Product Description

The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do -- he escaped to tell about it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147769 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-07
• Released on: 1998-10-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Amazon.com
Kaffir Boy does for apartheid-era South Africa what Richard Wright's Black Boy did for the segregated American South. In stark prose, Mathabane describes his life growing up in a nonwhite ghetto outside Johannesburg--and how he escaped its horrors. Hard work and faith in education played key roles, and Mathabane eventually won a tennis scholarship to an American university. This is not, needless to say, an opportunity afforded to many of the poor blacks who make up most of South Africa's population. And yet Mathabane reveals their troubled world on these pages in a way that only someone who has lived this life can.

From Publishers Weekly
In this powerful account of growing up black in South Africa, a young writer makes us feel intensely the horrors of apartheid. Living illegally in a shanty outside Johannesburg, Johannes (renamed Mark) Mathabane and his illiterate family endured the heartbreak and hopelessness of poverty and the violence of sadistic police and marauding gangs. He describes his drunken father's attempts to inculcate his tribal beliefs and to prevent his son from getting an educationthe one means by which he might escape from the ghetto. Encouraged by his determined mother and grandmother, Mathabane taught himself to read English and play tennis, and, through the assistance of U.S. tennis star Stan Smith and his own efforts and intelligence, obtained a tennis scholarship from a South Carolina college in 1978. Now he is a freelance writer in New York. In the course of relating his inspiring story, he explains the anger and hate that his country's blacks feel toward white people and the inevitability of their rebellion against the Afrikaner government. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Born in the township of Alexandra in 1960, the author of this memoir experienced hunger, crime, and most of the unpleasant features of ghetto lifevividly recalled hereduring his formative years. His mother and grandmother worked hard to enable him to finish school; others, including U.S. tennis star Stan Smith, encouraged him as a tennis player despite the obstacles posed by a segregated society. The narrative ends in 1978, as Mathabane takes up a U.S. tennis scholarship. Particularly for area collections and large sports collections, but of potential interest to a wide range of readers, including YAs. (Illustrations not seen.) Elizabeth A. Widenmann, Columbia Univ. Libs.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.