Kaffir Boy

On his first day at the Bovet Community School, the author arrives early and is joined by 2,000 children standing in rows, many of whom are very young and faint. The principal addresses them and tells them the rules, including the rule that they will be whipped for being late. He hopes they stay long enough to learn to write their names. The language of instruction is Tsonga.

Then the newcomers, hundreds of squirming children, are packed into a hall. A girl of about 16 named Miss Mphephu announces herself as their teacher, but she has no control over the children. She indiscriminately uses the cane on the children, and then the principal enters and splits the kids into two shifts and also uses the cane. When the author returns home, he vows never to return, but his mother tells him it was worth it if he learned something.

Although Mathabane is still beaten for infractions such as having long nails and failing dictation, he starts to like school more. The 16-year-old teacher is dismissed in favor of a mother with children in the class who is fairer. The author begins to make friends with more affluent children, and the school offers a nutrition program run by nearby Catholic sisters so that he can get peanut butter on brown bread and a cup of skim milk (and bring some home to his siblings). If his mother does not have the four cents for his lunch, he borrows from his wealthier friends. He also likes the songs that involved reciting the alphabet and arithmetic tables.

On the last day of school in December, the principal and teachers gather in the courtyard and announce that the top student out of hundreds is Johannes Mathabane (as the author is then known). His mother and grandmother kiss him. His performance is all the more amazing because he does not have books and has to borrow them and rely on his memory during exams.

During his second year of school, his father surprises him by giving him 60 cents for a slate and primer (his grandmother paid his school fees). His father, however, tells him to stop going to school after he has learned to write letters and read, as he thinks that was all his son needs to get by.

The author’s sister Florah also begins school, and his mother struggles to pay for school. Mathabane is often caned for not wearing the right uniform and having books, although he promises his teachers he will have them by the end of the month. He wants to drop out of school, but his mother promises she will try to find a job. She asks him what kind of job he can get if he drops out at age 9, and he realizes that his friends who have dropped out were surviving by stealing and living on handouts.

The author’s mother, who is pregnant, finally gets a job working as a cleaning woman at the house of an Indian trader named Shortie. She says she will do anything to help her children. Her husband tells her that he will no longer give her money for groceries, and he uses the money on gambling and drinking. The mother wants to use the money to buy primers and pay for school, and she buys cheap books at a flea market. They turn out to be in other languages, such as Chinese and French, but their next-door neighbor Mr. Brown, who is literate, trades them with the author’s mother and gives her some primers.

Three years into his education, the author struggles to find a reason for his education. His father tells him that educated blacks cannot get jobs and that with a tribal education, kids could be helpful to their tribes even by age 8, but this is not true of the white man’s education.

One day, while studying, he hears men chanting the name “Ali,” and he finds out that a boxer of this name, a black man, has beat a white man to death in America (it later turned out that he had knocked out the white man but had not killed him). Everywhere, people speak of Ali’s victory, and Mathabane also wants to beat a white man to death.

The author goes to a gym with a group of boys in a quest to be like Ali. The man at the gym calls the author “Ali” and dubs his large opponent “Schmeling” (154). The author is soundly knocked out and hates boxing from that moment on.

One day in 1968, Mathabane finds the world around in mourning over someone named King who has died in America. He wonders why people care so much. His mother explains that King died fighting for equal rights for his people and that black people in South Africa do not have equal rights either.

His mother tells him that in the year he was born, blacks had organized a protest against the pass laws, but 69 people were killed by the police in Sharpeville. The author asks if blacks had fought back, but his mother explains that blacks are not allowed to carry guns and now blacks are afraid of fighting back. The author tells his mother he will fight for his rights when he is older, but his mother says nothing in response.

Mathabane tires of school and decides to be truant for four weeks, after which he hopes to be expelled. He goes to a garbage dump with other boys and then caught a movie. His mother secretly knows he isn’t going to school, as she monitors where he is in his workbooks, but she does not let on. Instead, she goes to the principal.

The principal sends the thuggish truant-hunter known as Mandleve (Big Ears) after the author, and he finds him at the dump. Although Mathabane tries to fight back with a crowbar, Mandleve comes with a group that overwhelms the author, binds his feet and hands, and brings him back to school. There, his waiting mother gives the command for the teachers to cane him. He is bedridden for a week and rarely misses school again, even when he is sick. 

One day, when he is 10, Mathabane is returning home after playing soccer at night. He sees a band of tsotsis chasing two men, and he dives into the grass and hides. The men chase one man into the yard where Mathabane is hiding, and they let the other man escape. Although he begs to be saved, the man is slashed by knives, and the author sees blood gushing from his throat and sees his entrails hanging out of his stomach. Mathabane sees the group finish off the man, and he witnesses the man’s look of anguish. When he got home, he faints.

