Born a Crime

A child who was against the law

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood is Trevor Noah's memoir, published in 2016, a year after he became host of The Daily Show in the United States. It is not a story of his comedy career. It covers his childhood and youth in South Africa, from his birth in 1984 to his early twenties. The book is a set of stories, mostly in loose order, grouped in three parts. Before most chapters, Noah adds a short essay that explains a piece of South African history, such as how apartheid sorted people by race.

The title is literal. Noah's mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, is Black and Xhosa. His father, Robert, is a white Swiss German man. Under apartheid, the Immorality Act made sex between white and Black people a crime. Patricia chose to have a child with Robert anyway. Noah says she wanted a child of her own, not a husband, and Robert agreed to help.

So Noah's body was evidence. As a small child he could not be seen in public with either parent without risk. His mother sometimes walked across the street from him and asked a mixed-race neighbor to hold his hand, so she could pass as a maid. His father could not walk with him in a park. His grandmother in Soweto kept him indoors for long periods, because police could take a light-skinned child away. Noah jokes that he was raised in a world that told him he should not exist.

How apartheid divided people

Noah's history essays explain the system with dark humor. Apartheid sorted people into categories: white, colored (the official term for people of mixed descent), Indian and Black. It then split Black South Africans by tribe and language and placed them in separate areas. Noah argues that the design was deliberate. If groups hated and feared one another, they would not unite against the government.

Noah did not fit any box. He was lighter than his Black family but not a member of the colored community either. In Soweto, his family treated him almost like a white child. His grandmother would beat his cousins but not him, because she said she did not know how to hit a white child. Noah got away with things and learned early that skin color changes how people treat you.

Apartheid ended in the early 1990s, and Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. Noah shows that the end of the law did not end its effects. Townships stayed poor. People stayed in their groups. Old fears remained.

Patricia: the mother who refused limits

The center of the book is his mother. Patricia grew up poor and was sent at times to live with relatives in a homeland. She trained as a typist and found work as a secretary in Johannesburg at a time when few Black women could. She lived in the city illegally, often hiding from police. She treated the rules of apartheid as obstacles to get around, not laws to obey.

She was also deeply Christian. Every Sunday she took her son to three churches: a mixed church, a white church and a Black church, each with a different style of worship. If something went wrong on the way, she saw it as the devil trying to stop them.

The book opens with one of those Sundays. When Noah is about nine, the family misses its bus and takes a minibus taxi. The driver, a Zulu man, grows hostile toward Patricia, a Xhosa woman alone with children. She senses that he means to hurt them. As the minibus slows, she pushes Trevor out of the door and jumps after him, holding his baby brother Andrew. They run through the dark until they are safe. Then she thanks God. Noah, bruised and furious, asks why she did not wake him and warn him first.

Patricia believed in reading, in English and in seeing the world. She bought books even when there was little money for food. She took her son to places that were not meant for them, to show him that the world was larger than the township. Noah says she raised him as if he were free before he was free.

She was also strict. She chased him through the streets when he misbehaved and beat him when she caught him. Noah describes this with humor and without bitterness. He says she hit him because she loved him and feared what the world would do to a Black boy who did not learn.

Language as a passport

One of the book's main ideas is that language can cross the lines that color draws. Noah's mother made sure he spoke English, which she saw as the language of money and power. He also learned Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans, Tsonga and others.

He found that if he spoke to people in their own language, they saw him as one of them. In one story, a group of young Zulu men walk behind him, planning in Zulu to rob him. He turns and joins in, in Zulu, suggesting they rob someone together. They laugh and change their minds. Noah calls himself a chameleon: his color stayed the same, but he could change how people saw it.

This skill helped him move between groups at school. He did not belong to the white kids, the colored kids or the Black kids, so he became the boy who sold snacks to everyone. He was an outsider who could visit every circle.

Hustling in Alexandra

After high school Noah spends time in Alexandra, a crowded township near Johannesburg. With his friend Bongani and others, he runs a small business selling pirated CDs and working as a DJ at parties. They also buy and resell goods and lend money at high interest. He calls this world the hustle.

In one famous chapter, Noah's crew includes a talented dancer named Hitler. In South Africa, he explains, the name was not shocking, because many Black South Africans knew Hitler only as a strong man in a war, not as the face of the Holocaust. The crew gets a gig at a Jewish school. When the boys chant "Go Hitler!" while their friend dances, the teachers are horrified. Noah uses the scene to show how history is taught differently in different places, and how apartheid kept Black South Africans from learning about the wider world.

The hustle teaches him about poverty. He sees that people in Alexandra are smart and hardworking but stuck. They lack the money, contacts and education to move up. Noah turns the old saying on its head: teaching a man to fish is not enough if no one gives him a fishing rod. He later leaves this life when he sees that it leads nowhere.

In another chapter, Noah is arrested for driving one of his stepfather's cars with the wrong license plates. He spends about a week in jail. He believes he hid the arrest from his mother and got out by himself. Later he learns that she knew and that she quietly paid for his release.

Abel: the danger at home

The darkest thread of the book is Patricia's marriage to Abel, a Tsonga mechanic. Abel is charming and funny when sober. When he drinks, he is violent. He beats Patricia over the years, and he turns his anger on Trevor too. Patricia and Abel have two sons, Andrew and Isaac.

The family falls into debt through Abel's failing garage business. They move to a poorer area. Noah describes living with constant tension, waiting for Abel's moods. Patricia reports the abuse to the police several times. The officers do little, treating it as a family matter.

Patricia eventually leaves Abel and remarries. Then, in 2009, Abel waits for her as she returns from church and shoots her. One bullet hits her leg. Another enters the back of her head and exits through her nose. Somehow it misses her brain, spine and major blood vessels. She survives. Noah, by then a comedian in Johannesburg, rushes to the hospital and pays the bill. His mother, waking up, jokes that he is now the best-looking person in the family.

Abel is convicted of attempted murder but receives a suspended sentence and serves no prison time. Noah uses the story to show how domestic violence was often ignored in South Africa, and how close he came to losing the person who made him.

His father and belonging

Noah's relationship with his father is quieter. Robert ran a restaurant in Johannesburg and later moved to Cape Town. They lost touch for years. When Noah was in his twenties, he found his father again. He learned that Robert had kept a scrapbook of every newspaper story about his son's comedy. Noah shows that love can be real even when it is not loud.

Who should read it

Read it if you want to understand apartheid and its aftermath through stories that make you laugh and then hit hard. It also suits anyone who loves stories about mothers, or who has felt like an outsider in their own home or country.