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Overview: The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa. 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.… (more)
User reviews
I remember apartheid being an issue in the media when I was in high school in the '80s, but I admit I didn't know about the incredible inhumanity of it. As practiced, it sounded like it was possibly more dehumanizing than slavery, and I honestly didn't think such a thing could exist. Mark was subject to "Bantu education," which was the non-compulsory system to prepare black children for their lives of subservience. Faced with few opportunities, he worked as hard as he could at school and also fell into playing tennis, which opened doors to him that he might never have known existed. A meeting with Stan Smith, an American Wimbledon champion and seemingly all-around great guy, led to Mathabane eventually getting a scholarship to go to college in the US, which is where the book ends. He later wrote another memoir, Kaffir Boy in America, which picks up where this one left off. I am curious about it because before leaving South Africa, Mathabane clearly views America as a sort of interracial utopia - which is definitely was not in 1979 (and still isn't today).
I listened to the audio version of the book, which was narrated by Mathabane himself. His speaking voice is beautiful and melodic, and I doubt that anyone else could have done justice to the words in various tribal languages, protest anthems, childhood songs, and snippets in Afrikaans. Some of the events were very difficult to listen to, and I had to take a couple of breaks from it just to regain my equilibrium. But nonetheless, I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about what daily life was like under apartheid.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER