Remember: English is the lingua franca, the bridge language, or common language used in government and the media in South Africa
* lingua franca-language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.
Part 1, Tuesday:
In class: reading chapter 4
multiple choice questions
Directions: after reading chapter 4 , copy and paste the questions onto a google doc, highlight the correct response and share: dorothy.parker@rcsdk12.org
Part 2, Wednesday:
chapter 5: review the vocabulary (note pronunciations), read the chapter. Note the four takeaways that I listed at the start of the chapter.
Thursday: Select one of the four takeways listed at the start of the chapter and write a personal connection as to how Trevor's mom's life reflects the idea (keep this short and then how it is expressed within your own life philosophy. About a couple hundred words will suffice.
Add this to the multiple choice document.
Due at the close of class on Thursday, unless you receive extended time.
VOCABULARY:
anomaly- (noun)-something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.
bewildered (adjective)- confused
Chapter 4: Forward
When I was growing up we used to get American TV shows rebroadcast on our stations: Doogie Howser, M.D.; Murder, She Wrote; Rescue 911 with William Shatner. Most of them were dubbed into African languages. ALF was in Afrikaans. Transformers was in Sotho. But if you wanted to watch them in English, the original American audio would be simulcast on the radio. You could mute your TV and listen to that. Watching those shows, I realized that whenever black people were on-screen speaking in African languages, they felt familiar to me. They sounded like they were supposed to sound. Then I’d listen to them in simulcast on the radio, and they would all have black American accents. My perception of them changed. They didn’t feel familiar. They felt like foreigners.
Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.”The architects of apartheid understood this. Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different.
The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.”
“But he’s a scientist.”
“In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.”
However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he…is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.”
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Chameleon
One afternoon I was playing with my cousins. I was a doctor and they were my
patients. I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I
accidentally perforated her eardrum. All hell broke loose. My grandmother came
running in from the kitchen. “Kwenzeka ntoni?!” “What’s happening?!” There was
blood coming out of my cousin’s head. We were all crying. My grandmother
patched up Bulelwa’s ear and made sure to stop the bleeding. But we kept crying.
Because clearly we’d done something we were not supposed to do, and we knew
we were going to be punished. My grandmother finished up with Bulelwa’s ear
and whipped out a belt and she beat the shit out of Bulelwa. Then she beat the shit
out of Mlungisi, too. She didn’t touch me.
Later that night my mother came home from work. She found my cousin with
a bandage over her ear and my gran crying at the kitchen table.
“What’s going on?” my mom said.
“Oh, Nombuyiselo,” she said. “Trevor is so naughty. He’s the naughtiest child
I’ve ever come across in my life.”
“Then you should hit him.”
“I can’t hit him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I
understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit
him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors
before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person. I’m
so afraid. I’m not going to touch him.” And she never did.
My grandmother treated me like I was white. My grandfather did, too, only he
was even more extreme. He called me “Mastah.” In the car, he insisted on driving
me as if he were my chauffeur. “Mastah must always sit in the backseat.” I never
challenged him on it. What was I going to say? “I believe your perception of race is
flawed, Grandfather.” No. I was five. I sat in the back.
There were so many perks to being “white” in a black family, I can’t even
front. I was having a great time. My own family basically did what the American
justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.
Misbehavior that my cousins would have been punished for, I was given a warning
and let off. And I was way naughtier than either of my cousins. It wasn’t even
close. If something got broken or if someone was stealing granny’s cookies, it was
me. I was trouble.
My mom was the only force I truly feared. She believed if you spare the rod,
you spoil the child. But everyone else said, “No, he’s different,” and they gave me a
pass. Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get
comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. I knew my cousins were
getting beaten for things that I’d done, but I wasn’t interested in changing my
grandmother’s perspective, because that would mean I’d get beaten, too. Why
would I do that? So that I’d feel better? Being beaten didn’t make me feel better. I
had a choice. I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy
granny’s cookies. I went with the cookies.
