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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Middle Grade | Published in 2019

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-13

Part 3, Chapters 14-17

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 2, Chapters 9-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “The Mulberry Tree”

In the pre-chapter prologue, Noah explains how the original Indigenous people of South Africa, the Khoisan, slowly died out from disease and war, while others were “bred out of existence” (119) by Dutch colonists. This systematic interbreeding, intended to erase Indigenous identity, led to the existence of Colored people. Unlike Black tribes like the Xhosa and Zulu, Colored people during apartheid did not have a distinctive culture or language, but took aspects of their culture from their oppressors, the Afrikaners.

Growing up, Noah sees himself as “colored by complexion but not by culture” (122). He is “mixed”: he has a white father but speaks African languages and “identified as being black” (123), like his mother. Colored people dislike him either for his whiteness—his perfect English, white father, and private schooling—or his Blackness—his Afro hairstyle and African languages.

Noah often gets bullied by Colored children. One time, he gets his bike stolen. Another time, he gets pelted with unripe mulberries until he cries and runs home. When he tells Abel about it, Abel finds the children who pelted Noah and beats one of them until he cries. Though Noah had wanted revenge, only then does he realize how similar he and the other boy are, and that by “unleashing [his] fury on [the boy’s] world,” he was just perpetuating a cycle of violence (128).

Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “A Young Man’s Long, Awkward, Occasionally Tragic, and Frequently Humiliating Education in Affairs of the Heart, Part 1: Valentine’s Day”

In the pre-chapter prologue, Noah discusses how his mother raised him to treat women with respect. She taught him not to be offended if a woman makes more money than he does and to treat women as equal to men.

When Noah transfers to the government school H. A. Jack as a preteen, he experiences Valentine’s Day for the first time. The white girls in school tell him to ask a girl named Maylene, the only Colored person in school, to be his valentine. They think it is Noah’s duty, since he and Maylene have the same skin color.

He asks Maylene, and she accepts. He has his first kiss. On Valentine’s Day, he shows up with flowers and a teddy bear for Maylene, but she tells him she can no longer be his girlfriend because a white boy named Lorenzo asked her to be his valentine and she agreed. Noah is devastated but understands her choice.

Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Outsider”

After graduating from H. A. Jack, Noah goes to high school at Sandringham, which is like a charter school. It is a perfect microcosm of post-apartheid South Africa: there are white kids and Black kids that run the gamut of class, as well as Indian kids and Chinese kids. While there are Colored kids, Noah is the only “mixed” kid among the 1,000 students—illustrating how effective the apartheid prohibition on interracial relationships has been. As such, he still feels like an outsider, even amid such a diverse group of students.

He becomes renowned for being the first in line every day for the tuckshop: the school canteen. People begin to pay Noah to buy them things at the tuckshop. In this way, even though he still feels like an outsider, he finds a way to move between social groups like a “chameleon.”

Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Color-blind”

In the pre-chapter prologue, Noah explains how his mother bought a run-down house in the white suburb of Highlands North, where they were the only non-white family. Highlands North, like other white suburbs, is built like a “fancy maximum security prison” (143-44), with high walls around every house due to white paranoia about “black crime” (143). Only after living there for a year does Noah learn that he can make friends with the children of “domestics” who work for the white families. Only a few white families allow their “domestics” to stay with their own children, which makes Noah’s pool of potential playmates shallow.

Noah describes his friendship with a Sandringham peer named Teddy, who is the son of a domestic worker in a wealthy white suburb a 45-minute walk from Noah’s home. With their similarly rebellious personalities, they get along immediately and are together all the time. They often walk around the mall together, though they cannot afford to buy anything.

The pair discover that after a stationary shop closes, they are able to reach through its gate and grab alcohol-filled chocolates from inside. They do this every weekend for a month until a mall cop sees them. They run away: Noah cannot get caught, as the guards know him and his mother and if they see his face, “I was dead” (147). Noah cuts through a small hole in a gate at a dead-end alley but Teddy chooses not to follow him.

Noah makes it home, but the guards catch Teddy and arrest him for shoplifting. Teddy’s mother goes to their house to tell Patricia. She says that Teddy was with another boy who wasn’t Noah that night. Noah thinks he is in the clear. The next day he gets called to the principal’s office, where he sees his homeroom teacher along with the head of mall security and two policemen. His teacher asks him if he knows who Teddy was with and Noah says no.

His teacher plays the security footage, pauses it on an image of Noah, and asks him, “do you know of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with?” (151). Noah realizes the blurry footage has “blown out” his melanin, and even though his features are recognizable, the adults have convinced themselves they are looking for a white child. They interrogate Noah not because they think the boy is him, but because they are convinced that he knows who the “white kid” is.

Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “A Young Man’s Long, Awkward, Occasionally Tragic, and Frequently Humiliating Education in Affairs of the Heart, Part 2: The Dance”

By the end of high school, Noah’s tuckshop business has turned into a black-market empire. With the help of two distributors, he burns CDs for buyers at several high schools. When one of the distributors, Tom, hears Noah say he doesn’t think he can get a date for their upcoming dance, Tom offers to get Noah a beautiful date in exchange for a larger cut of their CD sales.

