Study Guide to
Kaffir Boy
by Mark Mathabane
Table of Contents:
A
Note to the Reader
Short Summary of Kaffir Boy and Its Significance
Life of the Author
Timeline of Author's Life and Major Events in South Africa
List of
Characters
Themes
Glossary
Critical
Analysis of Kaffir Boy
Where Are They Now? An Update on the Main Characters
Frequently Asked Questions
A
Note to the Reader
This study guide will give you an
overview of Kaffir Boy, a summary of the book and its characters, and some
information about its author. However, to fully appreciate this
contemporary classic, which won a Christopher Award and is on the American
Library Association's List of "Outstanding Books for the
College-Bound and Lifelong Learners," we encourage you to read the
entire book when you have the time.
This guide will give you
information that should be helpful to you as you work on an essay, oral report or term
paper for class.
The Editors, New Millennium Books
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Short Summary of Kaffir Boy and Its Significance
Kaffir
Boy is the culmination of Mark
Mathabane’s efforts to tell the world the truth about apartheid’s
devastating impact on South African blacks. It is also a testimony to the
triumph of the human spirit over seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is
the first widely published autobiography written in English by a black
South African. When it first appeared in 1986, the book stunned readers in
much the same way that Frederick Douglass’ 1845 slave narrative had and
enabled many to finally understand apartheid in human terms. Kaffir Boy was Mathabane’s attempt to prove
that “apartheid is inherently evil and must be abolished.”
Though
it is possible that Mathabane might have written this autobiography later
in his life, the book probably would not have been written with the same
degree of youthful passion, fervor, anger and force. Because Mathabane
began writing the book in his early twenties, memories of his brutal and
terrifying childhood were still fresh in his mind.
Written
in the United States, where for the first time in his life Mathabane felt
free to express his opinions without fear of imprisonment, the book's
central themes are man’s inhumanity to man and the resilience of the human spirit
to overcome oppression. The author-narrator, Johannes, is trapped in a
terrifying world that robbed him of his childhood and forced him into the
role of protector and provider for his younger siblings at an age when
most American children are beginning Kindergarten. In Mathabane’s
childhood, there was virtually no opportunity for his personality to
develop freely. External forces conspired to squelch his personal freedom
– Kafkaesque apartheid laws, his father’s abuse and rigid tribal
beliefs, extreme poverty and hunger. He was treated brutally and
tyrannically by both the white social structure, in the form of Peri-Urban
policemen, and by his own father, who tried to mold him into a man
according to Venda tribal traditions that Mathabane viewed as outdated and
incapable of helping him fight apartheid.
Fortunately Mathabane found other role models in a strong network of women – his mother, Granny and Aunt Bushy – who nurtured his physical and emotional growth and fought hard to save him from the dead-end life of street gangs by ensuring that he received an education. The heroine of the book is clearly his mother, Magdalene, who sacrificed much and withstood physical abuse from her husband to make sure her firstborn son could attend Bovet, the local black school. A secondary heroine is Granny, who took Mark to the white world, where she worked as a gardener, and introduced him to a white family that began giving him hand-me-down clothes and books -- things his family couldn't afford. Mathabane's father made only ten dollars a week, whenever he was not languishing in jail for the blacks-only crime of being unemployed.
Throughout the book Mathabane encounters people who try to warn him that it is dangerous, under apartheid, for blacks to strive to rise above their station in life. Such blacks were called "cheeky" or "uppity" by whites, and they were often frustrated by a lack of opportunity. But Mathabane refuses to give up on his dreams. Once he discovers, through reading “banned” books such as Treasure Island, that there is a world beyond the ghetto where people are free to pursue their individual dreams, he becomes determined to get to know such a world. He becomes obsessed with seeking knowledge, convinced that it will set him free from bondage -- especially from mental slavery.
South
African society was organized in a hierarchical fashion. Whites, as
representatives of Western Civilization, which was considered superior,
were at the top of the pyramid. Indians and mixed-race South Africans,
called Coloreds, were in the middle. Blacks, who were considered
uncivilized, were at the bottom. Blacks could not vote, ride whites-only buses, drink from
whites-only water fountains, swim at whites-only beaches, use whites-only
restrooms or live in whites-only neighborhoods. They were confined to
ghettoes called "townships" and needed all kinds of permits,
which were seldom granted, to move about, to live together as families and
to find jobs. By seeing
the effect of these apartheid laws through a child’s eyes, Mathabane is
able to drive home his main point: that it is morally reprehensible to
base a society on the legal mistreatment of human beings whose only crime
was being born with black skin.
From
his earliest years, Mark Mathabane refused to be judged by the color of
his skin. He fought relentlessly to be judged by the contents of his
character and by his accomplishments. This struggled made him an outsider
who was misunderstood by many people. Kaffir Boy chronicles his alienation
from his tribal roots, his growing thirst for knowledge of the world
beyond the ghetto, and his strong desire for self-determination. The book
is far more than a record of the many abuses Mathabane suffered at the
hands of his father, his peers, overworked and underpaid teachers and the
enforcers of apartheid. It is
a tribute to the power an individual has to shape his destiny, even when
external forces conspire to keep him “in his place.”
What
gives Kaffir Boy its unique place in world literature is its central
message that we all share a common humanity, that we should never give up,
and that love is a powerful antidote against hatred. Without
bitterness or anger, Mathabane presents the facts of his life in a way
that celebrates the power of family bonds, the value of a strong community
and the resiliency of the human spirit.
Life of the Author
Johannes Mark
Mathabane was born in 1960 in Alexandra Township, a one-square-mile
ghetto
outside Johannesburg, South Africa, that was home to more than 200,000
blacks. He is the eldest of seven children, and the first one in his
family to attend school. His father, Jackson, was a manual laborer from the Venda
tribe. His mother, Magdalene, was a washerwoman from the Tsonga tribe, which is also
known as the Shangaan tribe. As a young man, Mark’s father left the
Venda homeland and went to the city of Johannesburg in search of work.
After working all day as a laborer, he drank liquor at a speakeasy (shebeen)
run by
Ellen Mabaso, known in the book as Granny. Believing that marriage to an
older man would be good for her daughter, Ellen encouraged Magdalene to
marry Jackson Mathabane. According to custom, Jackson was required to pay
“lobola” – a bride price.
Johannes, who later assumed the name "Mark" to avoid arrest during the student protests of the mid-1970s, was the couple’s firstborn child. Under South Africa’s apartheid laws of racial segregation, which were instituted by the all-white National Party in 1948, it was illegal for a black man to have his family living with him in Alexandra. Laborers were supposed to live alone in Alexandra in single-sex barracks called "hostels." They were permitted to visit their wives and children in the homelands only once or twice a year. Peri Urban, the South African police force, constantly raided the ghetto, often in the middle of the night, demanding to see permits. Black men who didn't have permits, or whose permits were expired, were arrested and jailed.
In 1965, when Mathabane's memoir begins, one of these raids forced his parents to flee in the middle of the night. They left Mark in the shack with instructions to take care of his three-year-old sister, Florah, and one-year-old brother, George. Mark was only five years old. The raid was traumatizing and became a formative experience. It opened Mark's young eyes to the evils of apartheid.