At that point I didn’t think of the special treatment as having to do with color. I
thought of it as having to do with Trevor. It wasn’t, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten
because Trevor is white.” It was, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is
Trevor.” Trevor can’t go outside. Trevor can’t walk without supervision. It’s
because I’m me; that’s why this is happening. I had no other points of reference.
There were no other mixed kids around so that I could say, “Oh, this happens to
us.”
Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of
them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just
because of the color of my skin. 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.”
Whenever the kids in the street saw me they’d yell, “Indoda yomlungu!” “The
white man!” Some of them would run away. Others would call out to their parents
to come look. Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. It was
pandemonium. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids
genuinely had no clue what a white person was. Black kids in the township didn’t
leave the township. Few people had televisions. They’d seen the white police roll
through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever.
I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me
and they’d stop crying. They’d start whispering. Then they’d wave and say, “Oh!”
like they were more shocked by me walking in than by the death of their loved
ones. I think people felt like the dead person was more important because a white
person had come to the funeral.
After a funeral, the mourners all go to the house of the surviving family to eat.
A hundred people might show up, and you’ve got to feed them. Usually you get a
cow and slaughter it and your neighbors come over and help you cook. Neighbors
and acquaintances eat outside in the yard and in the street, and the family eats
indoors. Every funeral I ever went to, I ate indoors. It didn’t matter if we knew the
deceased or not. The family would see me and invite me in. “Awunakuvumela
umntana womlungu ame ngaphandle. Yiza naye apha ngaphakathi,” they’d say.
“You can’t let the white child stand outside. Bring him in here.”
As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white
and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate,
mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just
chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn’t know
what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So
when the other kids in Soweto called me “white,” even though I was light brown, I
just thought they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn’t learned them
properly. “Ah, yes, my friend. You’ve confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how
you made that mistake. You’re not the first.”
I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through
language. Soweto was a melting pot: families from different tribes and homelands.
Most kids in the township spoke only their home language, but I learned several
languages because I grew up in a house where there was no option but to learn
them. My mom made sure English was the first language I spoke. 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. English comprehension is equated with intelligence. If
you’re looking for a job, English is the difference between getting the job or
staying unemployed. If you’re standing in the dock, English is the difference
between getting off with a fine or going to prison.
After English, Xhosa was what we spoke around the house. When my mother
was angry she’d fall back on her home language. As a naughty child, I was well
versed in Xhosa threats. They were the first phrases I picked up, mostly for my
own safety—phrases like “Ndiza kubetha entloko.” “I’ll knock you upside the
head.” Or “Sidenge ndini somntwana.” “You idiot of a child.” It’s a very passionate
language. Outside of that, my mother picked up different languages here and
there. She learned Zulu because it’s similar to Xhosa. She spoke German because
of my father. She spoke Afrikaans because it is useful to know the language of your
oppressor. Sotho she learned in the streets.
Living with my mom, I saw how she used language to cross boundaries,
handle situations, navigate the world. We were in a shop once, and the
shopkeeper, right in front of us, turned to his security guard and said, in
Afrikaans, “Volg daai swartes, netnou steel hulle iets.” “Follow those blacks in
case they steal something.”
My mother turned around and said, in beautiful, fluent Afrikaans, “Hoekom
volg jy nie daai swartes sodat jy hulle kan help kry waarna hulle soek nie?” “Why
don’t you follow these blacks so you can help them find what they’re looking for?”
“Ag, jammer!” he said, apologizing in Afrikaans. Then—and this was the
funny thing—he didn’t apologize for being racist; he merely apologized for aiming
his racism at us. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought you were like the other
blacks. You know how they love to steal.”
I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast—give you the
program in your own tongue. I’d get suspicious looks from people just walking
down the street. “Where are you from?” they’d ask. I’d reply in whatever language
they’d addressed me in, using the same accent that they used. There would be a
brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious look would disappear. “Oh,
okay. I thought you were a stranger. We’re good then.”
