Book 20: Trevor Noah - Born A Crime

Born A Crime

Trevor Noah

 Released: November 15th, 2016

Book #20 completed for the year.  Trevor Noah’s “Born A Crime”.

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend.  I’m thankful for the recommendation, and feel this book taught me a lot I did not understand.  Learning another culture can be difficult.  Especially in the modern day where we tend to insult people for lack of understanding instead of informing them about things.

Here are things I learned and quotes that stood out:

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His birth was literally a crime due to Apartheid and the races of his parents.

Black South Africans are divided into different tribes.

The two largest tribes are the Zulu and the Xhosa.

Zulu tend to be more warrior-like

Xhosa tend to be more intellectual

He attended 3 different churches growing up.  They were racially divided, a white church, a mixed church, and a black church.

He hates secondhand cars, and can trace back almost everything that’s ever gone wrong in his life to secondhand cars.

When he younger, the secondhand car broke down.  The mechanic who fixed it married his mother, and later shot her in the back of the head.  She survived, but he struggles daily thinking about it.

Sun’qhela is a Xhosa phrase meaning “Don’t undermine me.”  It is usually a conversation ended between parent and child.

He was often chased by his mom for discipline as a child.  When he grew old enough to outrun his mother, she would yell “Thief!” And the townspeople would jump in to help catch him for her.

When the apartheid fell, and Nelson Mandela was released, a civil war broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress (ANC).  This was a proxy war with the Inkatha being predominantly Zulu and the ANC were primarily Xhosa.

Massive violence broke out.  A common scene was someone being held down by a rubber tire, doused in petrol and set aflame.  He saw many charred bodies.

His mother was very religious and lived by the words “If God is with me, who can be against me?”  She was a strong woman who was unwavering in the face of danger.”

South Africa had a system of minibuses that were essentially “organized crime” as they ran unregulated.  However they were territorial with their routes.

One time his family went to take a minibus to church.  It never arrived, so they hitchhiked.  Soon the minibus cut off the drag, pulled the driver from the car and threatened to beat him to death for stealing their riders.

Stereotypes ran that Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful and Xhosa women were promiscuous and Unfaithful.

Apartheid was described as “perfect racism”.  The Dutch East India Company landed there in 1652 and went to war with the natives.  When the British took over the Cape Colony the settled there and eventually started their own people called the Afrikaners, who are the white tribe of India.

Apartheid is essentially the removal of native and force on to reserved land, slavery, and segregation all at once.

Growing up, people were divided into 4 classifications by race and had to report it to the government.  Blacks, Whites, Colored, and Indian.

In South Africa, Christianity exists alongside forms of ancestral witchcraft.  For example, as recently as a few years ago, a man was put on trial for zapping another man with a lightning bolt.

In America, the dream is to make it out of the ghetto.  In Soweto, because there is no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto.

An outhouse was shared by 6-7 other houses in the community, and people used newspaper to wipe.

Once growing up, his mother went out for a bit and he didn’t want to use the outhouse because of a rainstorm.  So he put newspaper on the floor, did his business, but his great-grandmother walked in.  She was blind, and kept calling out different names to figure out who was there.  He finished his business quickly and quietly.  When his mom came home, they discovered the smell and became alarmed that their house had been bewitched.  So they went outside and lit the feces on fire and gathered in a prayer circle.

American TV shows were broadcast in native languages.  If you wanted to hear them in English, you would mute the TV, and turn on the radio and listen to the simulcast.  He believes this is a strong proponent of racism.  If you meet someone who comes over from Mexico and they’re a brilliant scientist, but they speak broken English, you may have a hard time believing their credentials.  If you see them and they speak similar to you, you tend to associate more because there’s a familiarity there.

He was considered white in a black family.

He would go to funerals, and because of his skin color, would be given special treatment.  For example, when someone dies, people would attend a service, then go back to the grieving family’s house for a community meal.  The family would eat inside, and the community would eat outside.  Because he was considered white, a white person showing up to a black person’s funeral was considered to elevate the nature of the funeral.  The mourners would assume the person was really important because a lighter-skinned person showed up.

