It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Black is one of the racial categories in apartheid South Africa. People who belong to the any of the various Bantu tribes extant in South Africa were categorized by the minority white apartheid government as Black. Though the umbrella terms Black and Bantu were used by the colonists to cordon off indigenous South Africans from European colonists and non-white immigrants, the apartheid government also upheld distinctions between various people whom it categorized as Black, creating animosity between tribes like the Zulu and Xhosa so that they would fight amongst each other rather than unite to overthrow minority white rule.

Certain neighborhoods are designated as “black neighborhood[s]” (97), where only Black people are allowed to live. The neighborhood of Soweto is one of these places. Within these neighborhoods, there is ethnolinguistic diversity among Black folks. For example, Patricia and her family are Black Xhosa people, but they often have interactions with Zulu, Tsonga, Swazi people, and more.

Noah identifies as Black, though under the racial categorization of apartheid, he is often perceived as Colored. Apartheid’s racial categories are not based on objectivity, biology, or even skin color, but on an arbitrary system of oppression. For instance, Chinese people were categorized as “black,” while Japanese people were categorized as white (77).

Colored is one of the racial categories under apartheid rule in South Africa. In effect, it refers to racially “mixed” people whose lineages became “mixed” prior to the inception of the apartheid system, when interracial relationships became illegal. While being “mixed” is illegal under apartheid, being Colored—the child of two Colored people—is not. When in public, Patricia often purposefully arranges for Noah to be seen as Colored by bringing along a Colored friend and pretending to be their maid. Though Noah is not Colored, this perception keeps him from being taken away from her.

Noah calls himself “colored by complexion but not by culture” (122), or a “perceived colored person” (232). Under apartheid, the only way a Colored person was allowed to exist was as the child of two other Colored people. Colored people do not have a direct line to either their Black or white ancestors. As such, Noah writes that Colored people struggle with culture and knowing who they are. Many of them adopted the culture of their Afrikaner oppressors.

Colored people have a lot of “animosity” toward Noah, who is culturally Black but has a white father. Noah says Colored people hate him for two reasons. First, because he is too Black: He is “proud of [his] Afro” and speaks African languages with joy (122). They mock him by calling him “Bushman” and tell him he is throwing away his whiteness (122). Second, because he is too white: He attends private school, has a white father, and speaks perfect English. As such, they think that he thinks he is “better than them” (123). Dealing with this judgement and ostracization from the people who look most like him is “one of the hardest things [Noah has] ever had to deal with” (121). 

Johannesburg is the largest city in South Africa. It lies in the Witwatersrand hills, which house mines for minerals, gold, and diamonds. During apartheid, the minority white government intended to make South Africa an all-white country, but they soon discovered that they could not survive without the labor they exploited from Black people. Thus, they made the main city of Johannesburg a white-only residential space and allotted certain segments of the areas around Johannesburg for other sub-groups of people who labored in the mines.

Though non-white people were not allowed to live in Johannesburg, Patricia flouts these rules and rents an illegal flat in the city before she meets Noah’s father. The Johannesburg police arrest her many times for walking around the city without an ID, but she just pays the fines. She lives in a neighborhood called Hillbrow, which Noah describes as “the Greenwich Village of South Africa […] a thriving scene, cosmopolitan and liberal” (25). There is a vibrant art scene and regular meet-ups between “black people who hated the status quo and white people who simply thought it ridiculous” (25). Patricia and Robert live on the same floor of a Hillbrow apartment complex and often attend illegal integrated gatherings together during their relationship. Patricia is one of a relatively small number of Black South Africans who can afford to illegally rent a residency in the main city of Johannesburg. Most of the people living in Johannesburg’s townships, like Patricia’s family in Soweto, barely make enough to upkeep their homes.

