Skin colour, politics and poverty

One of those books you are glad your bookclub chose so that you read it!

Trevor Noah is of course a well known public figure; this book gave a very comprehensive understanding of the South Africa he grew up in, the complications of colour, politics, and poverty, in an unholy trinity. It is a lively tale which conveys a sense of the unvarnished truth, told with humour, indignation, fluency and persuasiveness. With a slightly braggart flourish for good measure.  

In the course of the book, one learns about so many interesting aspects of apartheid South Africa – about minibuses, for e.g., an unregulated system as the apartheid govt provided no transportation for black people:

Drivers who stole routes would get killed. Being unregulated, minibuses were also very unreliable. When they came, they came. When they didn’t. they didn’t.

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Noah writes with a wonderful immediacy in his speech pattern, a speaking and writing voice with a distinctive syntax and rhythm. We also learn about tribal rivalries and stereotypes:

Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful. Xhosa women were promiscuous and unfaithful.

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Under apartheid, Chinese were apparently classified as black, while Japanese were classified as white. Noah tells us there is a difference between the racism of Afrikaners and the racism of the British. He tells us about Bantu schools which provide poor education to blacks which equip them only to stay impoverished. 

Noah talks of ‘the black tax’, which

Because the generations that came before you had been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero.

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He also explains well about ‘coloureds ‘ – how the descended from whites and Khoisans, the Native Americans of South Africa, and how they are caught in no-man’s land, between whites and blacks. At all points, Noah stresses how apartheid encouraged groups, whether tribes or colours or any other demarcations, to regard each other with enmity and hostility. 

The start of every chapter contains a short prologue, a page or so of some serious reflections. Noah indicts the political system of unjust power and oppression with succinctness as well as with humour:

“Apartheid was perfect racism” ( p19)

“Soweto was designed to be bombed – that’s how forward thinking the architects of apartheid were” (p28)

He also underscores oppression with well chosen words, such as when discussing how race-mixing was criminalised under apartheid: “a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system” – bravo, well put! 

Noah alternates between making sharp observations and comments, with humour, to make his points, playing to amusing cliches sometimes, and telling amusing anecdotes: :

My father, Robert, is white. Swiss/German, to be precise, which Swiss/Germans invariable are (p22)

In Soweto you were always hearing about men getting doused in pots of boiling water – often a woman’s only resource. And men were lucky if it was water. Some women used hot cooking oil. Water was if the woman wanted to teach her man a lesson. Oil meant she wanted to end it. (p37) 

His mother is clearly an unusual woman, of remarkable character and tenacity. She breaks rules, seems fiercely independent and fearless, and chose to have a mixed child as an unmarried woman in a land where this is illegal. The odds were stacked against her – for e.g. as Noah mentioned, his mother who was a terrible cook and not prepared to work in a factory or be the maid of a white woman, instead took a secretarial course, learning to type: “a black person learning to type was like a blind person learning how to drive. It is an admirable effort but you are unlikely to ever be called upon to execute the task” p23. Still, his mother benefitted from fortuitous timing and a change of political climate, and successfully bucked the trend.  

Noah brings up all kinds of interesting angles in this book – he reflects on how he was treated as a white child in his own black family and given leniency and perks and special treatment. In Soweto, he explains, there were a million people of whom 99.9% were black, and so he was a curiosity, regarded as white (even though he was light brown). He thought of his parents and himself as white chocolate, dark chocolate, and milk chocolate, but all chocolate.  

Being an insider outsider all his life, Noah found that being able to speak many languages have him the chameleon power of assuring many other groups he was part of their tribe – which was part of his self-preservation technique in school and on the streets.

Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.

p56

This is an interesting point about language being the passport to belonging, and yet perhaps, the conclusion is just a touch too slick and oversimplified. Particularly so when you apply this reasoning to his rant about being regarded as coloured and hated for it by others – apparently all his language speaking skills could not change how people perceived his identity after all. Persuasive as Noah’s writing is, occasionally he over-reaches, such as when he was making the point that South Africa only teaches bald facts of apartheid to school children, he compared this to how apparently the UK teaches its children that Empire was shameful – which is a claim he may want to recheck. These kinds of somewhat off-target claims then undermines his credibility to some extent. 

English however was the important language, as it was in so many colonies:

My mum made sure English was the first language I spoke. If you are black in South Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up. English is the language of money. English comprehension is equated with intelligence. If you are looking for a job, English is the difference between getting the job or staying unemployed. If you are standing in the dock, English is the difference between getting off with a fine or going to prison.

p24

There are however incidents in this book which do not show Noah in such a heroic light as he seems to habitually prefer to represent himself. When he was 7 years old, he was playing in a shed which was part of the residence of a white family, who were renting out their garage to Noah’s mum’s boyfriend. Noah was playing with a magnifying glass, using it to burn his name onto pieces of wood, and left the magnifying glass in the shed where it caused a fire to start. The fire burned the entire shed and house down. Noah claims it was not his fault, and it may even be acceptable that he shows no remorse, but jarringly, he shows no sympathy at all for the people who lost their homes and had everything burnt down – he merely mentioned they had insurance. His mum’s boyfriend was kicked out of the garage, which Noah found “hilarious” because the garage was the only unscathed piece left of the property. Likewise, there is something chilling in Noah’s lack of concern for others even as a child in the incident of the two cats Noah’s mum brought home as pets, which were killed in a gruesome way, mutilated. Noah explains he doesn’t like cats, but this does not seem enough for him to have completely untouched by their suffering through abuse, torture and killing.  

Noah implies that he is in part the product of a society where danger and (casual) violence is always near at hand. He talks of his time in the hood, in jail, of domestic abuse, domestic violence taken to an extreme by his stepfather, and the authorities’ as well as social acceptance of violence and abuse, particularly of women. For all its humour, this is quite a defensive book, Noah always seeming to feel a need to justify himself and make the reader fully aware of just how exceptional he is, considering the circumstances which made him. The books starts strongly, and is never lacking in interest, but muddles it timeline chronology further along for no apparent reason, and would have benefitted from some editing and restructuring. It is almost as if Noah wants to force a climatic finish to his book, and selects the most dramatic incident to recount, having kept it up his sleeve till the end. It is all a little contrived, as is the whole book. But still highly readable.