In school, kids were amazed that he spoke all the African languages.  

He chose to be place in the black classes against the wishes of his school administrators.

Under apartheid, Bantu schools were built.  They didn’t teach science, math, or other worthwhile subjects.  It only taught how to count potatoes, dig holes, etc.

There was a difference between British racism and Afrikaner racism.  The British would give you the opportunity to adapt to normal society.  The Afrikaner would hold you back because your classification determined the course of your life.

His mom worked on a sewing machine making school uniforms.  Her pay was a plate of food, which she thoroughly enjoyed because she earned it on her own.

Xhosa families always gave their children a name with a specific meaning.  “The Fixer”, “He Who Popped Out Of Nowhere”, “She Who Gives Back”.

His mom named him Trevor because it was a name with no meaning in the South African world.  He was free to create his own destiny.

His mother would ensure he had an endless supply of books.  He loved and cherished reading growing up.

His mother prepared him to live a life of freedom before they even knew freedom would be an option.

Neighbors would ask “Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto.”  His mother would respond “Because, even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know the ghetto is not the world.  If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”

Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa.

Japanese people were labeled as white in South Africa.

Once at Catholic Church, he drank all the communion wine and ate all the crackers because he was forbidden from observing communion.  He mother was very disappointed in the church over this because she felt they were denying him from experiencing something important.

He once burned a house down by accident with a magnifying glass.

He said that in all his travels, he’s never found a place where black people like cats.  In South Africa, this is because witches have cats, and so cats are considered witches.

His mom once brought home 2 black cats from work.  A coworker gave them to her to raise from a litter.  One time they arrived home to find both strung up by their tails, skinned, gutted, bled out, and with heads removed.  Someone had written “Heks” which translates to “Witch” on their front wall.

He once had a dog named Fufi who ran away.  As he chased her, she jumped the fence to another house.  This led to a situation where he fought back and forth with another boy over who owned the dog.  His mother came and resolved the situation, but it taught him a valuable lesson, “You do not own the thing you love.”

He got along with his father, but had several obstacles.  His mother always supported the relationship and made time for it.  His stepfather disapproved and was an angry alcoholic, who didn’t want his mom to associate with him.

He always ate Potato Rötsi, a bottle of Sprite, and Custard with Caramel with his father.

His dad kept a scrapbook of every major thing he did in South Africa.

The Khoisan are the Native Americans of South Africa

In South Africa, colored people were like 2nd class white citizens.  They didn’t have the rights of whites, but they had more rights than blacks.  People could promote/demote to other race classifications.  The when Nelson Mandela took over, everything flipped 180°.

He struggled making friends growing up. None time he was pelted with mulberries, and another some kids stole his bike.

His mother always tackled pain and darkness with a sense of humor.

His stepdad had a nasty temper.  When he explained the mulberry story, they both got in the car to go and confront the bullies.  His stepfather caught the “ringleader” and began whipping him with a tree branch.  Trevor took great joy in this, until after a while, the beating didn’t stop.  He witnessed his stepfather beat the hell out of a 12-year-old.

“Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns.  You can still be the man of the house and earn less than your woman.  Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are.  Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less like you.”

“Trevor, make sure your woman is the woman in your life.  Don’t be one of these men who makes his wife compete with his mother.  A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother.”

His first Valentine broke his heart on the actual day to go after a more popular white kid.

In school, he would always make a mad dash to the tuck shop for food.  He did this because time was limited, the lines were long, and the more time you spent in line, the lower the quality of food, and the greater chance of getting in trouble due to time.

• I can relate to this.  I tend to eat my food extremely fast.  I blame high school.  40 minutes to eat, dump your tray, grab your books and get to the other side of school or get in trouble for being late.  It’s a flawed system.

“I don’t regret anything I've ever done in life, any choice that I've made.  But I'm consumed with regret for the things I didn't do, the choices I didn't make, the things I didn't say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "What if ..." "If only ..."

"I wonder what would have ..." You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

South Africa has 11 official languages.  He once took a girl who didn’t speak any of his languages to his prom.