He introduces Noah to Babiki, the most beautiful girl Noah has ever seen. Noah immediately develops a crush on her. Tom convinces Noah’s stepdad Abel to let Noah borrow his BMW to take Babiki to the dance. Abel initially refuses, but Tom makes a bet with him: If Abel sees Babiki and agrees she is the most beautiful girl in the world, he will let Noah borrow the BMW. Tom wins the bet, and Abel agrees to lend Noah the car.

Noah’s second distributor, Bongani, takes Noah shopping for clothes to impress Babiki. He then takes Noah to several salons to get his hair relaxed and braided into cornrows. Noah is impressed with his new look, as is his family.

When the night of the dance comes, Abel is drunk. He forces Noah to buy him more beers before he lets him take a car, and he won’t let him take the BMW, so Noah and his friends take a Mazda. He’s very late picking up Babiki, who is upset. He gets lost and it takes another hour to get to the dance.

At the dance, Babiki won’t get out of the car. Boys from school flock around her, ogling at her. One of them tells Noah that Babiki doesn’t speak English. Noah finally realizes Babiki speaks Pedi, and he has never actually spoken directly to her, instead communicating with her through intermediaries. Babiki is so shy by nature that he assumed she was just quiet.

Noah suddenly has sympathy for Babiki, whom he now believes likely owed Tom a favor, got roped into something she didn’t want, and was scared and frustrated at being lost with a boy she barely knows. He tries to speak to her in every language he knows, but she only speaks Pedi. He eventually drives her home. Before getting out of the car, she kisses Noah on the lips, confusing him.

Part 2 Chapters 9-13 Analysis

Unlike the previous chapters, which focus on Noah’s family, these chapters focus on Noah’s extended social circle, including peers, bullies, and potential love interests. Because these people have less of a personal connection to Noah, their interactions with him are often colored by the social legacies of apartheid, creating tension between External and Internal Perceptions of Identity.

Noah’s situation, as a “mixed” child of a Black Xhosa mother and white father, is unique in his experience. As an adult, Noah has met other “mixed” South Africans, but they were all moved to their white parent’s country of origin after their birth, as their parents couldn’t envision a life for them in South Africa under apartheid. Noah is one of the very few “mixed” children who stays in the country, and as such, his race perplexes those he encounters.

Due to the difference between External and Internal Perceptions of Identity, Noah calls himself “a cultural chameleon” (142). Since he belongs to “no group,” he finds himself oscillating between multiple groups based on his surroundings. This is perhaps most clear in the three places outside the city that he lives in through his youth: Soweto, Eden Park, and Highlands North. In Soweto, an all-Black township, he is “the only white kid” (143). In Eden Park, a Colored district, he is the only “mixed” kid. And in Highlands North, a white suburb, he is “the only black kid” (143). Noah is experiencing a lived version of the psychological theory called “social categorization,” wherein people categorize others into groups based either on an exaggerated perceived similarity between themselves and their perceived in-group, or an exaggerated perceived difference between themselves and their perceived out-group. These categories are “thin […] as their coherence rests solely on arbitrary or socially constructed labels” (Krueger, J. “Social Categorization, Psychology of.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences via Science Direct, 2001). Prejudice and discrimination can result from social categorization, which then leads to more prejudice and discrimination in a vicious cycle. Noah’s identity, as perceived by others, depends on the social context around him: He is alternatively categorized as Black, white, or Colored depending on who is perceiving him.

The apartheid government was deeply invested in encouraging social categorization. As Noah explains before the first chapter: “All nonwhites were systemically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given different levels of rights and privileges to keep them at odds” (3). Because he is categorized differently by different groups, Noah becomes aware early on that race is socially constructed—a fiction that is not intrinsic to himself but nonetheless influences how people perceive and treat him. When Noah’s homeroom teacher and the police see the image of Noah and Teddy stealing candy from the stationary store, even though his features are recognizable, they categorize the figure as a “white kid.” The camera cannot pick up Noah’s light brown skin. Based on the perceived contrast between Noah’s on-camera skin and Teddy’s dark skin, all the adults conclude that Teddy’s accomplice is white. In all-Black places, like Soweto, Noah is socially categorized as white. In Sandringham, he is not. Noah writes: “These people had been so messed up by their own construct of race they would not see that the white person they were looking for was right in front of them” (152). The adults’ rigid and fully constructed idea of racial categories deceive them, despite all the glaring evidence that points to Noah as the second perpetrator.

While race is not “biologically real,” it is “socially real” in that it hugely affects people’s lived experiences (Hodson, Gordon. “Race as a Social Construction.” Psychology Today, 2016). Noah feels the effects of the perceptions of those around him in his everyday life. Even though Noah is often perceived as Colored—a racial category with a specific meaning in South Africa—Colored South Africans position Noah as an outsider. Because he has a Black parent and a white parent rather than two Colored parents, they “hated” him either for his Blackness or his whiteness (122). Some Colored children mock Noah for his upbringing as culturally Black. In one case, they pelt him with unripe mulberries and harangue him with calls of “Bushie! Bushman!” (124). The designation “Bushman” is now considered a derogatory name for the diverse groups of first peoples in Southern Africa. Even though Noah’s skin looks like that of his bullies, they still make it clear that he is considered an outsider among them. Noah writes that the alienation and animosity he received from Colored people “was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with” (121). While the prescriptive racial segregation of apartheid-era South Africa was not based on biological reality, that does not make its lived effects any less real to the people, like Noah, who experienced it.