One of those evils had to do with jobs. Mark's father
was constantly arrested and jailed for the black-only “crime” of being
unemployed and for raising a family in a Johannesburg township without a
government permit.
Forced to raise seven children without
enough money,
Mark’s mother did whatever she could to keep them alive. She gathered leeches
called sonjas to eat, scavenged for half-eaten sandwiches at the
garbage dump, and begged for blood at the slaughterhouse to boil as soup.
Mark’s chronic hunger made him weak and prone to fainting. He often
fainted near a store in the hope that when he was revived someone would
take pity on him and give him a piece of candy. Mark never had a normal
childhood. He often witnessed grisly murders and saw children prostituting themselves for food.
Unable to bear the pain and hunger any longer, he attempted suicide at age
ten. It was his mother who stopped him by taking the knife from his hands
and telling him that if he died, she would die too.
A love of learning carried Mark from despair to hope. Believing that an education was the only way out of the ghetto, Mark’s illiterate mother stood in long lines for hours until she finally managed to register Mark for school. Mark realized the importance of school after seeing that his mother was willing to risk being beaten up by his father in order to pay his school fees. At her urging, he became a diligent student and rose to the top in his class. When a riot broke out in the township and the library was on fire, Mark crawled through the flaming wreckage, trying to salvage as many books as possible.
When Mark saw American tennis
professional Arthur Ashe during one of Ashe’s visits to South Africa,
Mark became determined to become a “free” black man like Ashe by
learning to play tennis. With an old warped racket given to him by his
grandmother’s white employer, Mark taught himself to play tennis by
hitting a ball repeatedly against a cement wall. A chance meeting between
Mark and 1976 Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion Stan Smith eventually led
to Mark’s receiving a tennis scholarship offer from an American
university.
In 1978, Mark quit his job as a bank
teller and boarded a plane to the United States. He attended several
colleges – Limestone College in Gaffney, S.C.; St. Louis University;
Quincy College in Illinios – before graduating in 1983 from Dowling
College in Oakdale, N.Y. with a degree in Economics. He began writing as
an undergraduate, and became the first black editor of the Dowling College
newspaper, the Lion’s Roar. After attending the Poynter Institute
of Journalism in St. Petersburg, Florida, he began publishing articles
about his life under apartheid in American newspapers, including the St.
Petersburg Time, Newsday and The New York Times. When two of
his brothers-in-law were shot and killed at point-blank range by a black
police officer, Mark feared that the murders might have been committed as
an act of retaliation against him for one of his recently published
articles. He agonized over the harm his political writing might bring to
his family, who still remained trapped in Alexandra. But he knew that
ignoring racial intimidation would not make it go away.
While at Dowling, Mark read the works
of James Baldwin, Richard Wright and other African-American writers. He
was particularly moved by Black Boy, which inspired him to start
writing a book about his life and to call it Kaffir Boy.
(“Kaffir” is the South African word for “nigger.”) Friends and
professors dissuaded him from writing a book, telling him that no one who
was only twenty-two years old could possibly write a memoir. The more they
discouraged him, the more determined Mathabane became to tell his story.
He had been working on the manuscript
for a year, using the computer lab at Dowling College, when a local
church, Bellport Unitarian Church on Long Island, asked him to speak to
the congregation about his experiences in South Africa. Two published
authors were in the audience, and both offered to introduce Mathabane to
editors and agents in New York City. Mathabane chose instead to give the
manuscript to Arthur Ashe’s agent, Fifi Oscard, who sold it to Ned
Chase, a senior editor at Macmillan.
In 1986, Kaffir Boy was
published. Despite glowing reviews in the Washington Post and most
other major newspapers and winning a prestigious Christopher Award for
inspiring hope, the book sold slowly. It was only in 1987, after his first
appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, that Kaffir Boy came to the
world’s attention and became a New York Times bestseller. It reached the
No. 1 spot on the Washington Post bestsellers list and was
translated into several languages. Critics compared the book’s power,
impact and importance with that of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the
Promised Land and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Today, the
book is used in classrooms across the U.S. and is on the American Library
Association’s list of “Outstanding Books for the College-Bound and
Lifelong Learners.” An abridged audio recording of Kaffir Boy was
released in 1988, and the audio cassettes can still be purchased at
www.mathabane.com.
In 1989, a sequel, Kaffir Boy in
America, was published to positive reviews and also became a national
bestseller. The book picks up Mathabane’s life story where Kaffir Boy
ends and describes Mathabane’s early years in the United States. In the
book, he contrasts race relations in the U.S. with race relations in South
Africa, drawing many thought-provoking and disturbing parallels.
In
1992, Mathabane and his American-born wife, Gail, co-authored a book title
“Love in Black and White.” This book describes their personal
odyssey as an interracial couple in America. Together they have appeared
on talk shows, led workshops and delivered lectures on ways to heal the
racial divide in America.
Mathabane’s fourth book, “African
Women: Three Generations,” was published in 1994 by HarperCollins. In
this book, Mathabane describes the struggles, relationships and triumphs
of three South African women who were heroines in Kaffir Boy -- his
grandmother, mother and sister Florah.
In 1999, Mathabane published his first
novel, Ubuntu, which is set in post-apartheid South Africa and tells the
story of a white human rights lawyer, Liefling, and her attempts to bring
a ruthless apartheid-era killer, Kruger, to justice. Filled with facts
from actual transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
report, Ubuntu blends fact and fiction in a way that educates readers
about atrocities that occurred under apartheid while simultaneously
keeping them in suspense as a gripping story unfolds.
Miriam’s
Song, Mathabane’s sixth book, was published in 2000 and tells the true
story of his sister Miriam’s coming of age amid the turmoil and violence
that preceded the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela's election. The book
was nominated for South Africa’s Alan Paton Award.
Mathabane
has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the “Today” show, CNN,
Larry King and numerous TV and radio programs across the country. His
provocative articles have appeared in USA Today, The New York
Times, Newsday and U.S. News & World Report.
He has been featured in Time, Newsweek and People
magazines. A sought-after lecturer, he was nominated for 1993 Speaker of
the Year by the National Association for Campus Activities. He continues
to write about mankind’s pressing need to abolish, once and for all,
racial injustice, intolerance and prejudice of any kind, child abuse,
spousal abuse, alcoholism, illiteracy, poverty and disease. He currently
lives in Portland, Oregon, and maintains a website at www.mathabane.com.
Timeline of
Mark Mathabane’s Life
and Major Events in South Africa
1948
The National Party comes to power in South Africa in
an all-white election and establishes apartheid, the legal and strongly
enforced separation of the races.
1953
The Apartheid Government enacted The Bantu Education
Act, which established a Black Education Department in the Department of
Native Affairs. Under the legislation, authored by Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd
(then Minister of Native Affairs, later Prime Minister), blacks were to be
taught only menial skills that would prepare them to work in the homelands
or do menial labor for whites.
1960
March 21 -- At
least 180 black Africans were injured and 69 killed when South African
police opened fire on approximately 300 demonstrators, who were protesting
against apartheid pass laws, at the township of Sharpeville in the
Transvaal. The event came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre. In
response to Sharpeville, the government outlawed the African
National Congress (ANC).