In Germany, they require teaching about the Holocaust to effectively learn the lessons of it.  He feels that America glosses over the teaching about slavery much like how South Africa glosses over Apartheid.

He made a steady earning of 500 rand a week in high school selling pirated music CDs he made.

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices.  People don’t want to be rich.  They want to be able to choose.  The richer you are, the more choices you have.  That is the freedom of money.”

He has an obsession with McDonalds.

Started a DJ business with his friend Bongani.

He had a friend named Hitler who was an amazing dancer.  They would have dance parties where crowds would chant “Go Hitler!  Go Hitler!  Go Hitler!”

The reason for the unusual name is due to lack of education.  Most people in South Africa do not know who Hitler or Mussolini were.  His own grandfather thought “Hitler” was the name of a tank.  The idea is that white men were fighting a battle against a man named Hitler who was devastating everyone.  The white people had to ask the black people for help, which meant this “Hitler” guy must be tough.  So they name children and pets after him and Mussolini to give them “tough” names, and nobody reacted.

“Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West.”

Different countries have different figureheads of evil.  So for instance, where America looks at Hitler as the most evil person of all-time, in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes is a more hated man.  In Congo, it is the Belgium King Leopold.  For Native Americans, it would be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson. 

The reason the Holocaust is looked at as a bigger issue is because the Nazis documented everything.  6 million people dying is a huge figure.  In the Congo, thousands of people were killed, but only recorded in history as estimates.  So in reality, nobody knows, but that figure could be worse than the Holocaust because it wasn’t recorded.

He never questioned his friend’s name.  Having a friend named Hitler would be like having a friend named John.  Nobody thinks twice about it.  It’s simply what his mother named him.

He and Hitler started a DJ/Dance group.  They were once booked to play at a Jewish School.  Thinking nothing of it, had Hitler breakout his dance moves, and Noah chanted “Go Hitler! go Hitler!  Go Hitler!”  When a teacher kicked them off the stage and out of the building for yelling offensive things.  He took this as a more racial issue, believing she was kicking them out over race.  It wasn’t until later, he learned why they had taken such offense to his friend’s actual name.  Most of South Africa had no idea.

“Bongani was one of those people who brought out the best in everybody.  He was that friend who believed in you and saw the potential on you that nobody else did…”

The town of Alexandra, South Africa is considered “hood”.  You could tell who the rich kids are by if they had cheese at home or not.

“We like to believe we live in a world of good guys and bad guys, and in the suburbs it’s easy to believe that, because getting to know a career criminal in the suburbs is a difficult thing.  But then you go to the hood and you see there are so many shades in between.”

“In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors.  You knew them, you talked to them on the corner, saw them at parties.  They were a part of your world.  You knew them from before they became gangsters.  It wasn’t “Hey, that’s a crack dealer.”  It was, “Oh, little Jimmy’s selling crack now.””

Their operation slowly morphed from selling pirated CD’s and DJing to conducting payday lending, and pawn shop operations.

“It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it.  But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in.  If a crackhead comes through and he’s got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he’s stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking “I’m aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes”.  No, she’s thinking, “My family needs food and this guy has Corn Flakes.”, and she buys the Corn Flakes.

“When you’re trying to stretch your money, food is where you have to be careful.  You have to plan or you’ll eat your profits.”

“Vetkoek” is fried dough

A “smiley” is a goat’s head.  Usually boiled and covered with chili pepper.”  It’s called that because after’s you’re done eating the meet, it looks like the goat is smiling back at you.  The cheeks and tongue are delicious, but the eyeballs have a pus-filled inside, and are relatively tasteless.”

“Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading.  If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet — Tweets, Facebook posts, lists — You’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.  When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was.  It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain.”

“The hood has a gravitational pull.  It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave.  Because by making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you and made you and never turned you away.  And that place fights you back.

“In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects.  We don’t see their face.  We don’t see them as people.”

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.  If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”  He was so right.  When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being."

