Born a Crime

Back in 1960 when I was on a summer holiday with my parents in the Cape Province of South Africa, I spotted a groovy, nattily-dressed young guy getting on a bus and my teen heart was all a flutter.
 
Only problem was as soon as I saw him take seat in the “Coloureds Only” section, I was shocked - not because he was “coloured” (he just looked tanned to me) - but because being a “white” girl I wasn’t allowed to be attracted to such a boy. Heaven forbid I should mention it out loud to anyone because you didn’t know who was listening and if I openly expressed an attraction to someone of mixed race, in my naivety I actually thought I might get sent to jail. Hard to believe these days, but that was how one was conditioned to think when visiting South Africa. Also, some years later in the early 1970s when I took a ship from Durban to Australia I made friends with a lovely couple from Nyasaland (now Malawi). He was white, she was black and they had three children. While transiting South Africa from Nyasaland by train, the husband had been forced to travel in "white" carriages and his wife and children were forced into the "black" carriages. In Durban, they had to stay in separate hotels and could have nothing to do with one another until they boarded the ship. 
 
Trevor Noah’s coming-of-age book brought back these memories for me. Although he was born in the 1980s when apartheid was wavering but still held its grip on the country, much of what he encountered growing up hadn’t changed. For a Xhosa woman to have relations with a white Swiss man was officially a crime. How Trevor’s independently-minded and slightly eccentric mother bravely negotiated her life with her son makes for moving and astonishing reading. That Trevor came out of it with the sense of humour and prodigious gift for satire that have now made him a successful and much loved entertainer is an even greater tribute to her.
 
Trevor’s unique situation, being neither Black nor White, and not even quite Coloured under the legal definition of those days, makes for sober but occasionally hilarious reading. His desperate tales of trying to get a girlfriend, or about the casting out of the demon and buying a toffee apple had me laughing out loud, but those about his mother’s troubled second relationship and what eventually happened to her nearly had me in tears.
 
In any memoir such as this, there is always going to be comedic exaggeration or poetic licence and there are quite a few gaping holes in his youthful career path apart from being a DJ and pirating and hustling CD’s, but possibly these will be filled in another future book.
 
Now that some places in the world are looking like reviving these despicable old prejudices and racial divides, we need to be reminded of what it was like to live under such systems and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for that reason.

​Four-and-a half stars.

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