BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Trevor Noah, author)
Memoir, South Africa, apartheid, race, community, poverty, comedy, history, crime, mother-son, extended family, absent father, domestic abuse, trauma, education
Comedian Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, is a tribute to the resilience of his fellow South Africans as generations continue to recover from apartheid. It is a love song to the brave, spiritual and indomitable mother who gave him life and raised him, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. The memoir is also an unexpectedly deep and thoughtful reflection on race, community, family and poverty. Noah is a successful comedian and a former host of The Daily on Comedy Central network. As the title of the book references, Noah’s birth violated South African law. Noah was born in 1984 in South Africa to a black mother and a white father. At that time, South Africa’s 1927 Immorality Act, rendered illegal “carnal relations” between a black woman and a white man. Hence, Noah’s birth was evidence of a crime.
Because of aprtheid laws, Noah’s Xhoso mother and Swiss German father, Robert, never married or even lived together. Robert was present and engaged in Trevor’s life while he lived in South Africa and again later when he lived in Europe. As a child, Trevor saw his father on weekly Sunday visits and at his birthday and Christmas. He was not estranged from his father and respects him, but his primary relationship was with his mother. Growing up, Noah was required to remain indoors or in secluded areas out of public view to avoid drawing the attention of law enforcement. He spent a great deal of time playing alone.
Noah’s mother and grandmother before him, in poverty. His mother had experienced a dire, barely subsistent childhood. As a middle girl child, Patricia was sent away by her family to live with relatives on a farm. There she was a farm laborer and was barely fed. Patricia grew determined to forge a better life for herself and eventually for her son. She defied social boundaries and restrictions, attended secretarial school to secure work in white owned businesses, bore and raised a mixed race child and managed to own a car, purchase a home and operate businesses. She suffered significant domestic abuse at the hands of her husband Abel, Trevor’s stepfather, and her pleas for justice fell on deaf ears with chauvinistic police officers. Above all, Patricia’s love for and dedication to Trevor was primary.
Noah deftly navigates his depiction of poverty in South Africa. He uses searing anecdotes about his mother’s perpetually broken car, their struggle to purchase sufficient food to avoid hunger, her insistence on using hand-me-downs and used clothing, and the cardboard and corrugated huts, in which extended families lived in Soweto and the the endless work, including by children, at failing businesses just to earn enough to feed a family, However, Noah uses an extremely light hand in writing these components of his stories. They are laden with details that expose the depth of the poverty in which his family lived–eating boiled goats heads, meals made of vegetables scrounged from the streets and roadsides and at times, garbage cans, and the preciousness of having meat or sharing a single roasted chicken with 14 people.
In Born a Crime, Noah uses introductory contextual historical information prologues to each chapter. The stories are a mix of witty anecdotes and deeply vulnerable revelations about the challenges of his childhood. Together these elements convey an accessible and multi-dimensional picture of growing up as a mixed race child during apartheid and during the initial period of apartheid’s end. The author deftly relays the complexity of both race and language in Soweto and the surrounding environs. He identifies three distinct racial groups: black, white, and mixed race, the third being a group which could include a person with a black and a white parent, or some other non-white, non-black racial heritage combination, including Indian or Chinese. (Paradoxically, people of Japanese descent were classified as white). In South Africa, mixed race individuals, like Trevor, were referred to as “colored”. Children of mixed race were not wholly welcomed in either black or white communities. They were considered “other” and existed in a profoundly isolating racial gap.
Trevor’s identity and personality evolved in large part due to his in-between racial status. He was treated as a privileged white child in his black Soweto family and community and as a lesser-than black child in most white circles. The relative percentage of mixed race children in his schools and neighborhoods was so small that Trevor often was the only colored child in his class or school, and struggled to belong. When forced to choose, he chose black, the race and culture of his mother and the extended family with which he lived.
Noah developed coping mechanisms to bridge the racial gaps and divides of his childhood. First he developed working knowledge of the many languages of the greater Soweto and surrounding areas–English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Tsonga and more. His facility with languages allowed Trevor to move between and amongst different racial and ethnic subdivisions and sectors of the community with ease, and to diffuse animosity by connecting through shared languages. Second, at the insistence of Trevor’s mother, for most of his childhood Trevor attended three churches each Sunday–the black church, the white church and the mixed church. This exposure, which at times felt interminable to an active boy, acquainted Trevor with the habits, norms and cultures of each of the dominant forces in his culture. He also attended Catholic, private and public schools, allowing him to absorb the relative differences in privilege and behavior that cut across economic divisions. Finally, Trevor relied on ingenuity and humor to create for himself a pathway to move between groups. To make money and ingratiate himself to multiple groups, Trevor became a food delivery service of sorts at school, racing to the food line and ordering and delivering food to wealthier students for a fee.
The lack of opportunity for black and mixed race youth in South Africa contributed to Trevor’s own post high school engagement in petty crime, hustling to pirate CDs and grifting payday loans in the ghettos of Soweto. Though he lived a subsistence existence in an oppressive apartheid country, Noah’s writing does seethe with hostility nor attempt to elicit pity. It is paradoxically warm, funny and accessible. Noah balances the gritty details of life in the slums of Soweto with the abundant love, care and resourceful determination of his mother deployed to provide pleasures for him that were free for the taking–saving for a car to allow them to take drives into the countryside (when petrol was obtainable) to visit parks and libraries, scouring castaway piles for free books, reading daily from the Bible, attending multiple churches and soaking up the language and music of several faith traditions, and enjoying the privilege of an education.In Born a Crime, Noah expresses gratitude for his family, his friends and above all, his mother’s love and devotion to him.
Noah’s memoir delivers more than just his childhood origin story. He provides the reader with an inside look at the impact of apartheid on generations of South Africans. He peels back the curtain of horror and shows how institutional oppression, racism and segregation resulted in lasting poverty and robbed generations of black and mixed race South African citizens of opportunity. It stressed families to breaking points, deployed and fostered violence, and deprived generations of education, forever altering their economic stability and futures. By including significant background about the history, laws and cultural norms of South Africa, and with his gift for wit and humor, Noah allows the reader to enter this momentous period of history in a personal, accessible, and forgiving manner. In so doing, he educates us all.
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