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

Themes

External and Internal Perceptions of Identity

Trevor Noah is constantly reminded that, as his schoolmate Theesan says, he is an “anomaly.” As he moves through childhood and adolescence, Noah struggles with balancing his concept of self-identity with the world’s perception of him. This tension causes him to emphasize certain aspects of his identity to survive in the world around him. While this is a necessary survival strategy for Noah as he grows up in apartheid-era South Africa, it also results in frustration, since he cannot simply be who he knows he is.

Noah says, “As a kid, I didn’t know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or me as mixed” (52). Noah’s understanding of his identity was uncomplicated by the perceptions of the people and social systems around him. As he grows, he realizes why he cannot be seen with his dad or mom in public and why he can’t go outside in Soweto. Geographic access during apartheid is dictated by racial identity. His dad is white, his mother is a Black Xhosa woman, and Soweto is a Black township. Apartheid rule created linguistic and racial categories for every sub-group of non-white people in the country so they could not form a coalition against the minority white apartheid government. Noah is a “perceived colored person” (232), so his perceived identity is dissonant with the places and people he calls home.

Because people cannot pin his identity down, Noah uses language to change people’s perceptions of him. Like his mother, he learns many languages and speaks back to people in the languages in which they address him. When people hear Noah speaking their language, they feel like they are “part of the same tribe” (54), regardless of how they perceived Noah initially. He learns that even if his “color didn’t change,” he could “change your perception of my color” based on the language he spoke (54). The way language is tied to perceived racial identity reveals how race is socially constructed: Once Noah presents himself in a different language, he can appear to be part of a different social group, even though nothing about him has actually changed.

Noah uses language as a tool to survive, but having to be so adaptable and mutable creates stress. Noah is not confused about his own identity. He clearly states, “I’m black and I identify as black” (232). It is having to navigate external perceptions of his identity that is stressful to Noah, since he knows he is “not a black person on the face of it” (232) within the convoluted racial logic of South Africa. When Noah is in jail for suspected grand theft auto, he observes how racial groups have self-segregated in the holding cell. His instinct is to join the Black people, since that is how he identifies. But his knowledge of his perceived identity holds him back: He wonders if the Black people will know why he is approaching, and whether the Colored people will be offended by his choice. In this high-stress situation, Noah relives “every time and every place I ever had to be a chameleon, navigate between groups, explain who I was. I’d never been more scared in my life. But I still had to pick. Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side” (233). Even in one of the most harrowing moments of his life, when he should be able to focus on getting out on bail, Noah is forced to navigate the complex politics of the external perceptions of his racial identity.

While Noah is always internally sure of his identity, throughout his memoir he is also always aware of how he is externally perceived. This dissonance is a product of the rigid and fabricated structure of racial difference during apartheid, and it causes Noah distress even as he navigates his post-apartheid life.

Crime in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa

Noah frames his upbringing through the concept of being “born a crime” (27) and living as a crime through his early childhood under apartheid rule. However, once apartheid ends, crime continues to affect Noah’s life. After decades of the regime, inequality remains ingrained in South African life. In poor neighborhoods, crime is an integral part of life that both allows people to survive and traps them in an endless cycle.

Some crimes are ways to push back against apartheid rule, while others are symptoms of it—actions defined as criminal only within the racist framework of apartheid. Within this framework, even Noah’s conception is a crime. He explains: “During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race” (21). Apartheid rule called for strict segregation and hierarchization of various races of people; a baby born to people from two different races defied the white supremacist logic that such a hierarchy could or should exist. The government went to “insane lengths” to enforce these laws: “[T]he police would kick down the door, drag the couple out, beat them, and arrest them. At least, that’s what they did to the black person” (22). If Noah’s small family had been caught together, he and Patricia would have been severely punished. Noah likely would have been shipped to an orphanage and Patricia given “five years in prison” (22). Simply existing, for their “mixed family” (21), is a criminal act. Depending on the context, simply choosing to raise your child can be a radical act: By raising Noah to “speak up for [him]self” and to believe that “the world was [his] oyster” and his “thoughts and opinions mattered” (75), Patricia is committing an act of rebellion against the racist laws of the apartheid regime.