[A Tsonga man he spent time in jail with] told me his story, a South African story that was all too familiar to me: The man grows up under apartheid, working on a farm, part of what's essentially a slave labor force. It's a living hell but it's at least something. He's paid a pittance but at least he's paid. He's told where to be and what to do every waking minute of his day. Then apartheid ends and he doesn't even have that anymore. He finds his way to Johannesburg, looking for work, trying to feed his children back home. But he's lost. He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn't know what to do, doesn't know where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it. So what does he do? He takes shit. He becomes a petty thief. He's in and out of jail.  He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from that, and a few days later he's in a shop and he sees some PlayStation games and he grabs them, but he doesn't even know enough to know that he's stolen something of no value.

Tsonga culture is extremely patriarchal.

“If you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he's a saint, you begin to think that you're the bad person.“

*I can understand this.  I look at my own life, and I think about the wonderful compliments people have given me, especially in recent times.  But I remember the days I was angry.  I remember screaming and arguing my way to sleep some nights.  I’ve called people horrible names, and just expelled hate and anger out at people.  So that’s why I know I’m a good person, but how to show a disbelieving world that good people make mistakes as well.

One time his stepfather came home black out drunk and nearly burned the house down after falling asleep while cooking food.  His mother berated him for it and he hit her.  When she got back up and began yelling at him for hitting her, he hit her again.  She grabbed the children, and walked out.  They went to the police station where she attempted to file charges.  They tried talking her out of it and considered it a ridiculous notion.  The stepfather came into the station, still half drunk, and explained that it was nothing.  They officers took his side.  That’s when he no longer had respect for law enforcement, because they’d rather be one of the guys first and enforcers of the law and safety second.

His stepfather’s boss decided to sell the garage he worked at and retire.  His mother went all in to help the stepfather run the business.  They sold their house and lived there for a year.  Trevor would sleep in the back of whatever car they were working on.  Shower in a janitor’s drain with a makeshift shower head.  He would do minor service repairs (at the age of 11).  But the business was failing.  When the mom took over finances, it became profitable.  But instead of paying off debt, the stepfather would take the money he earned and drink it away.  They would eat “marogo”, which is a type of wild spinach, along with some cooked caterpillars.

“I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn't see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that's inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others.”

“Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It's a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either hate them or love them, but that's not how people are.”

His stepfather Abel was a very abusive alcoholic.  After his first truly abusive encounter, Trevor avoided him around the house, staying close to exits and having an escape plan.

His mother eventually left Abel, and found another man.  One day, as they returned from church, Abel arrived to her house and declared he was going to kill everyone for ruining his life.  His mom was shot in the buttocks.  As she tried to escape, she was shot in the back of the head.  The bullet entered at such an angle, that it completely missed major parts of her brain, arteries, veins, and while shattering her cheekbone, popped out her left nostril.  She only needed a few stitches and miraculously survived.  

Trevor called Abel, and after yelling about how Abel killed his mom, Abel told him that if he ever saw him again, he would kill him too.

Abel plead guilty to attempted murder and only got 3 years of probation.  He served no prison time.  Because the police never filed a report when the mother attempted to press charges, he had no criminal background, so he was considered safe and released after making bail.

*I’ll be honest, I’m not a Trevor Noah fan.  I think his jokes are too political and pretty dick-ish.  That being said, this novel taught me a lot.  I learned a lot about South African culture.  I learned social norms.  I learned about backgrounds and situations I could neither fathom nor contemplate.  I think that’s honestly the issue.  If you don’t understand something, you don’t know.  I’ve never lived in “The Hood”.  I don’t know how that life goes.  I’m a pretty passive person, and probably wouldn’t last a day.  This taught me a lot about that life.  The struggle, the hustle.  Making your own opportunity.  He has an intriguing story.  I enjoyed it, and I understand a lot more about his anger and demeanor.  I may not care for his jokes, but I respect what he’s been through to make himself who he is today.  

Highly recommended!

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So at this point, I have now achieved my goal of 20 books this year.  I was going to make my goal 60, but Hunger Games: Mockingjay went on too long.  I’ll shoot for 40, and if possible 60, but bite sized pieces first.

On to Book 21: Love Lucy.