![]() ![]() In Chapter 6, Noah shows how his mother balanced her insistence on cultivating his curiosity-which led him to endless mischief, from pranks at school to burning down a white family’s house-with firm but loving discipline. She insists that Trevor learn English and refuses to let “the logic of apartheid” set limits on his imagination or sense of self when the apartheid regime appears to be weakening, she breaks new ground by moving into a suburban colored neighborhood called Eden Park with Trevor. When she returns in her 20s, she has to find a place for herself and moves into Johannesburg, doing her best to rise socioeconomically and support her son on her own. ![]() In his fifth chapter, Noah tells the story of his mother’s own “search for belonging.” As her family’s unwanted middle child, in her teenage years Patricia finds herself working on the family’s farm and often going without food in the desolate, rural Xhosa homeland. By learning a number of different languages, Noah realized, he could connect to almost anyone and fit himself into situations where it would be dangerous to be an outsider. In the fourth chapter, he explores his early realizations about this difference and struggle to define himself in relation to South Africa’s various native ethnic groups. ![]() When they visit her family in Soweto, the subject of chapter three, Trevor cannot leave the yard lest he get picked up and taken away by the police Noah remembers feeling strangely isolated from his cousins and neighbors, but not yet understanding why he was considered so different. The doctors are shocked when Trevor comes out so light-skinned and, for the first years of his life, Patricia has to constantly hide him because, according to his complexion, he is not black but “ colored” (the technical apartheid-era term for mixed-race people, who were considered an independent racial group and segregated from whites and blacks alike). She has a child with Robert, the Swiss man who rents her a room, but never expects him to be Trevor’s father. In the second chapter, Noah explains how he came into being: his mother’s fearlessness was a lifelong pattern, and she insisted on becoming a secretary and illegally living in a white neighborhood of downtown Johannesburg long before it became clear that the apartheid system was falling apart. One day shortly after anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, when their secondhand car fails to start, they take informal minibuses to church and nearly get attacked by an angry Zulu driver, emphasizing the danger and intergroup tension that continues to structure black South Africans’ everyday lives in the wake of apartheid. He shows how Christianity offers his mother a source of moral strength and discipline, which she seeks to pass onto her children. Every Sunday, his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, takes him and his baby brother, Andrew, to three churches: an integrated megachurch that seeks “to make Jesus cool,” an austere white church whose pastor focuses on interpreting passages from the Bible, and an informal outdoor black church whose congregants spend hours praying for Jesus to alleviate their suffering. In the first chapter, he focuses on the role of religion in his childhood. The first part of Born a Crime (Chapters 1-8) offers a portrait of Noah’s family under the apartheid regime. Each chapter also begins with a short preface, generally about the social and historical context behind the events Noah recounts. While the 18 chapters of Born a Crime generally trace Noah’s childhood from his birth to the beginning of his comedy career after high school, they consist of vignettes rather than a linear story. Born in 1984 to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss expatriate father, Noah is not merely an anomaly in apartheid South Africa his existence is actually illegal because the regime outlawed relationships between people of different races. In his 2016 memoir Born a Crime, comedian Trevor Noah recounts his childhood in South Africa under the apartheid government and the first few years of democratic rule by the nation’s black majority. ![]()
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