Kaffir Boy Suffering Quotes

Pangs of hunger melted my resentment of my father away, and now that he was gone I longed night and day for his return. I didn't even mind his coming back and shouting restrictions at me and making me perform rituals. I simply wanted him back. And as days slid by without him, as I saw other children in the company of their fathers, I would cry. His absence showed me how much I loved him. I never stopped asking questions about when he would be coming back. (6.8)

Each day we spent without food drove us closer and closer to starvation. Then terror struck. I began having fainting spells. I would be out playing when suddenly my head would feel light, my knees would wobbles, my vision would dim and blur and down I would come like a log. (6.24)

A few weeks later George and Florah came down with a mysterious illness, which left them emaciated and lethargic, their stomachs so distended that I thought they would burst. Their bodies were covered with sores, which punctured and oozed pus, and their hair turned to a strange orange colour. There were times when, while fanning off blowflies with a piece of cardboard from their filmy, half-closed eyes, mucus-covered noses and bruised mouths, while they lay writhing with pain on the damp cement floor, I thought I could see their tiny, empty intestines. Seeing them like that made me cry. Occasionally, they excreted live worms with their bloody stools. Their tearing coughs kept everyone awake at night. Each time my mother gave them a morsel of food, whenever she could get it, the vomited. Their suffering made the days and nights unbearably long and gloomy.

My mother did not have the one hundred cents to take them to the clinic, and no witch doctor, our last resort, was willing to treat them on credit. But with determination, courage and love, she tried her best to nurse them back to health using some herbs Granny gave her. My brother and sister fought with the tenacity typical of African children to stay alive, but I wondered for how long. The strangest thing was that, except for a minor cough, I felt fine. (6.36-37)

But things didn't get better. If they did, I didn't notice it. Gradually, I came to accept hunger as a constant companion. But this new hunger was different. It filled me with hatred, confusion, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety, loneliness, selfishness and a cynical attitude toward people. It seemed to lurk everywhere about and inside me: in the things I touched, in the people I talked to, in the empty pots, in the black children I played with, in the nightmares I dreamt. It even pervaded the air I breathed. At times it was the silent destroyer, creeping in unseen, unrecognized, except when, like a powerful time bomb, it would explode inside my guts. At other times it took the form of a dark, fanged beast, and hovered constantly over my dizzy head, as if about to pounce on me and gouge my guts out with its monstrous talons. (10.58)

Winter came, and turned out to be a very bad one. Our shack…had no heat, electricity or plumbing, and we had no stove, so my mother had to keep t he brazier indoors, as she had done all previous winters.

[…]

We went to sleep. Toward the middle of the night, I was awakened by something choking me, as if two steel claws had locked themselves around my throat.

[…]

Finally, my mother said, in a whisper, "That's what nearly killed you, children," pointing at the coals from the spilled brazier, from which puffs of smoke coiled upward as raindrops fell on them.

"What was in there, Mama?" I asked, thinking that maybe witches had been in the coal.

"Poison gas," my mother said ominously. (13.1, 3, 20-22).

My father had been arrested again. Hunger in the house was again acute. I was faced with two choices: starve or beg. (17.2)

My tenth birthday came and went away, like all the other nine, uncelebrated. Having never had a normal childhood, I didn't miss birthdays; to me they were simply like other days: to be survived. Strangely, however, on each birthday I somehow got the feeling that I had aged more than a year. Suffering seemed to age more than birthdays. Though I was only ten, black life seemed to have, all along, been teaching me the same lessons of survival, and making the same demands upon me for that survival, as it was doing to grown-ups. Thus, emotionally, I had aged far beyond my ten years. (27.1)

A few months after I witnessed the grisly murder a strange feeling that I should end my own life suddenly came over me. I don't know why I felt that way, though the feeling seemed connected with the witnessing of the murder. All the memories of my childhood suffering came back and multiplied to a lifetime of continuous suffering, and I felt I could take no more.

I was weary of being hungry all the time, weary of being beaten all the time: at school, at home and in the streets. I felt that somehow the whole world was against me. I felt that the courage, the resiliency and the unswerving, fanatical will to survive, to dream of a bright future, to accomplish, to conquer, of early years had deserted me. (28.1-2)

I often cried when I read these letters, especially those detailing the suffering of children. One day I was reading one such letter to a migrant worker named Phineas, when I was overcome with feelings and started crying. Phineas patted me on the shoulder, consolingly, as we both sat on a makeshift bench of milk crates in his tiny shack.

"Now, now, my boy," he said. "I admit things are bad back there, but not that bad. Look at it another way. If this one child is going to die, as the letter says, I'll still have six others left. I'm working seven days a week," he continued, "and one of these days I'll amass enough money to be able to take care of all their needs. Just you wait and see." (29.99-100).

"Why don't you get a job and help me keep your brothers and sisters in school, my child?" my mother said to me one evening.

I looked at her. She appeared exhausted, no doubt from being worked like a mule by white people: she washed and ironed for them, cleaned their homes, weeded their gardens, washed and fed their children and catered to their every whim. Even when she was ill she had hobbled to work, even when any of my siblings was ill she had gone to work, reluctantly. We had to eat, she would say, we had to have books and school fees, we had to pay rent, we had to have bribes for the policemen. She had recently been diagnosed a diabetic, and told to watch her diet, not to worry too much, not to work too hard. But she continued working too hard and worrying too much. There was no doubt she was suffering, yet she remained upbeat, downplaying everything with a shrug and saying, "Any caring mother would do all that and more for her children."

I began to feel guilty for being selfish, for thinking too much of myself and tennis. If I got a job, I could help tremendously. I could take the burden off my mother's shoulders and repay her for all she had done for me by making the rest of her life comfortable. (53.73-75)