The next day, his mother tells him she saw the body covered with newspapers and that the tsotsis had killed several people the night before. The author is overcome with the senseless cruelty of what he saw, and, although his parents brought him to a witchdoctor, he still suffers from sadness and a feeling of pain that will not leave him.

A few months after Mathabane saw the murder, he is overcome by weariness and the desire to kill himself. He is tired of fighting for a better life, something his mother urges him to do, when everything seems to be against him. He stands with a switchblade knife, contemplating killing himself as gladiators did in the movies he had seen.

His mother finds him on the stoop, and when he asks if anyone would miss him if he died, she responds that his little sisters, Merriam and Dinah, would miss growing up with him and that she herself would want to die if he died. “You’re the only hope I have” (169), she tells him. She takes his knife, and she continues afterward to monitor his moods. He realizes that if one has a comforting person to talk to, one can deal with the suffering of life.

Granny loses one of her two gardening jobs and is worried about how she is going to pay the rent until she finds a job with another family called the Smiths. They give her copies of comic books, and Mathabane becomes intrigued with them. He describes them as “anesthesia” (170) that numbed him to the pain around him. Granny tells him that the Smiths are rare examples of “nice white people” (171).

Granny then begins bringing home toys and games that the Smiths give her. The books, unlike any at Mathabane’s school, include books like Pinocchio and Aesop’s Fables. These games open up a new world for the author, and he no longer feels like fighting or looking for money to go to the movies.

He becomes well known as a teller of stories, and his teacher calls him before the class to explain how he knows these nursery rhymes. When the author tells his teacher of the “nice white people,” the teacher accuses him of lying. The author sheepishly explains his grandmother is a gardener, feeling ashamed because others look down on gardeners. The children who laugh at him because his grandmother is a gardener are caned, and the author never feels embarrassed about where he comes from again.

Mathabane’s father proposes to his wife that they start a beer business, now that they can scrape together the capital to do so. He proposes a business called a “Stokvel” that involves forming a kind of club in which members rotate having a party each weekend. They involve a community feeling but also make money. The mother at first refuses, saying that all her money is going to be saved for school fees. The father, who tells his wife that he should divorce her because he had paid a bride price for her and she has to listen to him, says that he will quit gambling and give all his money to his wife if she agrees. Mathabane begs his mother to say yes. The author’s father gives up gambling and drinking, and they start a beer-selling business. With the profits, the author’s mother is able to pay rent, afford school needs, and buy better food and treatment at the clinic. The author becomes the accountant, and his fair records win the trust of the customers.

The author begins to write letters for people who have relatives back on the tribal reserves. The letters contain news of sadness, including sickness and poverty, that affect the children. He writes a letter for a man named Phineas who is a migrant worker, and the author is overcome by sadness about the man’s sick child. Phineas lives hundreds of miles from his family, as many blacks do because Influx Control laws prevent their families from coming to live near white areas.

The author learns that his grandmother has arranged for him to meet the Smiths, the white family she works for. He refuses to go, as he is terrified. His mother threatens that he will have to leave home unless he goes, as it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get hand-me-downs from the Smith’s son. His grandmother tells him to speak only when spoken to in the white world.

Mathabane and his grandmother take the crowded bus to Johannesburg, where he sees skyscrapers and beautiful mansions en route. He also sees white children in neat outfits being led across the street by a crossing guard—a person who is not present at his school.

At the Smith’s house, a woman with silver hair opens the door and refers to the author’s grandmother as “Ellen.” Her warmth quiets the author’s fears, and she speaks to him. She tells her servant Absalom, “Bantu [black] children are smart. Soon they’ll be running the country” (189). Mrs. Smith says she is going to play tennis, and the author and his grandmother work on gardening in the yard. When Mrs. Smith and her son, Clyde, return, Mrs. Smith promises to look for an old racket for Mathabane. Clyde refuses to play with the author, referring to him as a “kaffir,” but his mother reprimands him. Mrs. Smith, who is from England, says South African whites are unchristian in their treatment of blacks. Clyde shows the author around, and Mathabane is amazed at Clyde’s enormous library. When Clyde shows the author a text by Shakespeare, the author can’t read it, and Clyde refers to him as “retarded” (192), again earning a rebuke from his mother. The author is so wounded by Clyde’s remark that blacks can’t read or write English that he vows to master the language, whatever it takes. When he and his grandmother are leaving, Mrs. Smith gives the author him his own copy of Treasure Island.

