Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography–The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

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Description

The classic story of life in Apartheid South Africa.

Mark Mathabane was once weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa’s most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and nighttime police raids were his rites of passage. Like each 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 circle of relatives and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

This ordinary 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 once supposed to do — he escaped to tell about it.
Kaffir Boy does for apartheid-era South Africa what Richard Wright’s Black Boy did for the segregated American South. In stark prose, Mathabane describes his life growing up in a nonwhite ghetto out of doors Johannesburg–and how he escaped its horrors. Hard work and faith in education played key roles, and Mathabane eventually won a tennis scholarship to an American university. This isn’t, understand that, an opportunity afforded to among the poor blacks who make up most of South Africa’s population. And yet Mathabane reveals their troubled world on these pages in a way that only anyone who has lived this life can.

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