It became a tool that served me my whole life. One day as a young man I was
walking down the street, and a group of Zulu guys was walking behind me, closing
in on me, and I could hear them talking to one another about how they were going
to mug me. “Asibambe le autie yomlungu. Phuma ngapha mina ngizoqhamuka
ngemuva kwakhe.” “Let’s get this white guy. You go to his left, and I’ll come up
behind him.” I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t run, so I just spun around real
quick and said, “Kodwa bafwethu yingani singavele sibambe umuntu inkunzi?
Asenzeni. Mina ngikulindele.” “Yo, guys, why don’t we just mug someone
together? I’m ready. Let’s do it.”
They looked shocked for a moment, and then they started laughing. “Oh,
sorry, dude. We thought you were something else. We weren’t trying to take
anything from you. We were trying to steal from white people. Have a good day,
man.” They were ready to do me violent harm, until they felt we were part of the
same tribe, and then we were cool. That, and so many other smaller incidents in
my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are
to people.
I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your
perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you
spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you,
but if I spoke like you, I was you.
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Chapter Four Multiple Choice Questions. Again: copy onto a google doc, highlight the correct response; do not share yet. You will be adding to this document after chapter 5.
Chapter 4 Questions
1. In what language are students in South Africa taught?
A. the lingua franca
B. their tribal language
C. English
D. Afrikans
2. After Tevor accidently punctured his cousin's eardrum, why was he not punished?
A. He actually was, once his mother came home.
B. His grandmother thought his body was too colorful when hit.
C. His cousins never said Trevor was to blame.
D. Trevor was too young to punish.
3. What does Trevor mean when he says that he was given the same "treatment as the American justice system"?
A. He was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.
B. When he was pulled over for driving he had to show his license and registration.
C. When he disrupted the classroom, he had to stay inside from recess with the other who were loud.
D. When his grandmother baked cookies, they were shared equally among the cousins.
4. In what way was Trevor NOT treated within the Soweto ghetto?
A. His skin color was so unique people would use him as a landmark.
B. Children would throw rocks at him, as they thought he was a devil.
C. He would have to eat inside at funerals, because people thought he was white
D. People would come up to touch him to see if he were real.
5. According to Trevor Noah, which of the following is NOT true about knowing the English language?
A. Knowing English was the difference between getting off with a fine or going to prison.
B. Knowing English was the difference between getting a job or staying unemployed.
C. Knowing English meant you were intelligent.
D. Knowing English, meant you didn't have to learn your home language to go to school.
6. In what way was Trevor like a chameleon?
A. He could escape by climbing fences quickly.
B. His family was afraid he would change color.
C. His language skills allowed him to adapt to different circumstances.
D. He could eat food was served to him.
7. What does Trevor mean when he says that when he was eleven years old, Trevor says he was seeing his country for the first time?
A. That everyone, all four of the racial categories, could actually get along.
B. People could occupy the same space and not have anything to do with each other.
C. That with an education, the racial differences would disappear
D. That the only place safe was back in the Soweto ghetto.
CHAPTER 5
The tangerine volkswagon We were black people who could wake up and say, “Where do we choose to go today?”
Takeaways thoughts from chapter 5:
1.As modestly as we lived at home, I never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience. We were always out doing something, going somewhere.
2. She refused to be bound by ridiculous ideas of what black people couldn’t or shouldn’t do.
3. We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.
4. “Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.
vocabulary:
gallivanting- (noun) to gallivant- to go from one place to another
charismatic- (adjective)-exercising a compelling charm, which inspires devotion in others. (sine qua non -latin meaning something essential) A charismatic person has that sine qua non.
ostensibly (adverb-word that describes a verb)- supposedly
depleted (adjective) drained or exhausted; to deplete -to exhaust
menial-(adjective) -not requiring much skill and lacking prestige.
deprivations (noun)-the damaging lack of material benefits considered to be basic necessities in a society.
shebeens- (noun)--unlicensed places that sell alchohol (speakeasy)
pristine (adjective)-unspoiled
furtively- (adverb)-in a way that attempts to avoid notice or attention; secretively. furtive (adjective)The fertive fox snuck into the chicken coop.
to embark on-(verb)- to begin a new course of action
frugality (noun)- the quality of being economical with money or food; thriftiness.
to obliterate-(verb)-to destroy utterly or wipe out
FOREWARD:
Before apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign enthusiasts eager to Christianize and Westernize the natives. In the mission schools, black people learned English, European literature, medicine, the law. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement, from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko, was educated by the missionaries—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom.
