Apartheid, Hitler and other stories

The title of the book is a factual description of Mr Noah's birth

Born a Crime

Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah

Hodder & Stoughton

288 pages; Rs 799

Trevor Noah, a stand-up comedian and actor, is a fast-rising star in the competitive US late-night talk-show business. The 33-year-old anchor of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show since 2015, he has steadily gained a reputation on a par with seasoned hitters like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Seth Meyers with his coruscating political commentary. Regretfully, his shows do not air on Indian TV (though they are available on YouTube), but there are many reasons Indians would relate to this captivating little childhood memoir. 

Mr Noah was born in 1984 in a South Africa under Apartheid, and for Indian millennials, his story provides a glimpse of what life would have been like under the British Raj, when an alien minority subjugated through public policy an indigenous majority.  

In some respects, Apartheid was worse. The title of the book, for instance, is a factual description of Mr Noah’s birth. The country’s Immorality Act, 1927, prohibited “illicit carnal intercourse” (legalese for sex outside marriage) between white people and people of other races and prescribed prison terms for people found guilty of doing so. Mr Noah was the product of such “illicit carnal intercourse” between his father, of German Swiss origin, and his mother, a Xhosa, one of South Africa’s two dominant tribes. 

This meant that Mr Noah led a precarious existence, too dark to credibly be a rich white man’s child and too light-skinned to be a black woman’s offspring. His childhood, however, is dictated not just by the circumstances of his birth but also the extraordinary personality of his mother, whose surname he retains. As in the Raj, women bore the brunt of the economic and social constraints on indigenous people in South Africa. Mr Noah’s mother, however, decided that lowly-paid servitude to the white community or  unremitting drudgery in the Bantustans — the arid “homelands” into which white rulers herded blacks — were not for her. Instead, she sought out spaces where the boundaries of segregation blurred, training as a secretary and finding employment with a multinational. 

This enabled her to eke out an existence in Johannesburg and participate in the city’s vibrant underground counter-culture where blacks and whites freely mingled. This is where she met Mr Noah’s father and convinced him to father her child – on a strict no-strings-attached basis, simply because she wanted a child of her own. No surprise, she was briefly jailed and fined for her decision, but not the father. 

Though Mr Noah did spend time with his father, he grew up in a chaotic extended family presided over by his maternal grandmother in Soweto, the Black township that became world famous as an egregious symbol of Apartheid. His descriptions bear an uncanny resemblance to life on the Gaza Strip, with its cheerful squalor and an intense sense of community. Deep religiosity — often hilariously incomprehensible to the junior Noah — was the bulwark against the grim realities of racism.  

The account is all the more searing because of the deprecating humour with which it is related. Despite all the resentment against white people, Apartheid had hardwired into public consciousness a notion of white supremacy. As a light-skinned kid in a dark-skinned township, he recalls, he was treated with deference — he was excused from the heavier household chores and escaped punishment for pranks.  

He talks of fly-blown communal toilets that, once, encouraged him to do a furtive dump on a newspaper in the living room while his mother was out and hide the evidence in the dustbin. When the smell yielded discovery of the turd, the family concluded that the devil had visited, and the entire neighbourhood was summoned for a communal prayer to exorcise it.

A segregated world also influenced world views. The name Hitler may have had evil connotations for the white world, but black kids saw him differently. “For many black South Africans, the story of the war was that there was someone called Hitler and he was the reason the Allies were losing the war,” Mr Noah writes. “This Hitler was so powerful that at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him…so that guy must be the toughest guy of all time.” 

Along with Mussolini and Napoleon, Hitler was a common name for black guys to adopt, mainly for whites to pronounce instead of complex tribal names. Now, “Hitler” was the celebrated dancer of neighbourhood troupe for which Mr Noah, who had started a lucrative business selling pirated music CDs in his student days, provided the back-up sound. “Go Hitler, Go,” was the star turn, involving gyrations and a standard arm movement that we recognise as the Nazi salute. 

The troupe’s popularity elicited an invitation to perform at a white school — but one that was also Jewish. The tragicomedy that followed — outrage on one side, incomprehension on the other — is a stark reminder of the gulf between black and white. 

Before each chapter, Mr Noah provides brief commentaries on the quirks of Apartheid. A striking one was how the regime classified the Chinese. They weren’t white, nor black, nor “coloured” (like the Indian community) and were too small to have their own classification. So they, too, were denoted as “black”. The Japanese, on the other hand, were classified “white” because the regime wanted their consumer electronics.  

Apartheid ended when Mr Noah was 10. Thanks to his mother’s insistence on providing him with an English education and teaching him to look outward, Mr Noah could take advantage of the opportunities that slowly opened up. The real value of this book is that Mr Noah does not wallow in the iniquities of this history and provides instead a clear-eyed and laugh-out-loud account of life on the downside.