Kaffir Boy

In 1965, the author, aged 5, is lying under the kitchen table on his bed of cardboard after having nightmares about black people sprawling dead in pools of blood beside slippery creatures. His sister Florah, aged 3, lies beside him. He hears his father rise at 5 in the morning and get ready for work, making his scufftin (food for work) and leave. His mother, bearing a chamber pot, leaves for the outhouse.

Suddenly, his mother, who calls him Johannes, screams at him to wake up, and he slams his head into the concrete pillar of the table by mistake. His mother tells him to be quiet, for the Peri-Urban, or the Alexandra Police Squad, has arrived. He is intensely afraid of them, but his mother tells him that they are still in the next neighborhood. As the author hurriedly dresses, his mother prepares to leave so that the police will not find her, but she can’t find her pass book. The author, whose memory is erased by fear, finally remembers where he had put it, and his mother prepares to leave as there are shots, yelling, and police whistles outside. Although he begs his mother not to leave, she steals out of the house, looking like a “fugitive” (11), and tells him to watch his sister and his 1-year-old brother, George, who will not stop bawling until Mathabane puts a blanket over him. His sister, Florah, is also yelling for their mother in fear. He believes that the police dogs eat black children, and he sees a neighborhood woman being prodded by a black policeman carrying a truncheon.

Looking out the window, the author sees several black policemen being ordered by a white policeman to his house. One policeman says that he doesn’t think the house contains Msomi gang members (a black gang during the ‘50s and ‘60s who resembled the Mafia). The policemen hear the howls of George, who has fallen off the bed onto a pile of bricks and who has a bleeding gash on his head. The policemen decide not to enter, as they are tired of “howling” (12) infants, and they leave. Mathabane’smother returns three hours later from the ditch where she had been hiding.

There are rumors that the Peri-Urban police might return for a sweep of the neighborhood for their annual “Operation Clean-up Month” (16) in which black policemen, led by whites, conduct raids on the whole Alexandra ghetto looking for people without the correct passbooks. They search for gangsters, prostitutes, and other “undesirables” (16)—which is apparently the category into which the author and his neighbors fit.

Mathabane’s mother insists that they should leave before daybreak, but her husband says that she is overreacting. After midnight, the Peri-Urban knock loudly on the door, and the author’s mother tells him to stall for time. He knows that if his parents do not hide, they could be taken away, as they have been in the past. When he opens the door, two black policemen enter and savagely kick him, and he falls onto the blunt side of an axe. The policemen question him about his parents’ whereabouts. After threatening Mathabane and his sister, who are frantic with fear, the policemen find the author’s father under his bed and question him about his pass book, which is out of order. Mathabane’s father tells the policemen that his wife is working as a maid and is not in the house. The policemen ask why he isn’t back at his tribal reserve, or “Bantustan” (22), as the policeman’s father is. The policemen ask Mathabane’s father, who is standing in a position of abject humiliation, what they should do, and they seem to expect a bribe. However, Mathabane’s father has no money to give them, and he is led out of the house, handcuffed, as the author is overcome by hate. The father joins countless others who are being removed from their houses and “thrown like bundles into the trucks and vans” (24). The policemen seize a naked man and do not allow him to get dressed until a watching neighbor throws him a pair of overalls.

The author returns home to discover his mother hiding in the wardrobe, but he can’t find the key. Asking his ancestors for help, he finally finds the key and lets his mother out. His father winds up working on a white man’s potato farm for two months as punishment for his pass-book crimes. 

The Peri-Urban police become a constant menace in the author’s life. Barely 6 years old in 1966, the author is tormented by nightmares about the police, who have declared Alexandra a “hot spot” (28) that merited constant raids. With his parents’ guidance, he becomes an expert sentinel, aware of the movements of the police. His mother is expert at not getting caught, as she always has a premonition that the police are coming (a premonition that his father discounts). While the women run away and hide, the men often remain, thinking it is cowardly to hide from other men. The men are often taken away in “lamblike submission” and sent to Number Four, a “notorious” (29) prison in Johannesburg. Serious offenders are sent to a horrible prison called Modderbee, where the author’s mother prays her husband will not be sent—although she admits to her son that her prayers will not stop the police. The family’s life continues in a weekly pattern in which Mondays are babalazi, or the “blue Monday hangover” from drinking “Bantu beer and Western liquor in the shebeens” (30). The rest of the week is filled with hard labor and the weekend attempt to forget it.

The family’s shack collapses, and they are forced to move to a new one, also consisting of two rooms and measuring about 15 feet by 15 feet. The author’s mother weans his brother, George, by smearing pepper on her breasts, and his father begins instructing his son in tribal ways. He believes whites will disappear from South Africa and then everyone will revert to tribal ways of living. While the author’s father instructs his children in tribal ways, they learn Western ways from other people around them. These tribal ways consist of many rituals that Mathabane finds confusing and embarrassing, and he one day breaks one of them by speaking while he is eating. While his mother tries to protect him, his father whips him with his rawhide belt.