Oct. 18 -- Mathabane is born in Alexandra, Township
outside Johannesburg, South Africa to Jackson Mathabane, a Venda, and
Magdalene Mathabane, a Tsonga.
1962
Nelson Mandela, leader of the ANC, was sentenced to
life in prison for sabotage and treason and was sent to Robben Island, a
prison off the coast of Cape Town.
1966
The white South African government announced that all
shacks in Alexandra were to be demolished and all blacks without proper
papers were to be forced to leave Johannesburg for the tribal reserves.
Mathabane’s family did not have proper papers, so they moved to a shack
on Thirteenth Avenue, as far away as possible from the section of
Alexandra that was being leveled by bulldozers.
1967
Mathabane began attending Bovet School, the tribal
school for Tsongas and Vendas.
1975
South Africa entered a period of economic depression.
Schools were starved of funds -- the government spent 644 rands a year on
a white child's education but only 42 rands on a black child. To cut
costs, the Department of Bantu Education announced it was removing one
grade (Standard 6) from primary schools. This meant that 257,505 pupils
had to try to enroll in secondary schools that had space for only 38,000.
Chaos ensued.
The Department of Education also issued a decree
stating that Afrikaans was to become the official language of instruction
in all black schools. Students objected to being taught in the language of
their oppressors.
1976
June 16 – Between 15,000 and 20,000 high-school students in Soweto
marched in protest, calling for better education for blacks. Police
responded by releasing attack dogs and firing teargas and live bullets
into the crowd. Students threw rocks and started setting fires to symbols
of apartheid, such as government buildings and beer halls. Army
helicopters and Anti-Urban Terrorism units arrived. The
battle between students and police continued into the night. Some
estimated the death toll at 200. Many more were injured. The rioting
spread to other towns and the government closed the schools. As soon as
the upheavals were suppressed in one area than they flared up elsewhere.
This continued for the rest of 1976.
Since Mathabane was involved in the protests, he
changed his first name from Johannes to Mark to avoid being arrested by
the police.
The Soweto uprising is commemorated today by a South
African national holiday, Youth day, which honors all the young people who
lost their lives in the struggle against Apartheid and Bantu Education.
1978
With the help of Stan Smith, Mathabane departed from Johannesburg and flew to the United States to attend Limestone College in Gaffney, SC on a tennis scholarship.
1981
Mathabane transferred to Dowling College in Oakdale,
NY, where he became the first black editor of the campus newspaper, The
Lion’s Roar.
1983
Mathabane began writing Kaffir Boy while still
in college. He graduated cum laude from Dowling with a B.A. in Economics,
then continued working on the book.
1984
Mathabane spoke at Bellport Unitarian Fellowship on
Long Island. Two published authors in the audience approached him and
offer to introduce him to their agents and editors. Macmillan publishing
company offered Mathabane a book contract for his half-completed
manuscript of Kaffir Boy.
Mathabane attended the Poynter Media Institute in St.
Petersburg, Florida, and then enrolled at the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism in New York City, where he completed work on Kaffir Boy.
1986
Kaffir Boy was published in hardcover,
receiving excellent reviews, and Mathabane went on a two-week book tour to
tell Americans about the horrors he experienced growing up under
apartheid. The book won a Christopher Award for inspiring hope.
Violence increased in South Africa. In Cape Town,
seven young activists from the township of Guguletu were being driven to a
job interview when their mini-bus was stopped by police at a roadblock.
The police opened fire, killing all seven, and planted guns at the scene
to report that “terrorists” had attacked them. The dead became known
as “the Guguletu Seven,” and their death is one of the most brutal
examples of apartheid-era security
force operations.
November – A police assassin shot to death two of
Mathabane’s brothers-in-law. Mathabane believes the killings were an
attempt by the apartheid regime to silence him.
1987
Mathabane married Gail Ernsberger, a fellow
journalist and writer.
Oprah Winfrey read Kaffir Boy, invited
Mathabane to appear on her show and arranged for his family to be reunited
with him in the U.S. A few
weeks later, Kaffir Boy appeared on The New York Times
bestsellers list.
1989
Scribner’s published Kaffir Boy in America,
the sequel to Kaffir Boy, which also became a New York Times
bestseller.
1990
February 11 – Nelson Mandela was released from
prison.
Click to read Mathabane’s article in Newsweek about Mandela’s release.
1991
HarperCollins publishes Love in Black and White,
a book about interracial relationships that Mathabane wrote with his wife,
Gail.
1993
Nelson Mandela accepted the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize on
behalf of all South Africans who suffered and sacrificed to bring peace to
the country.
July 4 – President Clinton invited Mathabane to
join him in presenting Mandela and F.W. de Klerk with the Liberty Medal at
a ceremony in Philadelphia.
1994
HarperCollins publishes African Women: Three
Generations, which tells the true stories of the lives of three women
– Mathabane’s grandmother, mother and sister Florah.
Mathabane’s father, Jackson, died of cancer in
Alexandra Township at age 72. In loving memory of his father, Mathabane
organized a funeral procession that included several large buses to
transport hundreds of citizens of Alexandra to the burial site.
1996
Mathabane was selected to become a White House Fellow
to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., where he helped
implement President Clinton’s “America Reads Challenge.”
1997
Leading a delegation of White House Fellows,
Mathabane returned to South Africa to visit for the first time since
leaving home in 1978. He was reunited with family members and childhood
friends he had not seen in 19 years.
1999
The American Library Association adds Kaffir Boy
to its list of “Outstanding Books for the College-Bound and Lifelong
Learners”
2000
Simon & Schuster publishes Miriam’s Song,
the true story of the coming of age of Mark’s sister Miriam during the
violent years leading up to Nelson Mandela’s release. The book is
nominated for the Alan Paton Award.
2001
Mathabane and his family moved from North Carolina to
Portland, Oregon. He is working on a novel and continues to lecture at
schools across the country.
2003
Mathabane’s grandmother, Ellen Mabaso, died of natural causes in
Alexandra Township. She was 84.
List of Characters in Kaffir Boy
Johannes Mark Thanyani Mathabane
The author-narrator, the “Kaffir boy” of the title. Johannes is
the Afrikaans name given to him by his mother at birth. Later he is given
an African name – Thanyani, meaning “the wise one.” When he becomes
politically active as a teenager, he changes his name from Johannes to Mark
to avoid being arrested for protesting against
apartheid and for breaking segregation rules by playing tennis with whites
and participating the student protests against Bantu Education. He has no trouble discarding the name Johannes, which is common
among his Afrikaner oppressors, so the new name – Mark Mathabane --
sticks.
Magdalene
"Geli" Mathabane
Mark’s
mother, an illiterate washerwoman of strong religious faith who believes
that an education will save her son from a dead-end life. Originally from
Gazankulu, the tribal reserve of the Tsongas, she is married to Jackson, a
man twenty years older than she. Although they are married according to
tribal laws, the white apartheid government does not accept their
marriage, forcing them to hide or escape from the police who make surprise
night raids on homes in Alexandra. Her values, instilled through nightly
storytelling, shape her son as a writer. She is the heart and soul of the
family.
