Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa » (Reissue)

Mark Mathabane is the author of Kaffir Boy in America, Love in Black and White, and African Women: Three Generations.

The Classic Story of Life in Apartheid South Africa

Mark Mathabane was weaned on devastating poverty and schooled in the cruel streets of South Africa's most desperate ghetto, where bloody gang wars and midnight police raids were his rites of passage. Like every other child born in the hopelessness of apartheid, he learned to measure his life in days, not years. Yet Mark Mathabane, armed only with the courage of his family and a hard-won education, raised himself up from the squalor and humiliation to win a scholarship to an American university.

This extraordinary memoir of life under apartheid is a triumph of the human spirit over hatred and unspeakable degradation. For Mark Mathabane did what no physically and psychologically battered "Kaffir" from the rat-infested alleys of Alexandra was supposed to do -- he escaped to tell about it.

Publishers Weekly

Kaffir Boy (1984), one of the best books ever written about apartheid, became a bestseller everywhere but in South Africa, where it is banned. This absorbing sequel, about Mathabane's life in the U.S. since he arrived here at age 18 in 1978 on a tennis scholarship, describes his painful experiences at three colleges in one year and in American society generally. He recalls his editorship of a college paper, disenchantment with the Columbia School of Journalism, encounters with racism, threats to his life, living on a shoestring budget, speaking out against racism, his decisions to become a writer, live in North Carolina and marry a white woman, his success (with Oprah Winfrey's help) in bringing members of his family on a visit to America and in arranging for some of his siblings to remain here to study. Mathabane is a remarkable human being: responsible, committed, reasonable, level-headed, humane, understanding and empathetic. He tells a wonderful, inspiring story and he tells it well. (June)