The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built what became known as Bantu schools. Bantu schools taught no science, no history, no civics. They taught metrics and agriculture: how to count potatoes, how to pave roads, chop wood, till the soil. “It does not serve the Bantu to learn history and science because he is primitive,” the government said. “This will only mislead him, showing him pastures in which he is not allowed to graze.” To their credit, they were simply being honest. Why educate a slave? Why teach someone Latin when his only purpose is to dig holes in the ground?
Mission schools were told to conform to the new curriculum or shut down. Most of them shut down, and black children were forced into crowded classrooms in dilapidated schools, often with teachers who were barely literate themselves. Our parents and grandparents were taught with little singsong lessons, the way you’d teach a preschooler shapes and colors. My grandfather used to sing the songs and laugh about how silly they were. Two times two is four. Three times two is six. La la la la la. We’re talking about fully grown teenagers being taught this way, for generations.
What happened with education in South Africa, with the mission schools and the Bantu schools, offers a neat comparison of the two groups of whites who oppressed us, the British and the Afrikaners. The difference between British racism and Afrikaner racism was that at least the British gave the natives something to aspire to. If they could learn to speak correct English and dress in proper clothes, if they could Anglicize and civilize themselves, one day they might be welcome in society. The Afrikaners never gave us that option. British racism said, “If the monkey can walk like a man and talk like a man, then perhaps he is a man.” Afrikaner racism said, “Why give a book to a monkey?”
__________—
THE SECOND GIRL
My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to
love and something that would love me unconditionally in return.” I was a product
of her search for belonging. She never felt like she belonged anywhere. She didn’t
belong to her mother, didn’t belong to her father, didn’t belong with her siblings.
She grew up with nothing and wanted something to call her own.
My grandparents’ marriage was an unhappy one. They met and married in
Sophiatown, but one year later the army came in and drove them out. The
government seized their home and bulldozed the whole area to build a fancy, new
white suburb, Triomf. Triumph. Along with tens of thousands of other black
people, my grandparents were forcibly relocated to Soweto, to a neighborhood
called the Meadowlands. They divorced not long after that, and my grandmother
moved to Orlando with my mom, my aunt, and my uncle.
My mom was the problem child, a tomboy, stubborn, defiant. My gran had no
idea how to raise her. Whatever love they had was lost in the constant fighting that
went on between them. But my mom adored her father, the charming, charismatic
Temperance. She went gallivanting with him on his manic misadventures. She’d
tag along when he’d go drinking in the shebeens. All she wanted in life was to
please him and be with him. She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends,
who didn’t like having a reminder of his first marriage hanging around, but that
only made her want to be with him all the more.
When my mother was nine years old, she told my gran that she didn’t want to
live with her anymore. She wanted to live with her father. “If that’s what you
want,” Gran said, “then go.” Temperance came to pick my mom up, and she
happily bounded up into his car, ready to go and be with the man she loved. But
instead of taking her to live with him in the Meadowlands, without even telling her
why, he packed her off and sent her to live with his sister in the Xhosa homeland,
Transkei—he didn’t want her, either. My mom was the middle child. Her sister
was the eldest and firstborn. Her brother was the only son, bearer of the family
name. They both stayed in Soweto, were both raised and cared for by their
parents. But my mom was unwanted. She was the second girl. The only place she
would have less value would be China.
My mother didn’t see her family again for twelve years. She lived in a hut with
fourteen cousins—fourteen children from fourteen different mothers and fathers.