Jackson Mathabane
Mark’s father, a victim of Kafkaesque apartheid laws, who never
abandons his family despite his difficulty in providing for them and his
drinking problem. Raised in the tribal reserve of the Vendas, he rules the
household according to tribal law. An illiterate laborer, he expects
complete obedience from his wife and children, often using physical abuse
to enforce his will. Emasculated and embittered by apartheid, he gradually
sinks into a life of alcoholism and gambling.
Florah Mathabane
The first of Mark’s five sisters, who is two years his junior
George Mathabane
Mark’s only brother, who is four years his junior
Granny
Mark’s grandmother, Ellen Mabaso, who provides refuge for Mark
and his mother when they are in trouble. An experienced gardener, she is
forced to raise her children alone after her husband leaves her for
another woman. She works ten hours a day, six days a week, for white
families in Johannesburg. She is a pillar of strength to her daughter and
grandchildren. Through Granny, Mark is introduced to the world of white
wealth and privilege, as well as the world of tennis, books and
literature.
Uncle Cheeks
Granny’s firstborn son, Cheeks Mabaso, who joined a gang in a
desperate attempt to help support his struggling mother. He gives his
nephew a radio, which Mark uses to learn English by listening to BBC
broadcasts
Granny’s
younger son, Piet Mabaso, who enables his nephew Mark to stay in school by
paying for his school uniform.
Granny’s
youngest daughter, Bushy Mabaso. As a teenager, she pays for her nephew
Mark’ school trips and gives him lunch money on a regular basis.
Mark’s
second sister
Merriam Mathabane
Mark’s
third sister
Linah Mathabane
Mark’s
fourth sister
Dinah Mathabane
Mark’s
fifth sister and youngest sibling
Mpandhlani
Mpandhlani
is a homeless thirteen-year-old gang member who recruits prostitutes for
male migrant workers who have been separated from their wives and children
and forced to live in all-male dormitories.
Ashe was an American tennis professional and the first
African-American to win Wimbledon. His South African match with Jimmy
Connors fuels Mark’s dream of becoming a great tennis player. Ashe
becomes Mark’s role model and inspiration, for he proves that blacks can
succeed not only in the game of tennis but also in breaking long-standing
racial barriers.
Scaramouche
Mark’s first tennis coach and mentor, who was “one of the best
tennis players among people of color in Johannesburg.” After
two-and-a-half years of coaching by Scaramouche, Mark wins the Alexandra
Open tennis championship, becoming one of the most outstanding young black
tennis players in South Africa.
The Smith Family
The Smiths are white South Africans who live in the upscale suburb
of Rosebank and employ Granny as a gardener. The Smiths gave Mark their
son Clyde’s old comic books, toys and games, which revealed to Mark a
new reality, molded his thoughts and feelings, made him dream and
increased his interest in learning. The Smiths also gave Mark his first
tennis racket. Clyde’s racist taunting challenges 11-year-old Mark to
prove that he could learn to master English, read and write as well as, if
not better than, any white person.
The Wimbledon tennis champion who befriends Mark during a tennis
tournament in South Africa. After returning to the U.S., Smith talks with
tennis coaches and arranges a full tennis scholarship for Mark at
Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina. Smith’s friendship and
financial support make it possible for Mark to escape the ghetto and come
to America to pursue his dreams.
A white nun is the first white person to shed tears in front of
Mark, making him realize that white people are human and have feelings
too. The nun helps Mark’s mother obtain his birth certificate so he can
enroll in school. The nun’s willingness to cut through the red tape
designed to prevent blacks from obtaining an education convinces Mark that
not all whites filled with hate toward blacks.
Mr. Wilde
A senior manager at Simba Quix, the largest potato chip company in
South Africa, Mr. Wilde gives Mark an academic scholarship and summer
employment based on his excellent grades.
A German immigrant, Horn runs a tennis ranch for whites who are
training to become professionals. After meeting Mark, Horn invites him to
participate in matches at the ranch. For the first time, Mark is able to
practice and compete against white players and to make friends across
racial lines.
Themes in Kaffir Boy
1: The Value of Education
Kaffir Boy’s single most important theme is the value of
education. Knowing that spending food money on school fees will likely
result in a severe beating, Mark’s mother still enrolls him in school
and endures the consequences. Though she never had the opportunity to
complete first grade, she is determined to see her son educated. She
believes that education is the key that will open up a new world and a new
way of life to her children, and she is willing to sacrifice everything to
give him that key. She believes that knowledge means power, can give one
the weapons necessary to fight injustice, and can liberate her son from
the prison of hunger and poverty in which he is trapped. Realizing how
much his mother believes in education, Mark becomes a diligent student,
rises to the top of his class, wins scholarships, and learns to express
himself through writing and speaking.
2: Abuse of Power
Kaffir Boy is the first book to expose the apartheid
regime’s bigoted and unethical abuse of power. When the National Party
won the 1948 election based on their promise to legalize apartheid, the
minority white population began passing laws that restricted living areas,
schools, and medical care for the black or “Bantu” population. Blacks
were confined to designated areas – all-black townships and arid rural
“homelands.” They could not move about without a passport-like booklet
containing their photograph, address, marital information and employment
status. Mark and his family, like other black South Africans, were victims
of a racially abusive system that remained in power until the early 1990s.
3: Equal Opportunity
The black population’s lack of equal opportunity is vividly
described in Kaffir Boy. Jackson Mathabane is continually arrested
and imprisoned for such “crimes” as being temporarily unemployed and
living with his wife and children. While he is in prison, the family has
no money and survives by digging for food in the garbage dumps on the
outskirts of Alexandra. They arrive early so they will be the first ones
there when the garbage trucks arrive. They live on the refuse of South
Africa’s whites.
4: Gender Equality
The unfair inequality between males and females is another dominant
theme in Kaffir Boy. According to tribal customs, a man pays lobola
(a bride price) to “purchase” a bride. This custom leads men to treat
their wives and daughters more like property than human beings. Because
Mark’s father purchased his mother, she is trapped in the marriage and
cannot escape his abuse.
5:
The Struggle to Survive
Though she bears a triple yoke of oppression – as a black, as a
woman and as an illiterate – Mark’s mother refuses to be a victim and
is determined to survive and ensure that her children succeed. She stands
up to her husband on issues that matter to her and seeks shelter in her
mother’s house only when absolutely necessary. She uses her love,
compassion and wisdom to bring Mark back from the brink of suicide and to
teach him how to survive, how to refuse to give in to a victimizer, and
how to triumph over obstacles.
Apartheid
A system of legalized separation between different racial groups
that was turned into law by South Africa’s National Party, which came to
power in 1948.
Kaffir
The South African term for “nigger.” The word Kaffir is
derived from the Arabic term for “infidel.”
Lobola
The price a man pays to purchase a young woman from her parents. In
South Africa, lobola used to be paid in the form of cattle. Gradually cash
replaced cattle as the means of paying lobola. Today, young men can often
get permission to marry after making only a cash down payment on his
bride.
Peri-Urban
Peri-Urban is the Alexandra police force that terrorizes, abuses
and arrests residents during surprise police raids in the middle of the
night. They drag Mark’s father half-naked from his bed, handcuff him and
throw him in a truck. For two months, he is forced to work on a white
man’s potato farm. After a second arrest and a year in prison, Mark’s
father returns home a bitter, abusive man. Peri-Urban is the reason Mark
believed that white people were devils.
