Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

"Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah is an engrossing, deeply personal memoir by one of the world's top comedians. It goes beyond mere autobiography and, with Noah's characteristic humor and grace, tells the story of a young man seeking his place at the end of Apartheid and the birth of a new South Africa. At the center of the story is Noah's relationship with his mother-one of the fiercest ladies every put to paper. While it has a serious heart, the book is hilarious and I found myself laughing hysterically at many points. My only complaint is that the funny moments are funny but at times, I felt a like I was reading a stand-up routine written into narrative form. I've read a few memoirs in the past where I felt as if the author had recorded himself and wrote it down as a transcription. But it was the moments where the book is more reflective that it shines. Very recommended.

It's a great introduction to Apartheid, a terrible chapter in South Africa's history, but told through the lens of a cheeky boy. When Trevor was born inter-racial sex was a crime. His mother was a no nonsense woman who flouted the rules and lived in the white part of town. There she met a white Swiss man and she asked one day for him to give her a child. I loved the stories of his parents, it wasn't quite what I was expecting from the title. He was born out of a woman's desire to give a child everything she did not have for herself.

She did so much to give Trevor the best possible advantages in life when odds were stacked against him. She was fiercely religious and would hit Trevor but everything was done with love. When his mum meets his stepfather, things go downhill and it was hard to read about the domestic violence.

Trevor talks about the genius of how Apartheid turned the majority black population against each other but also the utter lunacy of some of the policies. Chinese people were categorised as black but because South Africa wanted a good trading relationship with Japan, the Japanese were classified as white. Your classification could change too, you could become white if you were pale skinned and acted white but you could also be "downgraded" from white to coloured or coloured to black.

His childhood was one of never quite belonging. He was brought up by a black family yet if he ever ventured out in Soweto he would be called white. They were so separated that many had never really seen a white man and Trevor's paler skin was a novelty. He was educated and spoke many languages, which helped him make friends. If you speak the same language you are familiar and less scary. Yet he didn't feel accepted by coloured communities, he felt black.

I lost a bit of interest reading about his life of petty crime. He started making money selling pirated music, went on to DJing and then started providing loans, albeit much safer than most loan sharks. I tuned back in for the edge of the seat account of what happened to his mother.

It's well written with a good balance of history, humour and personal hardship. I laughed at Trevor's fear of flies going up his bum when he went to the outhouse and the dawning horror of what he does to resolve this.

Thankfully it isn't at all about his time as a comedian or how he got there. I usually have little interest in reading the childhood portions of memoirs but this was the opposite. It was all childhood and a fascinating look at race from the perspective of a country that's not the US or UK.

This has got to be one of the more interesting autobiographical books I've read. Growing up in the apartheid police state, the son of a white father and black mother, sounds like hell. Stories about his childhood status as a "colored" person who floated among the "black," "colored," and "white" apartheid racial castes, and how he learned how to speak many different languages and accents in order to be accepted by everyone, Noah gained a perspective not held by many of the nationals at the time, since they were locked into all those categories. He continually gives credit to his mother for exposing him to the educational and cultural things she never had growing up.

He ends with the story of his step dad shooting his mother, from his early adulthood. I was hoping he would provide more insights into the US since he lives here now, but I guess I'll have to wait until his next book.

I don't usually use audiobooks, but a friend highly recommended the audio version of this, and I'm so glad that I did. Trevor Noah reads his memoir himself. I daresay any successful standup comic would do a great job of reading their own material, but this has the added benefit of that at times he's talking in other languages, which wouldn't come through on the page half as well.

He grew up poor in South Africa, born during Apartheid. As the child of a Black mother and White father, he was literally a crime. His parents had be creative even to be seen in public with him.

I like reading books that take me outside of the setting and assumptions that I'm used to. This is thoroughly outside of my experience, and one story after another opened my eyes. I'd had no idea about the carefully studied and architect-ed nature of Apartheid, for example. While the book does have many dark things, it's also full of light, and very funny. His mother is a remarkable woman!

"The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.  Trevor Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa's tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle."



This book is amazing.  That is all.  Go preorder it.
I was reading this on my Kindle app and was highlighting like crazy.  Trevor Noah has been an outsider all his life.  In South Africa under apartheid there were four racial categories - white, black, colored, and Indian.  Colored people were the descendants of interracial relationships in the past.  There was no category for 50/50 black/white children because it couldn't legally happen.  He chose to identify as black because that's what his mother was but he wasn't accepted there either.



Growing up both defined by and outside of such a strict racial hierarchy sharpened his insights.

"That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation.  My mother calls it "the black tax." Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up to zero."
 

"British racism said, "If the monkey can walk like a man and talk like a man, then perhaps he is a man."  Afrikaner racism said, "Why give a book to a monkey?"

He talks about history when describing why having a friend named Hitler wasn't considered strange.

"Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that's especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler.  If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium's King Leopold would come way before Hitler.  If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson."

"Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them.  Six million people killed.  We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified.  But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses.  It's harder to be horrified by a guess."

This is the story of growing up illegally because his mother fought to make a place for him even before the fall of apartheid.  She was a visionary.  However, even after apartheid there wasn't a place for him to make a legal living as easily as it was to make an illegal one in the townships.  He talks about the saying about teaching a man to fish vs giving him a fish.  He points out that it doesn't work if you don't also help him get a fishing pole.

This isn't the story of how he became a comedian or how he ended up taking over for Jon Stewart as the host of The Daily Show.  That all comes later.  This is the story of the world that shaped him into the person he is today.  It is funny.  It is horrifying.  It is necessary reading.

I received this book from NetGalley.
 This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story