Context and Choices

My uncle, an occasional Cannonballer, sent me Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and an awesome coffee mug for Christmas. I was delighted. I love reading and drinking coffee. The beginning of the year turned out to be incredibly stressful and I struggled to focus on reading. I finally made it though. I read the book and then I immediately reread the book. It’s so good.

Noah introduces each new section or story with a page or two of historical context. The context is necessary to understand how Apartheid was built, how the different groups were created and then set against each other, and how it would be totally normal to name a kid Hitler.

Born a Crime is stories from Trevor’s childhood which illustrate two things – his mother, Patricia, is an amazing woman, and race is a made up social construct which must be dismantled. In a fair society, Patricia could have been anything. South Africa and the world are poorer for restricting her possibilities. She was a poor black woman who had been afforded no choices or opportunities, so she made them for herself. She made a conscious decision to have a child that defied Pretoria’s racial classifications and exposed the lies of South Africa’s racial constructions. Trevor is a child, not a construct, so he was disobedient, argumentative, disrespectful, and a destructive demon. He was his mother’s son, her teammate, and the bane of her existence. Patricia did her best to free her son from history so that he would not be defined and limited by the color of his skin.

History, though, is inescapable. All of the stories Trevor chooses to tell illustrate the ridiculous insanity of Apartheid and the prejudices it left behind. I hope that Americans reading the book will be able to draw parallels between South Africa and the US.

Thanks, Donald. This was a well chosen book. And while I do not put butter in my coffee, I do enjoy drinking coffee out of my Wisconsin butter mug.