Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
- Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 2016
- Genre: Biography
- Format: Ebook
- Page Count: 304 pages
- My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)
You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all.
This book is an enthralling, completely action-packed autobiography that took place in the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid eras of South Africa. It was easy to read, and should be read by everyone. By easy, I meant the language, not the content. Some of the stories were pretty disturbing.
Born a Crime consists Trevor’s childhood events, focusing on the relationship with his mother and his mischievous behaviours. At a time when intercourse between white and black individuals was illegal, Trevor was born to a white Swiss/German father and a Xhosa mother, and therefore, the title of the book is self-explanatory. He was literally the evidence of his parents’ crime. Being mixed, Trevor did not fit in anywhere: he was the white kind among the blacks and the black kid in the whites. But thanks to his polyglot abilities, fast legs, and wits, he was mostly able to keep himself safe and happy.
If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind.
The quote sums up how cool Trevor’s mum is. Ms. Noah is very non-traditional and she defied all unreasonable regulations. She made sure to provide her son with the best things she could manage, scrape up all the money she could get to give Trevor the chance of knowing that the world is a lot larger than their racially-divided neighbourhood, and hope that he would never get trapped in the poverty cycle of paying ‘the black tax’.
People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.
In his life, Trevor created chaos, broke the law, pieced his family together, became a famous comedian, and accomplished much more. Being not chronologically-ordered but topic-based, Born a Crime was a book of oppression, sadness, and anger. It was almost humorous, which is as funny as can be for such a depressing world haunted by the residue effects of racism, violence, and poverty. [12 May 2018]