Mastering English becomes Mathabane’s goal. He hopes to receive more books from the Smiths, as the library in his school has no similar books. His teachers tell him that Dr. Verwoerd, the prime minister and designer of Bantu Education, thinks that blacks should only be schooled in tribal ways and should not learn European ways. The author curses him for deciding what he should learn. Mathabane studies the books the Smiths gave him and looks up unfamiliar words, trying to learn two new English words a day even if he does not know how to pronounce them.

Uncle Pietrus, a relative on his father’s side, moves into a shack in their yard. He reads the newspapers and speaks of them with the author, thereby helping the author learn more words. At school, he only reads and speaks Tsonga and rarely uses English.

The author no longer fights along with his gang, the Thirteenth Avenue, and the gang members, including the leader named Jarvas, come to harass him. He says he will fight in the next fight, which occurs against their rivals, the Mongols, with tomahawks, slingshots, and other weapons. A boy has his eye gouged out, and the author realizes it could have been him and vows never to fight again. He tells his parents of his decision, and his mother tells him he has made the better choice not to become a tsotsi but that it will be difficult for him. 

Mathabane continues his education up until the point when he will need more money to continue. He reads Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery in Tsonga translation, but something strikes him as wrong about it. He also loves the Tsonga translations of the Greek and Roman epics, and he recites prose and poetry very well and is able to write upside down.

The author goes with his grandmother to Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, to help her with her other gardening job. On the way home, the author mistakenly boards a white bus, earning insults and invective from the white driver. The author’s grandmother says that her grandson is “deranged” so that the driver will not cause them to be arrested.

His grandmother explains that the white and black worlds are separate and that whites have laws and guns to maintain this system, and she points out the separate white and black phone boxes. The author realizes that his grandmother can’t read the signs that separates whites and blacks, but he becomes increasingly more aware of the signs that tell him everywhere he could not go.

Mathabane gets a job selling newspapers, which, along with writing letters, earns him money and allows him to read the papers. He goes along with Florah and school classmates to the Johannesburg Zoo. His classmates stomp and chant on the way and holler at whites, who run away, fearing a black invasion.

At the zoo, they have to enter through the non-whites’ gate, but the paths in the zoo are for both races. The author has long ago stopped pondering the contradictory rules of whites. His group comes upon a group of white preppy school children speaking Afrikaans. They insult his group, referring to them as “baboons,” but the author and his group insult them back in Tsonga, which the whites can’t understand. They return to their group laughing and singing and feeling as though they have earned a victory. After lunch, they tour the relics of the Anglo-Boer War in the war museum across from the zoo; this war created bitter feelings between the English and the Afrikaners in South Africa that still exists.

Police raids cause his family’s beer business to fail a year after it started, and the author’s father goes back to gambling and drinking. Mathabane works as a butcher boy for a Chinese family, and his mother works as a washing girl in a white suburb for a family who overlook the fact that she did not have a permit. She becomes the breadwinner in the family. Aunt Bushy has dropped out of school and works in a garment factory. She becomes pregnant at age 18 and is unmarried, and Uncle Piet leaves school at age 16 to help Granny, who spends her life savings on bribes so that her children can get work permits. The author’s mother becomes pregnant again with Linah, and she has to beg for money for diapers, baby food, and medicine.

Mathabane’s father wakes him up and begs him for bus fare, as he had squandered his money gambling. The author refuses to give his father any money, as he plans to spend it on books and baby food. His father tells him to give him money or leave the house, and author decides to leave and stay for a week at Granny’s house. His father, suffering under what the author calls “the double yoke of apartheid and tribalism” (207),can’t look to the future but only hopes to return to a past that no longer exists. 

After Mathabane does a good job polishing silver for Mrs. Smith, she gives him an old wood tennis racket. She tells him to become the “next Arthur Ashe” (208). The author has read the tennis magazines that Mrs. Smith has given him, but, at age 14, he has never handled a tennis racket and is confused about the game, as well as about how a black man like Arthur Ashe is allowed to play with whites.

Mathabane works doing odd jobs for Mrs. Smith and her friends, such as gardening and washing cars, and his mother looks worn down from working and having 6 children. He tells her that he wanted to quit school to help her. They come to the compromise that he if he earns a First Class pass, he will go on to secondary school; if not, he will drop out and work in a factory.

The author begins playing tennis on the courts in Alexandra. He thinks tennis might allow him access to fame and fortune, like Arthur Ashe. A Coloured man named Scaramouche comes along and gives him some pointers. He then agrees to be Mathabane’s coach.