Kaffir Boy Fear Quotes

"Peri-Urban!" I gasped and stiffened at the name of the dreaded Alexandra Police Squad. To me nothing, short of a white man, was more terrifying; not even a bogeyman. (2.25)

"Shut up, you fool!" I yelled at my brother, but he did not quiet. I then uttered the phrase, "There's a white man outside," which to small black children had the same effect as "There's a bogeyman outside," but still he would not stop. (3.48)

Following that brutal encounter I had with them, the Peri-Urban police became a tormenting presence in my life. Whereas in the past I had been more or less conscious of their presence in black life – as they stopped people in the streets and demanded passes, as they cashed after tsotsis and other hoodlums, as they raided shebeens in search of illicit liquor, and as they launched an occasional pass raid into the neighbourhood – they now moved permanently into my consciousness. Scarcely a week passed without the neighbourhood being invaded by waves of black and white policemen.

They always came unannounced, at any time of day or night, and gradually I came to accept, and to dread, their presence as a way of life. They haunted me in real life and in my dreams, to the extent that I would often wake up screaming in the middle of the night, claiming that the police were after me with dogs and flashlights, trying to shoot me down….So, barely six years old, I was called upon to deal with constant terror. (4.1-2).

My father came back, and our lives became somewhat normal again. But my instincts told me that that normalcy could be shattered at any moment – by another arrest. At this point in my life I realized that, willy-nilly, black people had to map out their lives, their future, with the terror of the police in mind. And that that terror led to the hunger, the loneliness, the violence, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the apathy and the suffering with which I was surrounded.

My father's repeated arrests gave me insight into the likely nature of my own future. As a black boy, the odds were heavily stacked against my establishing a normal, stable family when I came of age…

Knowing that, my heart sank, and I began to wonder whether life – black life – was really worth living. (18.1-3)

Many of those who came settled in our neighbourhood and, as a result, before long my playmates included boys from various tribal reserves. These boys brought with them voodoo superstitions, more mysterious than the ones I already held. My sensibilities became sharpened to the point where I began paying singular attention to little oddities hat previously I had dismissed without thought, now thinking that they were manifestations of witchcraft. For instance, I would be sitting outside at night, and a shiny object would suddenly streak across the sky and vanish mysteriously. I would bolt into the house and tell whichever adult was around that I had seen a witch. To my surprise some of the people around me would openly and publicly support my claims of witchcraft sightings, so that soon I began walking around with the paranoiac attitude that every strange thing that no adult could explain was the "deeds of witches," that strangers were not to be trusted, that every crone was a potential witch and out to get me. (18.4)

With almost three years of constant police terror behind me, I had now become, at seven years old, so conditioned to expecting predawn police raids that each time my mother awakened me in the middle of the night, I would spring up and ask, "Are they here? I didn't hear any noises," thinking that the police had invaded the neighbourhood. And on many occasions it turned out they had. (19.1)

My father's metamorphosis was now complete. In his new personage he was always cold, sullen, distant, contemplative; always wrinkling his brow and scratching his balding head and wringing his heads and muttering curses and complaints, especially on Fridays. Our emotional lives and his now moved on vastly different planes. My sisters could no longer run up to him, as he came through the door from work, and welcome him with a hug or a kiss as other children did their fathers on Fridays. They tried it once, but he simply shoved them aside and warned them never to do it again. He never even said goodnight to any of us at bedroom. I dearly and desperately wanted to love him as I loved my mother. I tried, persistently but in vain, to reach out for his love and understanding, and each time he reciprocated by becoming more distant and inscrutable, more morose and frightening to me. Gradually I came to fear him, to fear even the sound of his voice, even the sight of his shadow. I came to spend days and nights wishing he were dead; wishing he were blotted out of my life; wishing that a better father had taken his place. (20.53)

It soon became evident that the reason my father lived for the moment was because he was terrified of the future – terrified of facing the reality that I was on the way to becoming a somebody in a world that regarded him as a nobody, a world that had stripped him of his manhood, of his power to provide.

Years of watching him suffer under the double yoke of apartheid and tribalism convinced me that his was a hopeless case, so long as he persisted in clinging to tribal beliefs and letting the white man define his manhood.

His suffering convinced me that there was no way he could come to understand reality the way I did, let alone understand the extremes of emotions which had become so much a part of me and were altering my perspective toward life, that I no longer seemed his son, and he, to me, seemed no longer the father whose blood still ran in my veins.

By pining for the irretrievably gone days of drums, of warriors, of loinskins, of huts and of wife-buying, I knew that he could never travel, in thought and in feeling, the course my life was embarking upon, because everything he wholeheartedly embraced, I rejected with every fibre of my being.

The thick veil of tribalism which so covered his eyes and mind and heart was absolutely of no use to me, for I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that black life would never revert to the past, that the clock would never turn back to a time centuries ago when black people had lived in peace and contentment before the coming of the white man. (33.31-35)

One of my sisters – despite my insistence that everything be kept secret – told one of her friends that "her brother would soon be going to America," and soon all Alexandra knew. I began to receive threats that everything would be done to stop me from going. Each time I went to play tennis in a white neighbourhood, I thought I was being followed. The police began stopping me in the streets and demanding my papers: luckily my pass was in order. I began wishing that I were leaving the next day, instead of in a year's time. Anything could happen in a year.

I couldn't afford to cut off my relationship with white tennis players, which probably would have placated the militants, and not give the police the excuse to lock me up; if I did that, how would I prepare myself to face the rigors of American collegiate tennis? I continued with my life as before, and hoped for the best. (53.143-144)