As Noah moves through his late teens and 20s, he reckons with the way that the legacies of wealth and social inequity and racism left behind by apartheid relate to crime in the “ghettos” and “hood” on the outskirts of Johannesburg. He defies the idea that we “live in a world of good guys and bad guys,” explaining that in reality “there is a very fine line between civilian and criminal” in places that are systemically disenfranchised (204). It is impossible to live fully apart from crime in any of the Black townships outside the city because unlike the government, “crime cares” (204). It provides for the Black and Colored citizens when their own governments do not. Even Noah’s “superreligious, law-abiding mother” buys stolen food at a discount to feed her family (209). Crime offers people resources and opportunities that their own government denies them.

At the same time, the cycle of crime in these areas is like a “hamster wheel” (211) that keeps people “hustling” without letting them go anywhere. After two years of selling burned CDs and other black-market goods to make enough money for shelter and cheap food, Noah realizes his life of petty crime is “maximal effort put into minimal gain” (211). Eventually, he gets arrested after being “racially profiled” not because he is Black, but because he “looked colored” (230). Colored men made up “the most ruthless, the most savage […] brutally violent” gangs” in South Africa (230). The police need only the smallest excuse to arrest Noah because of his perceived race and the associations they have between that race and criminal activity. In this way, many people get lost in the prison system. Noah is lucky that he escapes with no sentence due to his lack of priors, but he knows that his trial could have gone the other way. He recognizes the privilege he has in being able to leave his life of petty crimes, while his friends in the “hood” couldn’t (219).

Crime plays a multi-faceted role in Noah’s memoir, ranging from an act of political defiance to an everyday part of life to an inescapable cycle. Throughout, Noah treats this topic with sensitivity and nuance, recognizing the complex intersections of privilege and oppression in his life and the lives of others.

Everyday Life Amid Systemic Racism

Noah’s narrative paints a stark if sometimes humorous picture of living as a “mixed” Black person with a Black family in apartheid-era South Africa. Systemic racism infused every aspect of the apartheid South African government, society, and environment. Noah’s life in townships like Soweto and Alexandra paint a portrait of what life was like for citizens in these racially segregated and economically disenfranchised areas, even after apartheid ended.

Noah spends time at his grandmother’s two-room house in Soweto, a Black township that the families of laborers are allowed to live in. The government created Soweto for exploitative purposes only, giving no consideration to making the everyday lives of people comfortable. Almost one million people live there, but there are “no stores, no bars, no restaurants. There were no paved roads, minimal electricity, inadequate sewerage” (40). Not only do the residents of Soweto not have luxuries, but the apartheid government deprives them even of basic living needs. There is “one communal outdoor tap” for several houses and “one outdoor toilet shared by six or seven houses” (42). In even the most inclement weather, half a dozen families, which often include extended family, must share one outhouse. Noah’s house, for instance, has eight family members, as well as two shanties out back for migrant workers.

This lack of everyday necessities from their government contributes to Crime in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa. Though they are not sanctioned or regulated, the people make for themselves what their government, with its racist economic system, will not give them. Noah describes the flourishing black market, which had “every type of business [running] out of someone’s house: auto mechanics, day care, guys selling refurbished tires” (40). Even though these establishments are not technically legal entities, they provide resources and care for the people. In this way, “crime cares” (204) in a way the government does not. Despite the systemic inequity visited upon Soweto, Noah describes it as magical because it “was ours” (39).

Even in comparison to Soweto, Alexandra is extremely poor. Soweto is “a sprawling, government-planned ghetto” whereas Alexandra is “a tiny, dense pocket of a shantytown” where houses were made from plywood and corrugated tin (183). The biggest characteristics of Alexandra are that it is “a hive of human activity” (199) and “a complete sensory overload” (200). All types of people are there, from busy mothers to kids playing in the streets to “gangsters hustling” (199). Even more than Soweto, there is “little in the way of basic sanitation” (199). The streets are filled with trash, trash fires, dirty bathwater, old motor oil, goats, which all combine to make a “river of filth running down the street” (200). It is full of smells, colors, sounds, and people, which give Noah the impression of electricity and excitement (211). Takeaway spots sell inexpensive local food like “smiley with some maize meal”: a full goat’s head, “boiled and covered with chili pepper” (209). Noah and his friends live on such food, which is “quite delicious” (209).

Noah refers to Soweto as a “ghetto” and Alexandra as “the hood”. These communities have been victim to economic inequities, forced relocations, racial segregation, and a systemic lack of basic resources like food and sanitation. Despite all of this, these places are home to many people, who have reclaimed them as places in which they find comfort and pride. Through his descriptions of everyday life in these areas, Noah paints a vibrant portrait of both sides of this experience.