Tsotsis
Tsotsis are gangsters that roam Alexandra. When Mark witnesses a
gang committing a brutal murder, he is so shaken up and filled with
despair that he considers committing suicide at age ten.
Critical Analysis of Kaffir Boy
The
first chapter of the book establishes its theme and setting. It opens with
the words on the warning sign that was posted at the entrance to Alexandra
Township. By opening the book with these words, Mathabane piques the
reader’s curiosity to know more about this strange land where people can
be prosecuted simply for driving through a certain area of a city without
a permit. He explains that, because of signs like this, more than 90
percent of white South Africans go through life without ever seeing,
firsthand, the inhuman conditions under which blacks had to survive.
On
the first page, Mathabane sets forth his purpose in writing Kaffir Boy:
“to show him (the white man of South Africa) a world he would otherwise
not see…and to make him feel what I felt when he contemptuously called
me a ‘Kaffir boy.’”
The
author describes Alexandra township, the ghetto in which he grew up, as a
“one-square-mile pit constantly shrouded by a heavy blanket of smog,”
and contrasts it with the verdant all-white suburbs surrounding it.
Mathabane
details the history of Alexandra – from its origins as a shantytown for
migrant workers who traveled from the tribal reserves to Johannesburg to
work in mines, factories and white people’s homes to the overcrowded
ghetto into which he was born. Like Alexandra’s early settlers,
Mathabane’s parents had migrated to Alexandra from the tribal reserves.
His father came from the Venda homeland and his mother came from Gazankulu,
the homeland of the Tsongas.
After
meeting and marrying, the couple rented a shack in Alexandra. In that
shack, Mathabane was born, a few months before sixty-nine unarmed black
protesters were massacred by South African policemen during a peaceful
demonstration against pass laws in Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. Pass
laws were intended to help the white regime regulate and control the
movement of blacks within the country.
The
second chapter delves into Mathabane’s life story from one of his earliest
and most terrifying memories. The narrator’s emotions are described in a
straightforward manner, so it is not necessary to search for symbolic
meanings. It is important to be aware of his emotions and to the
situations that provoke them. Mathabane is just a young child in this
chapter, and he is not yet aware of the impact these events will have on
him as he matures. The author’s voice provides narrative drive to what
otherwise would be a series of chaotic events.
When
the book opens, it is a winter night in 1965 and Mathabane is lying on a
bed of cardboard under the kitchen table, wide awake and terrified from
nightmares about dead black people lying in pools of blood. Before dawn,
his father gets up and leaves for his ten-dollar-per-week job as a manual
laborer. Suddenly Mathabane hears sirens, screaming and the sound of
breaking glass and barking dogs. Peri-Urban, the white police force, is
raiding the township, banging on doors and arresting anyone without
permits to live there. People are leaping fences in a mad dash to escape
from the police.
To
avoid arrest, his mother frantically searches for her passbook and flees
from the shack, leaving Mathabane to look after his terrified
three-year-old sister, Florah, and his wailing one-year-old brother,
George. Vivid description allows the reader to feel the small boy’s
fear. Mathabane barricades the door and tries to quiet the baby by
shouting, “Shut up, you fool!” and spanking and pinching him. Spotting
a blanket, he covered the baby’s face, smothering his screams until he
lay silent. Florah ran in, terror-stricken, leading Mathabane to release
George, who had nearly suffocated.
The
violence of this scene is palpable. In reaction to the violence and
pandemonium erupting in the streets outside, Mathabane slaps and scolds
his siblings in a desperate attempt to get them to be quiet so they can
avoid detection by the police. The three children cower together on their
parents’ rickety bed, which is propped up with stacks of bricks.
Mathabane peers out the window and sees three policemen coming toward the
shack. George rolls off the bed and hits his head against the pile of
bricks, sustaining a deep gash. Hearing the infant’s cry, the police
agree they don’t want to deal with any more crying, abandoned children,
and depart.
As
the very first scene of Kaffir Boy, this episode establishes Mathabane’s position as the feisty and rebellious eldest child, whose
responsibilities are clearly far too heavy for any child to bear. After
surviving this much terror, no amount of hardship or abuse can break his
spirit. By witnessing this type of fear-inducing police brutality and
chaos at such a young age, he gains a power to survive that is far beyond
the normal bounds of human endurance.
In
the third chapter we learn that this police raid was the first in a series
of raids by the Peri-Urban police, who are determined to “clean up”
the neighborhood by arresting gangsters, prostitutes, shebeen owners and
blacks whose passbooks were not in order.
That night the police return, and this time they break down the
door of Mathabane’s shack and kick him aside, sending him crashing head-first
into a crate.
His
mother hides in a small, locked wardrobe, but Mathabane is forced to witness
his father’s emotional emasculation as he is taunted and dragged
half-naked out of the house. Along with dozens of other blacks, he is
handcuffed, taken away in a convoy of trucks, and forced to spend two
months doing hard labor on a white man’s potato farm for his past crimes
– all because he could not afford to pay his poll tax or tribal tax and
did not have the money to bribe the police officer. The following year, Mathabane’s father was arrested again – this time for the “crime” of
being unemployed – and imprisoned for almost a year.
During
his father’s absence, Mathabane’s mother struggles to keep her family fed
but can only afford one meager meal a day. When the landlord threatens to
evict the family, Mathabane’s mother asks her mother for money to pay the
rent. After that money runs out, she secures a weekend job cleaning houses
and doing laundry. She rises each morning at six to take her three
children to the garbage dump to search for food and other items they
cannot afford, such as clothes, furniture and utensils.
Gnawing
hunger becomes Mathabane’s constant companion, leading him into more and more
dangerous situations. He begins stealing liquor bottles and reselling them
to the owners, using the money for food and tickets to the movies. When he
realizes that his mother is pregnant with her fourth child, he tells her
that she should not have given birth to him and that he is not happy in
this world. “It will get better,” she tells him, but from his
perspective, things only get worse. Soon he is hanging out with other six-
and seven-year-olds, many of whom are homeless and sleep in abandoned
cars. He innocently accepts an invitation from a thirteen-year-old boy,
Mpandhlani, to earn money and all the food he can eat by going with him
and some other boys to the men’s hostel on the hill. When Mathabane
realizes what the men expect him to do in exchange for the money and food,
he runs away in horror, vowing never to tell anyone what he has seen.
Jackson
Mathabane returns from prison a bitter and abusive man who spends most of
his money on alcohol. He violently forces his children to follow the
tribal rituals of his childhood, even taking his son Johannes on a trip back to
his Venda homeland. Johannes is surprised by the primitive conditions and
by his father’s visit to the local witch doctor. “The fact that he
willingly, without question or protest, submitted to the witch doctor’s
rituals made him a stranger to me,” Johannes says. He had responded in a
similar way when his mother had had all of her children baptized in the
Christian faith. He was skeptical of the church portraits that depicted
God “as an old blue-eyed white man” and the devil as “a naked black
man, his features distorted to resemble the devil with a tail.”