The author tells his mother that he hates his father and will kill him. He says that his friends’ fathers do not beat them. His mother reminds him that they are still “of the tribes” (33), and that in the tribes, fathers bring up their sons to be like them. His mother explains that tribal people follow rituals, but Mathabane finds his father’s tribal ways embarrassing. He decides not to speak Venda, his father’s language, in front of his friends. Instead, the author speaks the languages of his friends, Zulu, Tsonga, and Sotho, but his father finds out, lashes him, and threatens to cut out his tongue if he hears that his son isn’t speaking Venda. 

Towards the end of 1966, Mathabane’s father is laid off from his job as a menial laborer for a white firm in Germiston, a hour southeast of Johannesburg. He is supposed to be rehired, but he is not. The author finds out his father has been arrested while going to apply for a new permit because he is not employed. He does not return after the four-week sentence that is customary for not being employed. Fearing that her husband has been sent to the harsh prison at Modderbee, the author’s mother begins to lose faith. Although his father has treated him harshly, Mathabane also wants him to return. His mother explains to him that his father has been arrested many times because his pass book is not in order, and the author grows to hate the sight of the pass book.

The family starts to eat very little, as their mother does not have a permit to work in Johannesburg. Mathabane and his siblings resort to eating their own mucus, and the author often tries to faint near stores so that the owner will give him a candy or piece of fruit. The family does not have money to pay the rent on their shack, although the author’s mother talks the landlord into giving them a month to collect the rent. Being thrown out of their shack would mean a forced return to the tribal reserve.

One day, two Zulu men burst into the house wielding machetes and spears when the author’s mother is out. They take all the furniture as repayment for a mysterious debt that the author’s father apparently owes them. George and Florah develop an illness that causes them to have distended stomachs. Their hair turns red, and they have sores oozing pus all over their bodies, but their mother does not have money to bring them to the clinic. Their mother tries to nurse them back to health with herbs, and she tells them that they do not have money to celebrate Christmas that year. They watch, his sister in tears, as other children celebrate outside.

As the months wear on, Mathabane and his mother both become tense and irritable. The author is convinced his mother is hoarding food, as she keeps growing fatter, and he follows her in an attempt to figure out where she is hiding the food. However, when he confronts her, filled with embarrassment, she tells him that her bloated stomach means she is awaiting another delivery of a baby from the clinic.

The family receives help when their maternal grandmother, who has been off trying to rid a relative of evil spirits, returns and gives them some money. The family is able to feed themselves, pay their rent, and take George and Florah to the clinic. It turns out they have been suffering from malnutrition and chicken pox. When Mathabane suggests that the family live with the grandmother, his mother tells him it is not possible, as they are considered the property of their father and his relatives (none of whom had helped them).

Mathabane’s mother begins to work for the owner of the grocery store, cleaning his house and washing his family’s clothes, so the family can pay its rent. To eat, they decide to go to Mlothi, “a new garbage dump” (44) where many poor people in Alexandra are going to look for food. Each morning, the author, his mother, and his two siblings go to the dump, sorting through the garbage from white people’s houses. They have to arrive early, and they find items such as utensils, housewares, blankets, furniture, clothes, and food.

One day, the author believes he has found something good. He thinks it is food, and the other people at the dump look at his family enviously. Mathabane’s mother uncovers a package wrapped in brown paper. As the author and his sister munch on sandwiches they had brought, their mother’s face becomes “a mask of indescribable horror” (47). She finds a black baby in the package, and an old woman unwraps the package further to discover a girl, beginning to decompose, inside. The family leaves the dump, and the author’s mother explains that women working as maids and nannies sometimes smother babies so that their employers do not find out about the child. The police do not arrest black people for killing other black people. The family stops going to the dump and begins going to a place where rejected eggs are dumped, but most of the eggs contain dead embryos, so they stop going there too.

After the author’s sister, Maria, is born at home because his mother can’t afford maternity care, his father returns home, seeming like he has gone through rough times. He speaks of the many black men who have been thrown in prison for being unemployed, and he recalls with increasing bitterness towards whites about having to work on chain gangs. He had thrown away his pass, wanting to claim that he had lost it rather than that it was in disorder, and it takes him several months to get a new pass. However, no one will hire him because he had been arrested. The author’s hunger grows, and he becomes delusional, imagining that there is a fire in the house. His mother douses him with water, and he falls asleep on her lap. When he wakes up, he tells her of his dream in which white men regarded him as a god and gave him plenty to eat. His mother tells him that this dream means he will one day live far away with strangers and will be well cared for by them.

His father regains his early job, but the family has been forever changed. The feeling of insecurity they experienced never goes away, and the author’s father turns to drinking and gambling. One day, however, he brings home the delicacy of chicken feet, intestines, and heads, and he blushes when his kids hug him.