Kaffir Boy

“So my story is intended to show him with words a world he would not otherwise see because of a sign and a conscience racked with guilt and to make him feel what I felt when he contemptuously called me a ‘kaffir boy.” 

The author writes that whites in South Africa were kept out of areas like Alexandra by law during apartheid (this book was written in 1986, during apartheid). The whites in his country did not know the conditions in which the author and other blacks like him were raised. He wrote this book to tell them of the way in which he was raised for the first 18 years of his life, as the government during apartheid kept the black world hidden from whites in South Africa. 

“The authorities preferred his kind as policemen because of their ferociousness and blind obedience to white authority. They harbored a twisted fear and hatred of urban blacks; they knew nothing of black solidarity, relishing only the sense of raw power being a policeman gave them over their own kind.” 

The white authorities hire black policemen to conduct raids in Alexandra. The black policemen who are from the Bantustan are more obedient. They do not relate to the political movements of urban blacks and serve the white authorities blindly. 

“What I felt was no ordinary hate or anger; it was something much deeper, much darker, frightening, something even I couldn’t understand. As I stood there watching, I could feel that hate and anger being branded into my five-year-old mind, branded to remain until I die.” 

Mathabane is overcome by hatred at a young age. His hatred arises from seeing the Peri-Urban police harass him, his family, and others in Alexandra. This sense of hate and anger is so strong it will never leave him.