His
mother’s nighttime stories, riddles, proverbs, animal fables, tribal
folklore and songs served as a kind of library for Mathabane, a golden
fountain of knowledge. From his mother’s stories, Mathabane learned about
right and wrong, good and evil. Determined that her son become educated,
his mother gets him up at four o’clock on three separate mornings and
stands with him in line for hours, waiting to get the birth certificate
necessary to enroll him in school. Caught in a Catch-22, she is sent back
and forth between the clinic and the police station until finally she
becomes so desperate that she accosts a white nun and begs her to
intervene. The nun is so moved by his mother’s story that tears come to
her eyes. Mathabane is amazed to see a white person cry, for he didn’t
know that white people had the capacity to feel. The nun argues with the
bureaucrats behind the counter, and a birth certificate is quickly issued
to Mathabane’s mother. She is so happy that she tucks it in her dress and
sings praises to God. Then she tells her son never to forget that not all
white people are bad, and that he should judge people according to the
contents of their hearts rather than the color of their skin.
At dawn on a winter day, Mathabane’s mother awakens him and
forces him to bathe and dress in his father’s shirt and pants. She folds
them and tucks them until they fit his small body. She and Granny have to
tie his hands together and drag him against his will to the Shangaan
tribal school. When he returns home at the end of a horrible first day, he
discovers that his father has brutally beaten his mother for using food
money to enroll her son in school. When Mathabane realizes that his mother
is sacrificing so much to ensure that he gets an education, he decides to
remain in school. His father refuses to pay for a uniform or schoolbooks,
so Mathabane is beaten daily by the schoolteachers for failing to arrive in
proper uniform and with the required textbooks. Determined to succeed
despite the odds, he continues to go to school and to excel, achieving the
highest grades in his class.
At
age 10, Mathabane witnesses a brutal murder, which makes him want to end
his life so he can stop seeing and feeling the pain of living in such an
impoverished and violent world. His mother, finding him with a knife in
his hand, convinces him not to kill himself. She forces him to look at his
younger sisters, who are playing in the mud, and asks him what would
happen to them if they no longer had an older brother to protect them.
“I too would die if you were to die,” she said. “You’re the only
hope I have. I love you very much.” Then she asked him to give her the
knife, and he did.
Pregnant
with her fifth child, Mathabane’s mother takes a job cleaning houses to
pay his school fees. He continues to remain at the top of his class
through Standard Six (eighth grade). His success in school is due to long
hours of studying by candlelight, since there is no electricity in the
shack. The white woman who employs Granny as a gardener, Mrs. Smith, gives
Mathabane her son’s hand-me-downs: old clothes, books and toys. For the
first time in his life, Mathabane is able to read adventure books like Treasure
Island that take his mind far away from daily survival in the ghetto
and carries him to faraway islands and out to see on pirate ships. These
books spark his imagination and make him believe that there is a better
world beyond the pain and suffering of Alexandra township. Mrs. Smith also
gives Mathabane an old tennis racket, and he uses it to hit balls against a
cement wall for hours every day, trying to become like his idol – the
American tennis player Arthur Ashe, the first free black man he has ever
seen.
Mathabane’s
life begins to revolve almost entirely around school, reading and tennis.
He earns a First Class pass on his final Standard Six exams and is awarded
a government scholarship, which pays for all three years of his secondary
schooling at Alexandra High School. In 1972, Mathabane began high school
and one again became a top student, leading the Form One classes in final
exams. He also became the number one tennis player at the school.
In
June 1973, a fellow tennis player named Tom arranges for Mathabane to meet
Wilfred Horn, who runs Barretts Tennis Ranch, an all-white tennis
facility. Tom works at the ranch and has played tennis against many
whites. Uneasy about playing with whites because he knows the government
is looking for an anti-apartheid activist named Johannes Mathabane, he
introduces himself to Wilfred Horn as “Mark Mathabane.” Horn invites
him to play tennis regularly at the ranch and gives him a job there as
well. In November 1973, Horn buys Mathabane a ticket to see Arthur Ashe
play at Ellis Park. In 1974, Mathabane wins his first tennis championship.
The following June, he represents the southern Transvaal black junior
tennis squad in the National Tournament in Pretoria.
In
the spring of 1976, Mathabane graduates from high school and wins a
university scholarship from Simba Quix. In June, when black students in
Soweto protest against being forced to learn in Afrikaans, the language of
their oppressors, the protests spread throughout the black townships,
including Alexandra. Mathabane participates in the protests. The protest
turns violent, and people start burning and looting Indian-owned shops and
other buildings. When Mathabane sees that the library is on fire, he risks
his life to salvage a few precious books.
In
1977, Mathabane enters the South African Breweries Open and meets
Wimbledon champion Stan Smith and his wife Marjory, who help him get a
tennis scholarship to an American university. On September 16, 1978,
Mathabane boards a plane for the United States, armed with a student visa
– his passport to freedom.
Where
Are They Now?
An
Update on Members of the Mathabane Family
Magdalene Mathabane
Mark's
mother is now a permanent resident of the United
States and lives in Kernersville, North Carolina, near several of her
children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. She is an active member
of United Metropolitan Baptist Church in Winston-Salem and is well-liked
among her co-workers in the laundry room of North Carolina Baptist
Hospital. Through diligent studying, she has learned how to read and
write, and she attends English as a Second Language classes to improve her
ability to read and speak in English.
Jackson Mathabane
In the late 1980s,
Mark's father stopped drinking and began
attending church with his wife and children. By 1993, he had become a
deacon in the church. In 1990, Mark brought his parents from Alexandra to
North Carolina for a four-month visit. Mark and his father reconciled and
developed a strong bond of mutual respect and admiration. Jackson
Mathabane died in 1994 of prostate cancer at the age of 72.
Granny
After visiting America in 1987 to attend her grandson’s wedding,
Granny remained an active and well-loved part of Alexandra’s community
of elders for many years. Mark’s mother traveled back to South Africa
every summer to spend a month with Granny, who passed away in the spring
of 2003. By reading African Women: Three Generations, you can learn
about her life, including her childhood in the tribal reserve of the
Tsongas and her struggles as a single mother in Alexandra township when
the pro-Nazi National Party came to power in 1948.
Mark Johannes Mathabane
After departing from South Africa in 1978, Mark attended college in
the United States and graduated from Dowling College in New York with a
degree in Economics in 1983. His first book, Kaffir Boy, was
published in 1986. While attending the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism, he met Gail Ernsberger, whom he married in 1987. He has
written a sequel to Kaffir Boy (Kaffir Boy in America); a
book about his mother, grandmother and sister Florah (African Women:
Three Generations); a book about his sister Miriam (Miriam’s Song);
a book about interracial relationships (Love in Black and White);
and a novel about post-apartheid South Africa (Ubuntu). All six
books are available at www.mathabane.com.
He currently lives in Portland and is at work on a novel and lectures at schools all over the
country that teach Kaffir Boy.
