Kaffir Boy

Mathabane begins his book with the signpost that marks every road into Alexandra, the black ghetto where he was born in South Africa. Every black ghetto has this sign, and it prevents whites from knowing how blacks live: “So my story is intended to show him with words a world he would not otherwise see because of a sign and a conscience racked with guilt and to make him feel what I felt when he contemptuously called me a ‘kaffir boy’” (3). “Kaffir” is a word that South African whites used to refer in a derogatory way to black people. When the book was being written, Bishop Desmond Tutu had saved half of Alexandra from being demolished; the other half had already been destroyed by whites who wanted the land.

The author describes Alexandra as a collection of shanties with pot-holed streets. The supreme position is occupied by Indians, who first came to South Africa in 1860 as indentured servants working in the sugarcane fields. The next rung is occupied by “Coloureds,” the offspring of biracial unions between whites who arrived in South Africa in 1652 and blacks. The poorest are the black Africans, who are treated as “aliens in the land of their birth” (4).