
Trevor Noah is an African-American comedian who just wrote a book chronicling, mainly, his childhood in South Africa as an interracial child. Interestingly, I read Borna Crime this was around the same time I read Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Babara Wood’s Green City in the Sun, both of which also border around the issue of race.
Trevor Noah is an African-American comedian who just wrote a book chronicling, mainly, his childhood in South Africa as an interracial child. Interestingly, I read Borna Crime this was around the same time I read Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Babara Wood’s Green City in the Sun, both of which also border around the issue of race.
Born a Crime, captured my mind, firstly because it’s a totally relatable narrative of an African childhood. Minus the interracial descent, but talk of parent’s (mothers especially) drive towards religion and their resolve to drag any child along with them in their religious path, talk about friendship and relationships in the community and in school, Trevor brilliantly captured the experiences, feelings and behaviours characteristics to the African growing up.
“Trevor, don’t eat the food.”
“But I’m starving.”
“No. They might poison us.”
“Okay, then why don’t I just pray to Jesus and Jesus will take the poison out of the food?”
“Trevor! Sun’qhela!”
Personally, like Americanah, Born a Crime was enlightening in terms of the nature and history of racism and apathied in South Africa. Right at the beginning on the book, Trevor wrote, for example,
At the time, black South Africans outnumbered white South Africans nearly five to one, yet we were divided into different tribes with different languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho, Venda, Ndebele, Tsonga, Pedi, and more. Long before apartheid existed these tribal factions clashed and warred with one another. Then white rule used that animosity to divide and conquer. All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds.
All through the book, such factual passages educates the reader.
Also, credit to Trevor being a commedian, Born a Crime was fun to read and I found myself either chuckling or grinning over the earpiece from time to time; people who see me acting this way on the road may think I’m going insane.
Then there’s this part where he talked about having to push his mother’s car in traffic because it’s short of petrol,
There were times when we would be in traffic and we had so little money for petrol that I would have to push the car. If we were stuck in gridlock, my mom would turn the car off and it was my job to get out and push it forward six inches at a time. People would pitch up and offer to help.
“Are you stuck?”
“Nope. We’re fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
“Can we help you?”
“Nope.”
“Do you need a tow?”
And what do you say? The truth? “Thanks, but we’re just so poor my mom makes her kid push the car”?
That was some of the most embarrassing shit in my life, pushing the car to school like the fucking Flintstones. Because the other kids were coming in on that same road to go to school. I’d take my blazer off so that no one could tell what school I went to, and I would bury my head and push the car, hoping no one would recognize me.
Trevor can be appealing philosophical too. Somewhere, he said:
There’s also this part where he wrote about how his childhood dog thought him something about life. I recently wrote about that on Topistic.
One of my favorite parts of the book is somewhere at the beginning where quite indifferently Trevor remarked an important truth about the religion of the Africans:
I could go on and on quoting passages from Born a Crime it then I’ll quote almost every line of the book because, in its entirety, the book is an interesting and captivating read.
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