Born a Crime: Stories from a South African childhood

by Trevor Noah

Paper Book, 2016

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Library's review

I didn't know much about Trevor Noah before starting this memoir. I knew he had replaced Jon Stewart as the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, but I don't have cable television so I've never seen his work. But a colleague at work brought the book in to loan to another colleague and I glommed

onto it when she was done before giving it back to its rightful owner.

Noah's story is a compelling one: Born in South Africa to a white father and a black mother (interracial relationships and children were illegal under apartheid, hence the title), Noah struggled to figure out where he fit into South Africa's rigid racial system. Technically, he was considered "colored", but he didn't feel at home with the colored people he knew. He felt more comfortable with whites, but it was among the black populations of the townships and homelands that he realized he felt most at ease, even as they tried to reject him for not being black. This all sounds absurd to American ears, perhaps; it did to mine. But it highlights the general absurdity of trying to classify people into racial categories not just under apartheid but anywhere.

Noah has an engaging style, and there is plenty of humor though none of it was of the knee-slapping or laugh-out-loud variety for me. And he's equally capable telling the dead serious bits of his story, which includes an alcoholic abusive stepfather and a teenage life of petty crime before he began to make a name for himself as a comedian.

I found myself confused occasionally about the timeline, which jumps back and forth quite a bit, and I wished he had written more about his early career and how he made that transition. Readers who are bigger fans of his work may already know all that and not feel the loss as keenly as I did.

Ultimately I came away from the book with a fierce admiration for Noah's mother, who was a strong-minded independent black woman in a country and a time when that was a dangerous thing to be. It's clear that her strength, her independence, and her insistence on being treated with dignity and respect provided a powerful example to her son.

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Description

Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. With an incisive wit and unflinching honesty, Noah weaves together a moving yet funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time.