This month’s review is by Renee Kahl
Born a Crime
By Trevor Noah
Race is an artificial construct. This idea is not new, but Trevor Noah’s South African childhood during and immediately post-apartheid (he was 10 when it officially ended) is the ultimate illustration of it. Born to a black Zulu mother and white Swiss-German father, Trevor was uniquely positioned to negotiate the society’s tangled web of race and language divisions, and he delivers powerful insights on race, poverty and the destructiveness of bad education in the voice of a riotously funny comedian.
Racism is racism, but in South Africa it was organized in a different, more complex way than in the US, and the background on this itself makes the book worth a read. When the British empire ended after World War II, the white Dutch Afrikaaners actually made a study of world racist societies to more efficiently implement white supremacy despite a black majority. Every citizen was assigned to a racial category of either White, Colored, Asian, Indian and Black. With White at the top and Black at the bottom, the classes enjoyed varying degrees of privileges to ensure they saw one another, not the government, as enemies. Blacks were uprooted and relocated to resource-impoverished “homelands”; those with permits to work in specified menial jobs for whites in the cities lived in black “townships.” Eleven distinct official languages added to the tensions among groups, and language divisions were reinforced by the schools. The prohibition against racial mixing was strictly enforced by a police state.
Raised by his mom in poverty among black family, Trevor identifies as black despite physically resembling the more-privileged “coloreds”, who resent him for rejecting that identity. In his early years, he is always either hidden or performing the ruse that his mom is his nanny to conceal the “crime” of his existence. Still, his intrepid, religious mom takes him on frequent adventures, teaches him the “upper-class” languages English and Afrikaans (on top of the numerous tribal languages he learns automatically) and generally imparts an attitude that “the world was my oyster.” He is dragged to “white church”, “black church” and “mixed church”, learning to be comfortable in all groups. The family moves constantly, from black to colored to white areas; he experiences being “the only black kid in a white area, the only white kid in a black area, and the only mixed kid in a colored area.” Most of his schools have every racial group, and he gets along with all while struggling to fit in with any. He learns to be a “cultural chameleon” and an enterprising capitalist as a successful party DJ with a dance crew, eventually leading to discovery and fame.
The story is organized into theme-centered vignettes and not chronologically, which although it makes the timeline hard to follow, is suited to the mixed-up way Trevor felt growing up. He was everywhere and nowhere, challenging every categorization of race. Funny, smart, and amazingly optimistic and resilient, Trevor brings his humor and almost hyperactive energy to the narration of one astonishing adventure after another, at once hilarious and heartbreaking. If only there were space to narrate even one of them here.
A favorite quote:
“As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share.”
And one from his mom:
“Don’t fight the system, mock the system.”
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