Racial horrors through humour’s prism

Subhash Rajta

A black woman, with her two young kids, is trapped inside a moving minibus with two very angry men. She could be raped, or maybe even killed. Sensing the danger she’s in, she pushes her 10-year-old out of the moving vehicle, curls herself around the younger one and jumps out. Minutes later, having escaped from the grave danger, the badly bruised mother-son duo is laughing out loud, in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere.

About a decade later, the mother is lying in hospital in an intensive care unit — a bullet had entered from the back of her head and exited from close to her nostrils after shattering her cheekbone. Her face is a mess, and one of her sons is bawling by her side. The feisty woman asks the son to look at the brighter side, leaving him staring back at her in disbelief. “Well, you are now officially the best looking person in the family,” she says, and both crack up in uncontrollable laugher.

It’s this humour, present even in the life-threatening situations and circumstances, that lights up Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime, a memoir of his tough childhood spent on either side of the apartheid in South Africa. Through his childhood, and the life of his mother and the brave choices she made at the height of racial discrimination, the now well-known comedian lays bare the horrors the natives were subjected to by their colonial masters.

To tell this oppressive and heartrending tale of segregation of the natives, naked violence and abject poverty they were subjected to, and the complete lack of opportunities and dignity, wit and humour would be the last tools most writers would turn to. Not only such an approach is unlikely to truly appreciate and capture the plight of the natives, but it could also end up trivialising one of the worst tragedies in human history. Yet, Noah takes the risky route and, quite remarkably, captures the life and times under apartheid quite brilliantly, leaving the readers smiling and teary-eyed, simultaneously.

The book, in a way, is also a tribute to his indomitable and progressive mother, who lived life on her own terms at a time when all she was supposed to do was marry a man from her own race (inter-racial relationship was a punishable crime under apartheid), raise children and spend her entire life as per the whims and fancies of her man. Yet, she fell for a white man, and had a child with him, knowing fully well they wouldn’t be able to marry.

And so Noah was a mixed-race child, a living proof of the ‘crime’ his parents had committed. For the fear of law discovering their crime, the white man, the black woman and their mixed child couldn’t be a normal family. Neither could they live together, nor could they be seen together, and nor could the child address his father as dad in public.

For the kid, coloured in appearance but culturally black, it was difficult to fit in a society compartmentalised ever so tightly into whites, coloured and blacks. He was always an outsider, the others never sure with whom he exactly belonged. It was a tough situation for the youngster to be in, but thanks to his mother who fuelled his mind and soul with the hope of better future and prepared him for the “life of freedom”, there was no self-pity, no escaping into the ever-inviting and waiting-to-engulf world of violence and crime.

Surely, downloading and selling pirated music, which he indulged in while growing up, doesn’t count as crime in South Africa, at least not in the turbulent years followed by the end of apartheid and the advent of democracy. And when the freedom finally came and others struggled to make sense of it, Noah says “we were already down miles down the road, flying across the freeway...”