Kaffir Boy

Kaffir Boy is Mark Mathabane's autobiographical story of his escape from life in apartheid South Africa through education and sports. Apartheid was a political system enacted by the white-minority-led government in South Africa in 1948 and lasted until 1994. Although black South Africans had endured racial oppression for almost three hundred years at the start of apartheid, this political system was an especially virulent form of racial oppression.

"Apartheid" literally means "separation" or "segregation." The idea behind the apartheid political system was the belief that God intended the races to develop separately. In theory, the idea contains a core of positive attributes – each race should celebrate its heritage as God-given, and each person should strive to be the best [fill in blank here, e.g., Zulu or Dutchman or Britishman] that they could be.

In practice, we know that apartheid was an extraordinary attempt to control the movements of blacks and people of mixed-race (known as "coloureds" in South Africa). The government designated certain areas of land for different ethnicities, reserving the majority of land for whites. Blacks were crowded onto reserves, where land was of poor quality and where there was no industry or natural wealth. These men and women were required to have permission by the government in order to leave the reserves to seek employment elsewhere. These people were stripped of citizenship, denied the right to vote, paid wages too low to survive on, and educated into a servile class.

Published in 1986, during the height of civil strife in South Africa, Kaffir Boy quickly became a best seller in the U.S. Mathabane had been living in the U.S. for less than a decade when he wrote the book. He has remained in the U.S. and married a white American woman, with whom he later co-authored a book on interracial marriages.

Because Kaffir Boy has been banned several times for use in high school, Mathabane issued a revised version that eliminates a controversial section that depicts child prostitution between young street boys and black migrant workers in Alexandra, where Mark grew up. Shmoop is using the unexpurgated version of the book.