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"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 cross the line between black and white and win a scholarship to an American university.
This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is itself 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 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."
Kaffir Boy won a Christopher Award for being inspiring and is on the American Library Association's List of Outstanding Books for the College-Bound and Lifelong Learners. It is the first widely published memoir written in English by a black South African. When it first appeared in 1986, the book stunned readers in much the same way the Frederick Douglass' 1845 slave narrative had, forcing many to rethink American support of South Africa's white political regime.
Kaffir Boy was written in the United States, where for the first time in his life Mathabane felt free to express his thoughts and feelings without fear of imprisonment. 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 early age.
What gives Kaffir Boy its unique place in world literature is its central message that we are all human beings, and that the suffering of one individual leads to the suffering of humanity as a whole. Without bitterness or anger, Mathabane presents the facts of his life in a way that celebrates the power of family bonds and the value of a strong community.
A sought-after lecturer, Mathabane was nominated for 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. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Gail, and their three children.
Also by Mark Mathabane: Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White: the Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo, African Women: Three Generations, Miriam's Song, available at Amazon.
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