All the husbands and uncles had gone off to the cities to find work, and the
children who weren’t wanted, or whom no one could afford to feed, had been sent
back to the homeland to live on this aunt’s farm.
The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes,
sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be “free.” Of
course, this was a lie. For starters, despite the fact that black people made up over
80 percent of South Africa’s population, the territory allocated for the homelands
was about 13 percent of the country’s land. There was no running water, no
electricity. People lived in huts.
Where South Africa’s white countryside was lush and irrigated and green, the
black lands were overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding.
Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with
little beyond subsistence-level farming. My mother’s aunt hadn’t taken her in out
of charity. She was there to work. “I was one of the cows,” my mother would later
say, “one of the oxen.” She and her cousins were up at half past four, plowing
fields and herding animals before the sun baked the soil as hard as cement and
made it too hot to be anywhere but in the shade.
For dinner there might be one chicken to feed fourteen children. My mom
would have to fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the
gravy or even a bone from which to suck out some marrow. And that’s when there
was food for dinner at all. When there wasn’t, she’d steal food from the pigs. She’d
steal food from the dogs. The farmers would put out scraps for the animals, and
she’d jump for it. She was hungry; let the animals fend for themselves. There were
times when she literally ate dirt. She would go down to the river, take the clay
from the riverbank, and mix it with the water to make a grayish kind of milk. She’d
drink that to feel full.
But my mother was blessed that her village was one of the places where a
mission school had contrived to stay open in spite of the government’s Bantu
education policies. There she had a white pastor who taught her English. She
didn’t have food or shoes or even a pair of underwear, but she had English. She
could read and write. When she was old enough she stopped working on the farm
and got a job at a factory in a nearby town. She worked on a sewing machine
making school uniforms. Her pay at the end of each day was a plate of food. She
used to say it was the best food she’d ever eaten, because it was something she had
earned on her own. She wasn’t a burden to anyone and didn’t owe anything to
anyone.
When my mom turned twenty-one, her aunt fell ill and that family could no
longer keep her in Transkei. My mom wrote to my gran, asking her to send the
price of a train ticket, about thirty rand, to bring her home. Back in Soweto, my
mom enrolled in the secretarial course that allowed her to grab hold of the bottom
rung of the white-collar world. She worked and worked and worked but, living
under my grandmother’s roof, she wasn’t allowed to keep her own wages. As a
secretary, my mom was bringing home more money than anyone else, and my
grandmother insisted it all go to the family. The family needed a radio, an oven, a
refrigerator, and it was now my mom’s job to provide it.
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. Working for the family in Soweto, my mom
had no more freedom than she’d had in Transkei, so she ran away. She ran all the
way down to the train station and jumped on a train and disappeared into the city,
determined to sleep in public restrooms and rely on the kindness of prostitutes
until she could make her own way in the world.
My mother never sat me down and told me the whole story of her life in Transkei.
She’d give me little bursts, random details, stories of having to keep her wits about
her to avoid getting raped by strange men in the village. She’d tell me these things
and I’d be like, Lady, clearly you do not know what kind of stories to be telling a
ten-year-old.
My mom told me these things so that I’d never take for granted how we got to
where we were, but none of it ever came from a place of self-pity. “Learn from
your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about
your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it.
Don’t be bitter.” And she never was. The deprivations of her youth, the betrayals of
her parents, she never complained about any of it.
Just as she let the past go, she was determined not to repeat it: my childhood
would bear no resemblance to hers. She started with my name. The names Xhosa
families give their children always have a meaning, and that meaning has a way of
becoming self-fulfilling. You have my cousin, Mlungisi. “The Fixer.” That’s who he
is. Whenever I got into trouble he was the one trying to help me fix it. He was
always the good kid, doing chores, helping around the house. You have my uncle,
the unplanned pregnancy, Velile. “He Who Popped Out of Nowhere.” And that’s
all he’s done his whole life, disappear and reappear. He’ll go off on a drinking
binge and then pop back up out of nowhere a week later.
