Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.0/5.0 - This books started out as a 5.0 for the first half, the middle really dragged, the ending was good, so a 4 star all in all. This was a book that I had to stop and take notes on throughout. I am ashamed to say I knew nothing about apartheid before reading this, and just have the most basic understanding now. One way to describe it is institutionalized racism within a police state, where blacks are forced to live in ghettos, and language is used as a barrier. By that I mean, each tribe (Zula, Xhosa, and many others) are forced to speak only their dialect, in essence creating a Tower of Babel situation. In South Africa during Trevor's childhood, there were 3 or 4 races. There were blacks, whites, colored and mixed. I'm not sure of the distinction between the last two, though. Colored was when a black man or woman had a child with white man or woman. That was Trevor's case, his father was German/Swiss, his mother South African. But he calls himself colored as opposed to mixed.
Trevor's mother was a strong, religious woman who raised him "as a white kid" (p.73), which is to say to believe in and speak up for himself, and to know that his ideas, thoughts and decisions mattered. She drummed into him from the time he was a small boy how to treat women with respect.
A couple of notes of things that stayed with me. Page 110 - "Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give another human being." (Trevor speaking of meeting back up with his father when he is a young man).
There were a couple of places in this book that reminded me of other books I have recently read. For example, in the chapter "The Mulberry Tree," he talks about how races can be promoted or demoted - an Indian might be considered colored, a colored person could be "promoted" to white, depending on the whim of the government official. I kept thinking about the chapter in Hawaii where the Japanese unit is training in the United States during World War II, and in some ways they are treated as negroes, and in other ways as whites. Parable of the Sower also came to mind, when he described neighborhoods in Johannesburg where "virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, with electric wire on top (p. 151)."
I found his statement that Germany teaches about the holocaust and England teaches about colonialism apologetically, but South Africa teaches about apartheid the same way America teaches about racism - it happened, get over it.
This is a book that made we think and weep and I hope taught me something. One thing that I did not understand at all, though, is its classification as humor, and the fact that it won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. I didn't find anything humorous about this book.
AtY #24: A book about racism or race relations
Pop Sugar #20: A book found on a Black Lives Matter reading list
Book 45 of 2021


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