When Noah uses the word “mixed,” he refers to a person who has one white parent and one Black parent. People who are born of two Colored parents—who may have been “mixed” further back in their lineage—are referred to as Colored. While it is not illegal to be Colored in apartheid-era South Africa, it is illegal to be “mixed.” Being “mixed” is the first of Noah’s “crimes.” When he is very young, his mother makes him walk alongside her Colored friends while she walks behind them. If people found out that Noah was “mixed” rather than Colored, they likely would have taken him away to an orphanage and stripped his family of guardianship.

Noah explains that because “a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason” (21). Being Colored is not illegal because under the logic of apartheid, it is correct for two Colored people to have a Colored child. Being “mixed” is illegal because it shatters the apartheid fiction that races can or should be separated from one another, or that one is inherently better than the other.

Noah is explicit about his identity. He says, “I was mixed but not colored” (122). Throughout the memoir, Noah occasionally identifies himself as “mixed” and often identifies as Black.

The township of Soweto is an all-Black suburb of Johannesburg. Since Noah has lighter skin than his family, they have to smuggle him in at night so the neighbors don’t see him, and he isn’t allowed outside during the day. When the white minority regime realized that their intended all-white South Africa “could not function without black labor to produce its wealth” (24), they confined Black people to “government-planned ghettos” where they were allowed to remain only if employed as a laborer (24). While nearly one million people live there, there are only two roads in and out—intentionally making it difficult for residence to escape the city so the police “could fly over and bomb everyone” if “the monkeys ever went crazy and tried to break out of their cage” (29).

Noah’s description of Soweto illustrates the absurdities and struggles of Everyday Life Amid Systemic Racism. Noah’s grandmother’s house in Soweto has two rooms, one for sleeping and one for everything else. Houses in Soweto are not pre-built. Rather, families build onto them when they have the funds to do so. Noah explains that once allotted land by the apartheid government, a family would build a shanty out of corrugated tin and plywood. Then, once they had enough money, they’d replace one wall with brick. They would have to save up more money for the second, third, and fourth walls, until their home was one room. They would add a roof, windows, plaster, creating further rooms the same way.

White is one of the racial categories under apartheid rule in South Africa. Generally, they are the European colonists of South Africa, although some non-white races, like Japanese people, are categorized as white for political reasons. Some of the more recent colonists are English-speaking, while others are Afrikaners, who speak Afrikaans. The Afrikaners are the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers who began colonizing the area in the mid-1600s.

During and before apartheid, the South African government, economy, and agriculture were run by minority-white rule. During the first part of the 20th century, the white population in South Africa more than doubled to more than two million people. It peaked in 1990 at more than five million people, though this was only a fraction of the overall population. In the decade and a half after apartheid ended, this number dropped dramatically.

Apartheid rule perpetuated a prescriptive system of racism based on white supremacy. White people were given the best jobs, education, and economic opportunities, at the expense of Black and Colored people.

The Xhosa are the second-largest ethno-linguistic tribe in South Africa and are one of the Bantu-speaking peoples. During apartheid, they were deeply involved in the leadership of the cross-tribe African National Congress. Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid revolutionary and eventual first Black president of South Africa, was Xhosa, as are Noah and his maternal family.

Unlike the Zulu, who “went to war with the white man,” the Xhosa “played chess with the white man” (4). While their chiefs initially waged a long war with white invaders, they eventually decided to take a “more nimble approach” (4). In the apartheid-era, they pride themselves on being “thinkers.”

Noah’s family speak Xhosa at home. Patricia spends part of her youth living in “the Xhosa homeland, Transkei” in a “hut with fourteen cousins” (64). What the apartheid regime called the “homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes, sovereign and semi-sovereign ‘nations’ where black people would be ‘free.’ Of course, this was a lie” (65). The apartheid government allocated 13% of the country’s lands for the “homelands” and housed 80% of the country’s people there. Places like Transkei were “overpopulated and overgrazed, the soil depleted and eroding” (65). Like the homelands of the other tribes, the Xhosa homeland is a site of exploitation and resource extraction by the minority white government.