Then you have my mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. “She Who Gives
Back.” That’s what she does. She gives and gives and gives. She did it even as a girl
in Soweto. Playing in the streets she would find toddlers, three- and four-yearolds,
running around unsupervised all day long. Their fathers were gone and their
mothers were drunks. My mom, who was only six or seven herself, used to round
up the abandoned kids and form a troop and take them around to the shebeens.
They’d collect empties from the men who were passed out and take the bottles to
where you could turn them in for a deposit. Then my mom would take that money,
buy food in the spaza shops, and feed the kids. She was a child taking care of
children.
When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no
meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a
Biblical name. It’s just a name. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate.
She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.
She gave me the tools to do it as well. She taught me English as my first
language. She read to me constantly. The first book I learned to read was the book.
The Bible. Church was where we got most of our other books, too. My mom would
bring home boxes that white people had donated—picture books, chapter books,
any book she could get her hands on. Then she signed up for a subscription
program where we got books in the mail. It was a series of how-to books. How to
Be a Good Friend. How to Be Honest. She bought a set of encyclopedias, too; it
was fifteen years old and way out of date, but I would sit and pore through those.
My books were my prized possessions. I had a bookshelf where I put them,
and I was so proud of it. I loved my books and kept them in pristine condition. I
read them over and over, but I did not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured
every single one. As I grew older I started buying my own books. I loved fantasy,
loved to get lost in worlds that didn’t exist. I remember there was some book
about white boys who solved mysteries or some shit. I had no time for that. Give
me Roald Dahl. James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. That was my fix.
I had to fight to convince my mom to get the Narnia books for me. She didn’t
like them.
“This lion,” she said, “he is a false God—a false idol! You remember what
happened when Moses came down from the mountain after he got the tablets…”
“Yes, Mom,” I explained, “but the lion is a Christ figure. Technically, he is
Jesus. It’s a story to explain Jesus.”
She wasn’t comfortable with that. “No, no. No false idols, my friend.”
Eventually I wore her down. That was a big win.
If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind. My mother spoke to me
like an adult, which was unusual. In South Africa, kids play with kids and adults
talk to adults. The adults supervise you, but they don’t get down on your level and
talk to you. My mom did. All the time. I was like her best friend. She was always
telling me stories, giving me lessons, Bible lessons especially. She was big into
Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the
passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” That
was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to
think.
—
The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. It wasn’t like the Berlin Wall where one
day it just came down. Apartheid’s walls cracked and crumbled over many years.
Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply
weren’t enforced. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release,
when we could live less furtively. It was then that my mother decided we needed to
move. She felt we had grown as much as we could hiding in our tiny flat in town.
The country was open now. Where would we go? Soweto came with its
burdens. My mother still wanted to get out from the shadow of her family. My
mother also couldn’t walk with me through Soweto without people saying, “There
goes that prostitute with a white man’s child.” In a black area she would always be
seen as that. So, since my mom didn’t want to move to a black area and couldn’t
afford to move to a white area, she decided to move to a colored area.
Eden Park was a colored neighborhood adjacent to several black townships
on the East Rand. Half-colored and half-black, she figured, like us. We’d be
camouflaged there. It didn’t work out that way; we never fit in at all. But that was
her thinking when we made the move. Plus it was a chance to buy a home—our
own home. Eden Park was one of those “suburbs” that are actually out on the edge
of civilization, the kind of place where property developers have said, “Hey, poor
people. You can live the good life, too. Here’s a house. In the middle of nowhere.
But look, you have a yard!” For some reason the streets in Eden Park were named
after cars: Jaguar Street. Ferrari Street. Honda Street. I don’t know if that was a
coincidence or not, but it’s funny because colored people in South Africa are
known for loving fancy cars. It was like living in a white neighborhood with all the
streets named after varietals of fine wine.
