Kaffir Boy

The author starts to run around with a group of boys, ages 5 to 7, in his neighborhood. He spends time with them at the marketplace, watching the Indian traders, and he also visits the bus depot and the beer halls. He and his friends admire the tsotsis, or gangsters, around town, and he searches for empty beer bottles and used bus tickets to sell to bus drivers and “fat shebeen queens” (40).

With the money he makes, he goes to the cinema. There, he tries to get a sense of the white world, as the only whites he ever sees are policemen. He is not permitted to enter the white world. From the movies, he develops the idea that all whites are violent and is thankful that the law prevents him from entering the white world. Perhaps, he thinks, the law is protecting him. When he first went to the movies, he cowered in fear at what he saw on the screen until his friends told him “how everything on the silver screen only took place in the white world” (55).