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Kaffir Boy
Back Cover
"Like Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land ...
in every way as important and exciting."
— The Washington Post
"This is a rare look inside the festering adobe shanties of Alexandra, one of South Africa's notorious black townships. Rare because it comes ... from the heart of a passionate young African who grew up there."
— Chicago Tribune
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.
"Powerful, intense, inspiring."
— Publishers Weekly
"An eloquent cry from the land of silent people, where blacks are assigned by whites to a permanent role of inferiority."
— John Barkham Reviews
"Compelling, chilling, authentic ... an emotionally charged explanation of how it felt to grow up under South Africa's system of legalized racism known as apartheid."
— Milwaukee Sentinel
"Despite the South African government's creation of a virtually impenetrable border between black and white lives, this searing autobiography breaches that boundary, drawing readers into the turmoil, terror, and sad stratagems for survival in a black township."
— Foreign Affairs
"Told with relentless honesty ... the reader is given a rare personal glimpse behind the televised protests and boycotts, of the daily fear and hunger which is devastating to both body and soul."
— The Christian Science Monitor
"A chilling, gruesome, brave memoir ... Mathabane provides a straightforward, harrowing account of apartheid as it is practiced."
— Kirkus Reviews
Note: The word "Kaffir" is of Arabic origin. It means "infidel." In South Africa it is used pejoratively by whites to refer to blacks. It is the equivalent of the word "nigger."
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of pageAll Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2007 Mathabane Books & Lectures
This site was last edited on
February 22, 2008 10:54 AM
Books
Kaffir Boy
Kaffir
Boy Page
Back Cover
Preface
Chapter One
KB in America
KB
in A Page
Back Cover
Chapter One
Love in B&W
Love
in B&W
Dust Jacket
Reader Reviews
Preface
Mark's View
Gail's View
African
Women
AW
Home
Back Cover
Reader Reviews
Preface
Chapter One
Ubuntu (Novel)
Ubuntu Page
Dust Jacket
Chapter One
Miriam's Song
Miriam's
Page
Dust
Jacket
Dedication
Preface
First Chapter
Reader Reviews