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Traveling around the world today, I meet other mixed South Africans all the time. Our stories start off identically. We’re around the same age. Their parents met at some underground party in Hillbrow or Cape Town. They lived in an illegal flat. The difference is that in virtually every other case they left. The white parent smuggled them out through Lesotho or Botswana, and they grew up in exile, in England or Germany or Switzerland, because being a mixed family under apartheid was just that unbearable. Once Mandela was elected we could finally live freely. Exiles started to return. I met my first one when I was around seventeen. He told me his story, and I was like, “Wait, what? You mean we could have left? That was an option?” Imagine being thrown out of an airplane. You hit the ground and break all your bones, you go to the hospital and you heal and you move on and finally put the whole thing behind you—and then one day somebody tells you about parachutes. That’s how I felt. I couldn’t understand why we’d stayed. I went straight home and asked my mom. “Why? Why didn’t we just leave? Why didn’t we go to Switzerland?” “Because I am not Swiss,” she said, as stubborn as ever. “This is my country. Why should I leave?”
South Africa is a mix of the old and the new, the ancient and the modern, and South African Christianity is a perfect example of this. We adopted the religion of our colonizers, but most people held on to the old ancestral ways, too, just in case. In South Africa, faith in the Holy Trinity exists quite comfortably alongside belief in witchcraft, in casting spells and putting curses on one’s enemies. I come from a country where people are more likely to visit sangomas—shamans, traditional healers, pejoratively known as witch doctors—than they are to visit doctors of Western medicine. I come from a country where people have been arrested and tried for witchcraft—in a court of law. I’m not talking about the 1700s. I’m talking about five years ago. I remember a man being on trial for striking another person with lightning. That happens a lot in the homelands. There are no tall buildings, few tall trees, nothing between you and the sky, so people get hit by lightning all the time. And when someone gets killed by lightning, everyone knows it’s because somebody used Mother Nature to take out a hit. So if you had a beef with the guy who got killed, someone will accuse you of murder and the police will come knocking. “Mr. Noah, you’ve been accused of murder. You used witchcraft to kill David Kibuuka by causing him to be struck by lightning.” “What is the evidence?” “The evidence is that David Kibuuka got struck by lightning and it wasn’t even raining.” And you go to trial. The court is presided over by a judge. There is a docket. There is a prosecutor. Your defense attorney has to prove lack of motive, go through the crime-scene forensics, present a staunch defense. And your attorney’s argument can’t be “Witchcraft isn’t real.” No, no, no. You’ll lose.
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 16 and 17: there, this little boy and his mom,
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 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
Page 68 and 69: dad’s, where we’d watch Formula
Page 70 and 71: A bottle of Sprite. Custard with ca
Page 73 and 74: 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
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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
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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
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“Is it David?” “No.” “Ria
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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
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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
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someone must be the toughest guy of
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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
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“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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