fascinating and compelling character in the book.  Someone I’d really like to meet. 

Noah’s mother, who grew up in a hut with 14 cousins, and determined that her son would not grow up paying what she called “the black tax” — black families having to “spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past,” using their skills and education to bring their relatives “back up to zero,” because “the generations who came before you have been pillaged.”  She is a fiercely religious woman, who attributes her miraculous survival from a gunshot wound to the head (inflicted by Abel, her second husband) to her faith; a woman who took her son to three churches on Sunday (as well as a prayer meeting on Tuesday, Bible study on Wednesday and youth church on Thursday), even when there were dangerous riots in the streets and few dared to venture out of their homes.

Noah discovered early on that language was a way to camouflage his difference. His mother knew Xhosa, Zulu, German, Afrikaans, and Sotho and used her knowledge “to cross boundaries, handle situations, navigate the world.” She made sure that English was the first language Noah spoke because “if you’re black in South Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up.”  “English is the language of money,” Mr. Noah goes on. “English comprehension is equated with intelligence. If you’re looking for a job, English is the difference between getting the job or staying unemployed.”

To save money, Mr. Noah recalls, his mother perfected the art of coasting their old, rusty Volkswagen downhill “between work and school, between school and home,” and enlisting her son’s help in pushing the car when the gas ran out. One month, he says, money was so short that they were forced to subsist on bowls of wild spinach, cooked with mopane worms, “the cheapest thing that only the poorest of poor people eat.”

By high school, Mr. Noah writes, he had become an enterprising businessman, copying and selling pirated CDs; he and his business partners would soon segue into the D.J. business, throwing raucous dance parties in Alexandra, “a tiny, dense pocket of a shantytown,” known as Gomorrah because it had “the wildest parties and the worst crimes.”

After Mr. Noah’s Swiss father moved to Cape Town, his mother married, Abel, an auto mechanic, whose English name recalled the good brother in the Bible, but whose Tsonga name, Ngisaveni, says Mr. Noah, meant “Be afraid.” Those names would turn out to be a harbinger of his stepfather’s dual personality — charming and eager to be liked on the surface, but, as Mr. Noah recalls, highly controlling, and violent.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  ‘My childhood involved church, or some form of church, at least four nights a week.  Tuesday night was the prayer meeting.  Wednesday night was Bible study.  Thursday night was Youth church.  Friday and Saturday we had off.  (Time to sin!)  Then on Sunday, we went to church.  Three churches, to be precise. …The first church offered jubilant praise of the Lord.  The second church offered deep analysis of the scripture, which my mom loved.  The third church offered passion and catharsis; it was a place where you truly felt the presence of the Holy Spirit inside you.’  The author noted that each church had its own racial makeup: Jubilant church was mixed church.  Analytical church was white church.  And passionate, cathartic church, that was black church.  ‘It took us an hour to get to white church, another forty-five minutes to get to mixed church, and another forty-five minutes to drive out to Soweto for black church.’

Pg. 11:  I was nearly six years old when Nelson Mandela was released from prison (ten before democracy came).  I remember the violence that followed.  As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was now going to rule.  The question was, which black man?  Violence broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National Congress, as they jockeyed for power.  The simplest way to understand it is as a proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa.  The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant and very nationalistic.  The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa.  Thousands of people were killed.  Necklacing was common. 

Pg. 22:  During Apartheid, unlike in America, where anyone with one drop of black blood automatically became black, in South Africa mixed people came to be classified as their own separate group, neither black nor white but what we all ‘colored.’  Colored people, black people, white people, and Indian people were forced to register their race with the government.  Each group had to live in their own area, segregated from the others.

Pg. 33:  I come from a country where people have been arrested and tried for witchcraft—in a court of law.  I’m not talking about the 1700s, I’m talking about 2011.  And you can’t argue in court that witchcraft isn’t real.  No, no, no.  You’ll lose.

Pg. 42:  I didn’t understand why my grandmother had a driveway.  She didn’t have a car.  All of our neighbors had driveways, none of them had cars either.  There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway.  The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways.  It’s a hopeful place.  Yet, there was no indoor running water, just one communal outdoor tap and one outdoor toilet shared by six or seven houses. 

Pg. 53:  Nearly one million people lived in Soweto.  Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black—and then there was me.  I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark.  ‘The house on Makhalima Street.   At the corner, you’ll see a light-skinned boy.  Take a right there’.

Pg. 61:  The only way to make apartheid work was to cripple the black mind.  The government built what became known as Bantu schools.  Bantu schools taught no science, no history, and no civics.  They taught metrics and agriculture: how to count potatoes, how to pave roads, chop wood, till the soil.  To the government’s credit, they were being honest: why educate a slave?  It would only mislead him, showing him pastures in which he is not allowed to graze.

Pg. 66:  So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past.  That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation.  My mother calls it ‘the black tax.’  Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero. 

Pg. 69:  The end of apartheid was a gradual thing.  Apartheid’s walls cracked and crumbled over many years.  Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced. 

Pg. 161:  South Africa has eleven official languages.  English is the international language and the language of money and of the media.

Pg. 191:  The only rule is that if you throw a party in front of somebody’s house, they get to come and share your alcohol.  The parties don’t end until someone gets shot or a bottle gets broken on someone’s face.  That’s how it has to end; otherwise, it wasn’t a party.

Pg. 209:  The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares.  Crime is grassroots.  Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand.  Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement.  Crime gets involved in the community.  Crime doesn’t discriminate.  The hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in.  These notions are quite different when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from crime. (p. 212).

Addenda:

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) is a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

The case was brought by Mildred Loving (née Jeter), a woman of color, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Supreme Court's unanimous decision determined that this prohibition was unconstitutional, overruling Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.