I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d
never seen, seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same
dusty red-clay dirt and grass as Soweto but with proper houses and paved roads
and a sense of suburbia to it. Ours was a tiny house at the bend in the road right
off Toyota Street. It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought,
Wow. We are really living. It was crazy to have my own room. I didn’t like it. My
whole life I’d slept in a room with my mom or on the floor with my cousins. I was
used to having other human beings right next to me, so I slept in my mom’s bed
most nights.
There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the
night. It was me and her, alone. There was this sense of the two of us embarking
on a grand adventure. She’d say things to me like, “It’s you and me against the
world.” I understood even from an early age that we weren’t just mother and son.
We were a team.
It was when we moved to Eden Park that we finally got a car, the beat-up,
tangerine Volkswagen my mother bought secondhand for next to nothing. One out
of five times it wouldn’t start. There was no AC. Anytime I made the mistake of
turning on the fan the vent would fart bits of leaves and dust all over me.
Whenever it broke down we’d catch minibuses, or sometimes we’d hitchhike.
She’d make me hide in the bushes because she knew men would stop for a woman
but not a woman with a child. She’d stand by the road, the driver would pull over,
she’d open the door and then whistle, and I’d come running up to the car. I would
watch their faces drop as they realized they weren’t picking up an attractive single
woman but an attractive single woman with a fat little kid.
When the car did work, we had the windows down, sputtering along and
baking in the heat. For my entire life the dial on that car’s radio stayed on one
station. It was called Radio Pulpit, and as the name suggests it was nothing but
preaching and praise. I wasn’t allowed to touch that dial. Anytime the radio wasn’t
getting reception, my mom would pop in a cassette of Jimmy Swaggart sermons.
(When we finally found out about the scandal? Oh, man. That was rough.)
But as shitty as our car was, it was a car. It was freedom. We weren’t black
people stuck in the townships, waiting for public transport. We were black people
who were out in the world. We were black people who could wake up and say,
“Where do we choose to go today?” On the commute to work and school, there was
a long stretch of the road into town that was completely deserted. That’s where
Mom would let me drive. On the highway. I was six. She’d put me on her lap and
let me steer and work the indicators while she worked the pedals and the stick
shift. After a few months of that, she taught me how to work the stick. She was still
working the clutch, but I’d climb onto her lap and take the stick, and she’d call out
the gears as we drove. There was this one part of the road that ran deep into a
valley and then back up the other side. We’d get up a head of speed, and we’d stick
it into neutral and let go of the brake and the clutch, and, woo-hoo!, we’d race
down the hill and then, zoom!, we’d shoot up the other side. We were flying.
If we weren’t at school or work or church, we were out exploring. My mom’s
attitude was “I chose you, kid. I brought you into this world, and I’m going to give
you everything I never had.” She poured herself into me. She would find places for
us to go where we didn’t have to spend money. We must have gone to every park
in Johannesburg. My mom would sit under a tree and read the Bible, and I’d run
and play and play and play. On Sunday afternoons after church, we’d go for drives
out in the country. My mom would find places with beautiful views for us to sit
and have a picnic. There was none of the fanfare of a picnic basket or plates or
anything like that, only baloney and brown bread and margarine sandwiches
wrapped up in butcher paper. To this day, baloney and brown bread and
margarine will instantly take me back. You can come with all the Michelin stars in
the world, just give me baloney and brown bread and margarine and I’m in
heaven.
Food, or the access to food, was always the measure of how good or bad
things were going in our lives. My mom would always say, “My job is to feed your
body, feed your spirit, and feed your mind.” That’s exactly what she did, and the
way she found money for food and books was to spend absolutely nothing on
anything else. Her frugality was the stuff of legend. Our car was a tin can on
wheels, and we lived in the middle of nowhere. We had threadbare furniture,
busted old sofas with holes worn through the fabric. Our TV was a tiny black-andwhite
with a bunny aerial on top. We changed the channels using a pair of pliers
because the buttons didn’t work. Most of the time you had to squint to see what
was going on.