Florah Mathabane
At age nineteen, Florah married a young Xhosa named Collin. They
had a daughter in 1982, whom they named Angeline. When Angeline was only
three, Collin was shot and killed by the police during the political
unrest of 1985. Florah visited the United States three times -- in 1987,
1992 and 1995 -- and her daughter attended middle school and high school
in North Carolina. Florah chose to remain in South Africa and now works
for a cell phone company in Johannesburg. After graduating from high
school in North Carolina, Angeline, returned to South Africa to be with
her mother and to work as a singer and radio announcer. You can learn more
about Florah’s life by reading African Women: Three Generations,
available at www.mathabane.com.
George Mathabane
George visited the United States in 1987 and remained to attend
school. After graduating from Westchester Academy in High Point, North
Carolina, he studied business and accounting at Guilford College. He
returned to South Africa in 1993 and now works for the government. He is
married and has a daughter.
Maria remained in South Africa until 1998. She now lives in
Kernersville, North Carolina, where she works full-time as an assistant
manager at a fast-food restaurant and is raising three sons and a
grandson. An accomplished seamstress and fashion designer, she designs and
sews traditional African outfits for weddings and other special occasions.
Merriam Mathabane
Merriam (who later changed the spelling to Miriam) first came to
the United States in 1993, arriving with her firstborn son, whom she named
Mark Mathabane after her brother. Though she had completed high school in
Alexandra, she wanted an American high school diploma. After attending
East Forsyth High School in Kernersville, N.C. for three years, she
received her diploma. She enrolled in the nursing program at Forsyth
Technical Community College, but had to discontinue her studies due to a
car accident shortly before receiving her LPN. She currently works as a
certified nursing assistant and plans to return to finish her nursing
degree. In 2000, Mark published Miriam’s Song (available at
www.mathabane.com), which tells her life story. Miriam married an American
and now has a second son, Joshua. They live in Kernersville, N.C.
Linah Mathabane
Linah first visited the United States in 1987 and remained to
attend school. She graduated from St. Mark’s School in Southborough,
Mass., where she played soccer and tennis, and graduated with honors from
Ramapo College in New Jersey, where she played on the women’s tennis
team. She studied journalism at the Poynter Institute in Florida, worked
as a webmaster and editor for various magazines in New York City,
including Wine Spectator and Where? magazines, and now
manages a popular restaurant in Manhattan.
Dinah Mathabane
Dinah (who later changed the spelling to Diana) first visited the
United States in 1987 and remained to attend school. She graduated from
Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and graduated with honors
from Ramapo College in New Jersey, where she played with Linah on the
women’s tennis team. She worked in public relations and investor
relations for a variety of firms in Manhattan, and now lives in Charlotte,
North Carolina, with her American husband and their little girl. She
arranges Mark’s lectures at schools, colleges and universities.
Frequently Asked Questions
What
is apartheid and when did it start?
When and how did apartheid end?
What languages did you speak as a child?
What is a tribal reserve?
Where were the tribal reserves for black South Africans?
Your
mother was a Tsonga. Who are the Tsongas and what are their beliefs?
Your
father was a Venda. Who are the Vendas and what do they believe?
Why
did you change your name from Johannes to Mark?
What
were your first impressions of America when you came here?
What
happened to your family after you left South Africa?
Why
did you write Kaffir Boy, and when did you start writing it?
Why
did book reviewers say that Kaffir Boy was an important
book?
What
did your family think of America when they arrived here in 1987?
Did your mother ever fulfill her dream of learning to read and write?
Did you ever reconcile with your
What
is Alexandra Township like today?
Is there
any way I can help the students in Alexandra?
How can we invite you
to come to our school?
Q:
What
is apartheid and when did it start?
The word apartheid
means “separateness” in Afrikaans. It is pronounced "apart
hate." Apartheid was South Africa's policy of
legally mandated racial
segregation. Many of its laws were similar to the Nuremburg laws that
Hitler used to discriminate against Jews. The National Party, which was
made up of Afrikaners, introduced apartheid as part of their campaign in the 1948
elections. The National Party won the election and apartheid became the
law of the land until the early 1990s, when former Prime Minister F.W. de
Klerk began dismantling the racist system under pressure from the international
community in the form of boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Initially, apartheid laws classified people according to three major racial
groups—white; Bantu (black Africans) and Coloured (people of mixed
heritage). Later Asians (mainly Indians and Pakistanis) were added as a fourth
category. The laws determined where members of each group could live, what
jobs they could hold, and what type of education they could receive. Laws
prohibited most social contact between races and mandated segregated public
facilities. Nonwhites were not allowed to vote or run for office. People who openly opposed apartheid were
called "communists" or "terrorists" and accused of
treason. The government passed strict security legislation that turned South Africa into a
virtual police state.
Q:
When
and how did apartheid end?
Increasing violence, strikes, boycotts, sanctions and demonstrations by opponents of apartheid finally forced the white South African government to attempt to reform apartheid. When this didn't satisfy blacks, the government gradually began dismantling the system in the late 1980s. On February 18, 1990, Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk released Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress, from prison after 26 years. In 1993, Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize. It is remarkable that apartheid ended relatively peacefully and without a violent revolution. After Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings to learn the truth about the horrible crimes against humanity that occurred under apartheid in an effort to heal the racially torn nation. Mark wrote a novel about the TRC called Ubuntu.
Q:
What
languages did you speak as a child?
Nine. I first learned my mother's language, Tsonga (Shangaan). Then I learned my father's language, Venda. From our neighbors I learned Zulu, Pedi, Sotho, Xhosa and Tswana. At school I learned English and Afrikaans, a language spoken by the creators of apartheid. When the department Bantu Education mandated that all black schools should teach the major subjects in Afrikaans and not in English, the 1976 student protests began.
Q: What is a tribal reserve?
Beginning in the 1950s, the government of South Africa divided the black population into ethnic groups and assigned each group to a separate territory, which were called tribal reserves or bantustans. This policy of "separate development" was designed to ensure that whites retained control of more than 80 percent of the land in South Africa. From 1960 to the mid-1970s, the government attempted to make apartheid a policy of “separate development.” A total of ten tribal reserves, which were called "homelands" by the government, were created as part of the system of apartheid. The tribal reserves consisted of many fragments of arid land that could not support the populations assigned to them. They were reintegrated into the rest of South Africa in 1994.
Q: Where were the tribal reserves for black South Africans?
Here is a map of South Africa under apartheid. Each tribal reserve is a
different color. Both Venda (the tribal reserve of the Vendas) and
Gazankulu (the tribal reserve of the Tsongas) can be found in the upper
right-hand
corner, near South Africa's border with Mozambique. The nation's capital,
Pretoria, is indicated by a red star. Just southwest of Pretoria is
Johannesburg.
Q:
Your
mother was a Tsonga. Who are the Tsongas and what are their beliefs?
According to early Portuguese accounts, the Tsonga people lived in the central and southern areas of Mozambique, between the Indian Ocean and the Lebombo Mountains, during the early 16th century. Being fairly isolated, they lived a peaceful life until they were conquered by the Ngunis, who invaded their territory while fleeing from Shaka, king of the Zulus. The Nguni group with the strongest influence over the Tsongas was the Ndwandwe or Shangaan, whose ruler was Soshangane. They were known to the local people as the Angoni and later as the Amashangana. This group eventually built up a realm that stretched from the Zambesi River to Delagoa Bay and was known as the Gaza Kingdom.
