Kaffir Boy: The True Story Of A Black Youths Coming Of Age In Apartheid South Africa
- Book Review,
by Mark Mathabane
Amazon.com
Kaffir Boy does for apartheid-era South Africa what Richard Wright's Black Boy did for the segregated American South. In stark prose, Mathabane describes his life growing up in a nonwhite ghetto outside Johannesburg--and how he escaped its horrors. Hard work and faith in education played key roles, and Mathabane eventually won a tennis scholarship to an American university. This is not, needless to say, an opportunity afforded to many of the poor blacks who make up most of South Africa's population. And yet Mathabane reveals their troubled world on these pages in a way that only someone who has lived this life can.
From Publishers Weekly
In this powerful account of growing up black in South Africa, a young writer makes us feel intensely the horrors of apartheid. Living illegally in a shanty outside Johannesburg, Johannes (renamed Mark) Mathabane and his illiterate family endured the heartbreak and hopelessness of poverty and the violence of sadistic police and marauding gangs. He describes his drunken father's attempts to inculcate his tribal beliefs and to prevent his son from getting an educationthe one means by which he might escape from the ghetto. Encouraged by his determined mother and grandmother, Mathabane taught himself to read English and play tennis, and, through the assistance of U.S. tennis star Stan Smith and his own efforts and intelligence, obtained a tennis scholarship from a South Carolina college in 1978. Now he is a freelance writer in New York. In the course of relating his inspiring story, he explains the anger and hate that his country's blacks feel toward white people and the inevitability of their rebellion against the Afrikaner government. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA Those needing graphic confirmation of the harrowing experience of growing up poor and black in apartheid South Africa will find it in Mathabane's autobiography. His earliest memories were those of violent midnight visits from the dreaded black police, looking for those without the crucial pass book. His parents lived illegally in Alexandra; his father went to jail for a year because he had no job. Daily life was a struggle for food, shelter, and existence. The fact that he was at the top of every class, plus his newly discovered ability in tennis, gained him local recognition. American tennis star Steve Smith was instrumental in pushing for his journey to America, where he attended college and where he is now a writer on his homeland. Mathabane writes with compelling energy, and the details of his struggle will grip readers with immediate intensity. His story, while only one side, is a microcosm of the black African's fight for independence. Diana C. Hirsch, PGCMLS, Md.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Born in the township of Alexandra in 1960, the author of this memoir experienced hunger, crime, and most of the unpleasant features of ghetto lifevividly recalled hereduring his formative years. His mother and grandmother worked hard to enable him to finish school; others, including U.S. tennis star Stan Smith, encouraged him as a tennis player despite the obstacles posed by a segregated society. The narrative ends in 1978, as Mathabane takes up a U.S. tennis scholarship. Particularly for area collections and large sports collections, but of potential interest to a wide range of readers, including YAs. (Illustrations not seen.) Elizabeth A. Widenmann, Columbia Univ. Libs.Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Publishers Weekly Powerful, intense, inspiring.
Book Description
Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university. This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do -- he escaped to tell about it.
About the Author
Mark Mathabane is the author of Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White, and African Women: Three Generations.
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