We always wore secondhand clothes, from Goodwill stores or that were
giveaways from white people at church. All the other kids at school got brands,
Nike and Adidas. I never got brands. One time I asked my mom for Adidas
sneakers. She came home with some knockoff brand, Abidas.
“Mom, these are fake,” I said.
“I don’t see the difference.”
“Look at the logo. There are four stripes instead of three.”
“Lucky you,” she said. “You got one extra.”
We got by with next to nothing, but we always had church and we always had
books and we always had food. Mind you, it wasn’t necessarily good food. Meat
was a luxury. When things were going well we’d have chicken. My mom was an
expert at cracking open a chicken bone and getting out every last bit of marrow
inside. We didn’t eat chickens. We obliterated them. Our family was an
archaeologist’s nightmare. We left no bones behind. When we were done with a
chicken there was nothing left but the head. Sometimes the only meat we had was
a packaged meat you could buy at the butcher called “sawdust.” It was literally the
dust of the meat, the bits that fell off the cuts being packaged for the shop, the bits
of fat and whatever’s left. They’d sweep it up and put it into bags. It was meant for
dogs, but my mom bought it for us. There were many months where that was all
we ate.
The butcher sold bones, too. We called them “soup bones,” but they were
actually labeled “dog bones” in the store; people would cook them for their dogs as
a treat. Whenever times were really tough we’d fall back on dog bones. My mom
would boil them for soup. We’d suck the marrow out of them. Sucking marrow out
of bones is a skill poor people learn early. I’ll never forget the first time I went to a
fancy restaurant as a grown man and someone told me, “You have to try the bone
marrow. It’s such a delicacy. It’s divine.” They ordered it, the waiter brought it out,
and I was like, “Dog bones, motherfucker!” I was not impressed.
As modestly as we lived at home, I never felt poor because our lives were so
rich with experience. We were always out doing something, going somewhere. My
mom used to take me on drives through fancy white neighborhoods. We’d go look
at people’s houses, look at their mansions. We’d look at their walls, mostly,
because that’s all we could see from the road. We’d look at a wall that ran from
one end of the block to the other and go, “Wow. That’s only one house. All of that
is for one family.” Sometimes we’d pull over and go up to the wall, and she’d put
me up on her shoulders like I was a little periscope. I would look into the yards
and describe everything I was seeing. “It’s a big white house! They have two dogs!
There’s a lemon tree! They have a swimming pool! And a tennis court!”
My mother took me places black people never went. She refused to be bound
by ridiculous ideas of what black people couldn’t or shouldn’t do. She’d take me to
the ice rink to go skating. Johannesburg used to have this epic drive-in movie
theater, Top Star Drive-In, on top of a massive mine dump outside the city. She’d
take me to movies there; we’d get snacks, hang the speaker on our car window.
Top Star had a 360-degree view of the city, the suburbs, Soweto. Up there I could
see for miles in every direction. I felt like I was on top of the world.
My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what
I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white
culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should
speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.
We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can
imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite
limited. Growing up in Soweto, our dream was to put another room on our house.
Maybe have a driveway. Maybe, someday, a cast-iron gate at the end of the
driveway. Because that is all we knew. But the highest rung of what’s possible is
far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The
thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one
chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.
Perhaps even more amazing is the fact that my mother started her little
project, me, at a time when she could not have known that apartheid would end.
There was no reason to think it would end; it had seen generations come and go. I
was nearly six when Mandela was released, ten before democracy finally came, yet
she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would
exist. A hard life in the township or a trip to the colored orphanage were the far
more likely options on the table. But we never lived that way. We only moved
forward and we always moved fast, and by the time the law and everyone else
came around we were already miles down the road, flying across the freeway in a
bright-orange, piece-of-shit Volkswagen with the windows down and Jimmy
Swaggart praising Jesus at the top of his lungs.
People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these
things were izinto zabelungu—the things of white people. So many black people
had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black
child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom. “Why do all
this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?”
“Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know
that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”