Many Tsonga people are Christians today, but traditional religious beliefs still have a strong following among those in rural areas. The traditional religion centered on ancestor worship and the belief in one supreme being who had created man and earth. The diviner/ traditional healer (called the nanga) played an important part in ancestor worship and was often consulted in times of need and to help direct the rituals that were performed during times of crisis. They believed that the dead retain very strong links with the living, and that we pass from this world into the spirit world.
Q:
Your
father was a Venda. Who are the Vendas and what do they believe?
In
the 1700s, the Venda tribe migrated south from present-day Zimbabwe,
crossed the Limpopo River and settled at the foot of the mysterious
Soutpansberg Mountain Range. Their new home was a beautiful place with
fertile soil, rolling hills and thick forests. The mountains were often
shrouded in mist and contained a high-altitude lake, Lake Fundudzi, that
the Vendas, a matriarchal culture, believed was enchanted by the White Python, the god of
fertility. They also believed that spirits inhabit and live in the water,
air and mountains and that these places are sacred. The forest around the
lake is deemed sacred, and no Venda dares to set foot there for fear of
awakening the ancestral spirits that guard the forests.
One
of the tribe's most revered leaders was Thoho-ya-Ndou (Head of the
Elephant). His kraal (home) was called Dzata, which has been declared a
National Monument. Dzata had great significance for the Venda because they
buried their chiefs facing this place. In
1848, whites established a settlement called Schoemansdal in Venda
territory. However, Makhado, the Venda leader at the time, harassed the white
settlers until they abandoned the town in 1867. Makhado’s son, Mphephu,
continued this harassment, which eventually led to the Mphephu War. The
apartheid regime established a tribal reserve for the Vendas. Its capital
city was called Thohoyandou in honor of a great Venda chief.
The
Venda people believe that puberty and marriage are the most important
stages in life. Traditionally, initiation schools, or "mountain schools," were
used to prepare adolescents for the responsibilities of the next phase in
their lives. Through dances and ceremonies, the initiates are supposed to
gain strength, prepare for marriage and bring honor to their ancestors.
Q:
Why
did you change your name from Johannes to Mark?
I began going by the name "Mark" in 1976 to avoid arrest and detention by the apartheid police, who were looking for students who had participated in the student protests. At that time I had begun playing tennis at a whites-only tennis ranch and was very conspicuous as the only black person there.
Q:
What
were your first impressions of America when you came here?
When I came to the U.S. in 1978, I believed that America had long since resolved its racial problems, that blacks were equal citizens. In many ways, I found that to be true. The U.S. seemed to be a hundred years ahead of South Africa. Then I discovered, to my horror, that not much had changed in people's hearts. Without that change, laws are relatively impotent. I was shocked to learn about the Ku Klux Klan, militias and the white supremacy movement in the U.S. In many towns, there is a black world and a white world. What was really shocking was discovering that the black world in America resembled the world I had left, the townships of South Africa -- the poor buildings, the bad roads, the hopelessness, the rage, the frustration on the faces of the black boys and girls I met. These were the same emotions I felt when I was fighting for my life under apartheid. I had mixed feelings. I was grateful to finally live in a free society, but I also realized it was not the Promised Land.
Q:
What
happened to your family after you left South Africa?
My family continued to struggle, but I would send money home whenever I could. I paid for my sister Florah to attend secretarial school and bought Maria a sewing machine because she wanted to become a seamstress. My family eventually moved into a house built with the help of Habitat for Humanity, so they had indoor plumbing and electricity for the first time in their lives.
Maria and Florah were young mothers by the time I began publishing articles critical of apartheid in U.S. newspapers in the mid-1980s. After one particularly strongly worded article ran in The New York Times, my sisters' husbands were shot and killed by a police assassin. To this day, no one can explain why those two young men were targeted. I sensed it was a warning to me from the apartheid government to stop writing articles calling for sanctions and boycotts against South Africa. Despite my pain and grief, I continued working on Kaffir Boy, knowing that the truth had to be told.
Q:
Why
did you write Kaffir Boy, and when did you start writing it?
I began writing the first chapters of my life story when I was a sophomore at Dowling College on Long Island. It was a difficult book to write because the oppression of blacks in South Africa was still going on, and I risked endangering my family's well-being by writing the book. But I felt I had an obligation to tell the world the truth about apartheid's human toll. Once I started writing the book, memories came flooding back to me that I had repressed or tried to forget. Writing them down was cathartic. I was surprised by how little Americans, as well as most people around the world, knew about black life under apartheid, and I was eager to tell them how much blacks suffered under the apartheid system.
Q:
Why
did book reviewers say that Kaffir Boy was an important
book?
Though I didn't realize this when I was writing it, Kaffir Boy became the first widely published autobiography written in English by a black South African. When it first appeared in 1986, racial tensions in South Africa were at their height, and the military was constantly trying to suppress black uprisings. The book forced many people to rethink American support of South Africa’s white political regime. Some people credit the book with helping inspire Americans to become involved in the struggle to end apartheid. President Clinton read Kaffir Boy before awarding the Liberty Medal to Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk.
Q:
What
did your family think of America when they arrived here in 1987?
Q: Did your mother ever fulfill her dream of learning to read and write?
Yes, my mother began attending English-as-a-Second-Language classes through Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She also took literacy classes and painstakingly learned how to read well enough to read her favorite book, the Bible, by herself. Her dream, it turned out, was to become a teacher, but she was denied the opportunity to go to school in South Africa because she was a girl.
Q: Did you ever reconcile with your father?
Yes, I brought my father and mother to visit me and my family in North Carolina in 1990. Years earlier, he had stopped drinking and had begun attending church with my mother. By 1993, he was a deacon at the church. When he passed away in 1994 of prostate cancer, my family and I deeply mourned the loss.
Q:
What
is Alexandra Township like today?
When I returned to Alexandra for the first time in 1996, I found that the ghetto's population had mushroomed from 200,000 people to more than 600,000 -- all in one square mile. The residents of Alexandra also included refugees who had fled poverty and civil war in Mozambique. Despite the terrible conditions, I was overjoyed to see Granny, Aunt Bushy, Uncle Piet and many other relatives and old friends. They all told me that the struggle for freedom was worth it. Blacks walked around with pride, and their lives were no longer ruled by racist laws. Most important, they could vote. But I was saddened to see that economic apartheid still existed. Whites still led far better lives, held far better jobs, attended far better schools and lived in far better houses than blacks. My former school, Bovet, still had no computer and students there still could not afford books and basic necessities.
Q: Is there any way I can help the students in Alexandra?
Yes. Many schools hold fundraisers to benefit Bovet School in Alexandra. Donations are sent to the Magdalene Scholarship Fund, which then transfers the funds directly into the Bovet School account. The funds are used to pay school fees, buy books and purchase uniforms for smart students whose parents have either died of AIDS or are unemployed and can't afford to keep them in school. You can learn more about the scholarship fund at www.mathabane.com.
Q: How can we invite you to come to our school?
The best way is to have your teacher contact Diana West, my lecture agent, at lectures@mathabane.com or by calling 704-752-4189.
Copyright 2003 by New Millennium Books