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there, this little boy and his mom, our arms and legs covered in blood and dirt, laughing together through the pain in the light of a petrol station on the side of the road in the middle of the night.
Apartheid was perfect racism. It took centuries to develop, starting all the way back in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company landed at the Cape of Good Hope and established a trading colony, Kaapstad, later known as Cape Town, a rest stop for ships traveling between Europe and India. To impose white rule, the Dutch colonists went to war with the natives, ultimately developing a set of laws to subjugate and enslave them. When the British took over the Cape Colony, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers trekked inland and developed their own language, culture, and customs, eventually becoming their own people, the Afrikaners—the white tribe of Africa. The British abolished slavery in name but kept it in practice. They did so because, in the mid-1800s, in what had been written off as a near-worthless way station on the route to the Far East, a few lucky capitalists stumbled upon the richest gold and diamond reserves in the world, and an endless supply of expendable bodies was needed to go in the ground and get it all out. As the British Empire fell, the Afrikaner rose up to claim South Africa as his rightful inheritance. To maintain power in the face of the country’s rising and restless black majority, the government realized they needed a newer and more robust set of tools. They set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world. They went to Australia. They went to the Netherlands. They went to America. They saw what worked, what didn’t. Then they came back and published a report, and the government used that knowledge to build the most advanced system of racial oppression known to man. Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more than three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid.
Page 3 and 4: Copyright © 2016 by Trevor Noah Al
Page 5: IMMORALITY ACT, 1927 To prohibit il
Page 8 and 9: RUN Sometimes in big Hollywood movi
Page 10 and 11: like bouncers at a club, and hold t
Page 12 and 13: failed her she’d use her wits. If
Page 14 and 15: you stealing our customers? Why are
Page 18 and 19: BORN A CRIME I grew up in South Afr
Page 20 and 21: Many of the prostitutes in town wer
Page 22 and 23: he hadn’t, but once I existed he
Page 24 and 25: Traveling around the world today, I
Page 26 and 27: TREVOR, PRAY I grew up in a world r
Page 28 and 29: That’s all she did, all day, ever
Page 30 and 31: speakeasy. The shebeens were where
Page 32 and 33: using sonar. Every time she called
Page 34 and 35: praying continued. It went on for s
Page 36 and 37: CHAMELEON One afternoon I was playi
Page 38 and 39: As a kid I understood that people w
Page 40 and 41: was an ocean of black, like someone
Page 42 and 43: Before apartheid, any black South A
Page 44 and 45: and uncles had gone off to the citi
Page 46 and 47: through those. My books were my pri
Page 48 and 49: If we weren’t at school or work o
Page 50 and 51: Apartheid, for all its power, had f
Page 52 and 53: at school used overhead projectors
Page 54 and 55: She shrugged again. “So sad. I ho
Page 56 and 57: “What?” “Look, did you or did
Page 58 and 59: When I was seven years old, my moth
Page 60 and 61: I grew up in a black family in a bl
Page 62 and 63: oth. She brought them home, and I w
Page 64 and 65: They went back and forth. This woma
Page 66 and 67:
ROBERT My father is a complete myst
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dad’s, where we’d watch Formula
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A bottle of Sprite. Custard with ca
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W hen Dutch colonists landed at the
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your grandfather couldn’t keep hi
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Things like that happened a lot. I
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Revenge truly is sweet. It takes yo
Page 82 and 83:
A YOUNG MAN’S LONG, AWKWARD, OCCA
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Valentine’s card and the flowers
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OUTSIDER After finishing primary sc
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work for it—and I still get my br
Page 91 and 92:
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me the digits one by one as I wrote
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COLORBLIND At Sandringham I got to
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pedestrian out for a stroll. Once I
Page 99 and 100:
“Is it David?” “No.” “Ria
Page 102 and 103:
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I got up onstage and Tom did some t
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There was a red Mazda that we’d h
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hair and started painting this crea
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“Are you ready?” I said. “Let
Page 112:
I’d been dating a girl for over a
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GO HITLER! When I was in grade nine
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Business was booming. By matric I w
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Back then, most DJs could spin for
Page 121 and 122:
someone must be the toughest guy of
Page 123 and 124:
My mind was racing, trying to figur
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THE CHEESE BOYS My friend Bongani w
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settlement going on. Third, Fourth,
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In the hood, even if you’re not a
Page 131 and 132:
“But who did this belong to?” I
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“Hey, let’s make a deal. We’l
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Everyone must know that your succes
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e a whole lot harder for an investm
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O nce, when I was ten years old, vi
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lesson, and now that lesson is the
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me aside and told me what I was in
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first night, everyone was giving me
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couldn’t afford anything but a st
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“I-I’m not fine, Your Honor. I
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M y favorite thing to eat as a kid,
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could lift car engines and gearboxe
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Xhosa woman no less, a culture whos
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“Respect?! You almost burned down
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She gives and gives and gives; that
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on it as well. Clients were getting
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Bramley, three neighborhoods away,
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wouldn’t happen again, but it was
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“This is all I can do,” she sai
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“Where are you now?” I said.
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times he pulled the trigger, and fo
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emergency room to give us an update
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W hen my mother was shot, so much h
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For my mother. My first fan. Thank
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR TREVOR NOAH is a c
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